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Sep. 24th, 2015
Human behaviours are governed by superstition, repetition and cliches, which makes us easy targets for mind tricks. If you know the secrets, you could use them to your advantage. For example, we recently told you that the best way to detect a liar is to trick them into giving away too much information, rather than focus on their body language.
There are other ways to keep ahead of the curve. Here are some more surprising facts about reading human behaviours and influencing people’s decisions, plucked from the BBC Future archive and elsewhere:
1. Simply tapping someone on the shoulder, and looking him or her in the eye, means they are far more open to suggestion.
Read more: “The hidden tricks of powerful persuasion”
2. Pupil dilation is linked to the degree of uncertainty during decision-making: if somebody is less sure about their decision, they feel heightened arousal, which causes the pupils to dilate.
Read more: “How the eyes betray your thoughts”
3. A trick used by pickpockets on drunken targets is to start gently rocking from side to side as they talk to them. The drunk person thinks that they are rocking and so will try to compensate, but will be unbalanced and fall over. As they’re helped up by their assailant, they have their possessions taken.
Read more: “How pickpockets trick your mind”
4. People with higher levels of testosterone tend to be wider-faced with bigger cheekbones, and they are also more likely to have more assertive, and sometimes aggressive, personalities.
Read more: “What the face betrays about you”
5. Associating the colour red with dominance and aggression is hard-wired into our brains. For example, boxers assigned red kits were about 5% more likely to win their bout than the blues.
Read more: “How the colour red warps our mind”
6. In Rock, Paper, Scissors, men are most likely to throw the more “macho” choice of a rock – while scissors are least popular with both men and women. For these reasons, you are safest choosing paper – you’ll either win or draw. Another cunning trick is to say your choice out loud; your opponent will think you are bluffing and therefore choose a less wise option.
Read more: “How to win at almost anything”
7. Salesmen have mastered the art of controlling our thoughts. A classic trick used in showrooms is to overprice one product among a series of other very similar products. For example, if four similar espresso machine were on a shelf next to each other, but three were priced at $200 and one at $400, the overpriced one makes the other three look good value for money. The reality is, this shows how little we know about how much an espresso machine should cost.
Read more: “The subtle science of selling”
8. Laughter is a “social emotion” that brings us together and helps us to bond, whether or not something is actually funny. When you laugh with people, you show them that you like them, you agree with them, or that you are in same group as them. Studies have found that it also makes them more candid about their secrets later on. So if you want to suck up to someone and get them to tell you what they’re thinking, laughing at their bad jokes is a sure fire way of doing it.
Read more: “Why do we laugh inappropriately?”
9. The perceived attractiveness of a woman’s voice varies during their menstrual cycle. Their voice reaches peak attractiveness as the chances of conception increases. This shows how our underlying biology reveals itself in subtle behavioural differences.
Browse the data: “Women's voice attractiveness varies across the menstrual cycle”
There are other ways to keep ahead of the curve. Here are some more surprising facts about reading human behaviours and influencing people’s decisions, plucked from the BBC Future archive and elsewhere:
1. Simply tapping someone on the shoulder, and looking him or her in the eye, means they are far more open to suggestion.
Read more: “The hidden tricks of powerful persuasion”
2. Pupil dilation is linked to the degree of uncertainty during decision-making: if somebody is less sure about their decision, they feel heightened arousal, which causes the pupils to dilate.
Read more: “How the eyes betray your thoughts”
3. A trick used by pickpockets on drunken targets is to start gently rocking from side to side as they talk to them. The drunk person thinks that they are rocking and so will try to compensate, but will be unbalanced and fall over. As they’re helped up by their assailant, they have their possessions taken.
Read more: “How pickpockets trick your mind”
4. People with higher levels of testosterone tend to be wider-faced with bigger cheekbones, and they are also more likely to have more assertive, and sometimes aggressive, personalities.
Read more: “What the face betrays about you”
5. Associating the colour red with dominance and aggression is hard-wired into our brains. For example, boxers assigned red kits were about 5% more likely to win their bout than the blues.
Read more: “How the colour red warps our mind”
6. In Rock, Paper, Scissors, men are most likely to throw the more “macho” choice of a rock – while scissors are least popular with both men and women. For these reasons, you are safest choosing paper – you’ll either win or draw. Another cunning trick is to say your choice out loud; your opponent will think you are bluffing and therefore choose a less wise option.
Read more: “How to win at almost anything”
7. Salesmen have mastered the art of controlling our thoughts. A classic trick used in showrooms is to overprice one product among a series of other very similar products. For example, if four similar espresso machine were on a shelf next to each other, but three were priced at $200 and one at $400, the overpriced one makes the other three look good value for money. The reality is, this shows how little we know about how much an espresso machine should cost.
Read more: “The subtle science of selling”
8. Laughter is a “social emotion” that brings us together and helps us to bond, whether or not something is actually funny. When you laugh with people, you show them that you like them, you agree with them, or that you are in same group as them. Studies have found that it also makes them more candid about their secrets later on. So if you want to suck up to someone and get them to tell you what they’re thinking, laughing at their bad jokes is a sure fire way of doing it.
Read more: “Why do we laugh inappropriately?”
9. The perceived attractiveness of a woman’s voice varies during their menstrual cycle. Their voice reaches peak attractiveness as the chances of conception increases. This shows how our underlying biology reveals itself in subtle behavioural differences.
Browse the data: “Women's voice attractiveness varies across the menstrual cycle”
Is another human living inside you?
Sep. 24th, 2015 04:15 pmОnce upon a time, your origins were easy to understand. Your dad met your mum, they had some fun, and from a tiny fertilised egg you emerged kicking and screaming into the world. You are half your mum, half your dad – and 100% yourself.
Except, that simple tale has now become a lot more complicated. Besides your genes from parents, you are a mosaic of viruses, bacteria – and potentially, other humans. Indeed, if you are a twin, you are particularly likely to be carrying bits of your sibling within your body and brain. Stranger still, they may be influencing how you act.
A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are struggling inside us for control
“Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms,” says Peter Kramer at the University of Padua. “A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are all incessantly struggling inside us for control.” Together with Paola Bressan, he recently wrote a paper in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science, calling for psychologists and psychiatrists to appreciate the ways this may influence our behaviour.
That may sound alarming, but it has long been known that our bodies are really a mishmash of many different organisms. Microbes in your gut can produce neurotransmitters that alter your mood; some scientists have even proposed that the microbes may sway your appetite, so that you crave their favourite food. An infection of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, meanwhile, might just lead you to your death. In nature, the microbe warps rats’ brains so that they are attracted to cats, which will then offer a cosy home for it to reproduce. But humans can be infected and subjected to the same kind of mind control too: the microbe seems to make someone risky, and increases the chance they will suffer from schizophrenia or suicidal depression. Currently, around a third of British meat carries this parasite, for instance – despite the fact an infection could contribute to these mental illnesses. “We should stop this,” says Kramer.
In this light, it becomes clear that our actions are not entirely our own. It’s enough to make you question your sense of identity, but the idea of infiltration becomes even more eerie when you realise that your brain has not just been invaded by tiny microbes – but also by other human beings.
Even non-conjoined twins could be sharing organs without realising it
The most visible example might be a case of conjoined twins sharing a brain, says Kramer, but even regular twins could have shared organs without realising it. During early development, cells can be passed between twins or triplets. Once considered a rare occurrence, we now know it is surprisingly common. Around 8% of non-identical twins and 21% of triplets, for example, have not one, but two blood groups: one produced by their own cells, and one produced by “alien” cells absorbed from their twin. They are, in other words, a chimera – a fusion of two bodies – and it may occur in many organs, including the brain.
Brothers from another mother
Women accidentally carrying a "twin's" child
Lydia Fairchild’s paternity test was meant to be straightforward, proving to the courts that her two sons’ father was the person she said he was. When the test came back, however, Fairchild herself came up as a blank: there was no trace of her DNA in her own children.
The courts threatened to convict her of illegal surrogacy – they assumed it was a scam to gain benefits. Luckily, at around the same time, a scientific paper reported a similar case in which a woman was apparently not the biological mother of two of her three children. The reason was that she was a chimera: a case in which two twins had merged into one body early in development. Being the product of two different cell lines, some of her eggs carried a genome that was different from the rest of the body.
Needless to say, the discovery has caused Fairchild to question her own identity. “Telling my sons about this was the hardest part because I felt that part of me hadn't passed on to them,” she told the website Jezebel. “I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if they'll really feel that I'm not quite their real mother somehow because the genes that I should've given to them, I didn't give to them.’”
A chimera brain could have serious consequences. For instance, we know that the arrangement of different brain regions can be crucial for its function – but the presence of foreign tissue, being directed by different genes carrying a different blueprint, may throw that intricate design into disarray. This may explain, for instance, why twins are less likely to be right-handed – a simple trait that normally relies on the relative organisation of the right and the left hemispheres. Perhaps chimerism has upset the balance.
Even if you do not think you ever had a twin, there are many other ways you might be invaded by another human’s cells. It’s possible, for instance, that you started off as two foetuses in the womb, but the twins merged during early development. Since it occurs at such an early age of development, the cells can become incorporated into the tissue and seem to develop normally, yet they are carrying another person’s genetic blueprint. “You look like one person, but you have the cells of another person in you – effectively, you have always been two people,” says Kramer. In one extreme case, a woman was surprised to be told that she was not the biological mother of her two children (See “Brother from another mother”, left). Alternatively, cells from an older sibling might stay around the mother’s body, only to find their way into your body after you are conceived.
However it happens, it’s perfectly plausible that tissue from another human could cause the brain to develop in unexpected ways, says Lee Nelson from the University of Washington. She’s currently examining whether cells from the mother herself may be implanted in the baby brain. “A difference in the amount, cell type, or the time during development at which the cells were acquired could all result in abnormalities,” she says.
Nelson has found that even as an adult, you are not immune from human invaders. A couple of years ago, Nelson and William Chan at the University of Alberta in Edmonton took slices of women’s brain tissue and screened their genome for signs of the Y-chromosome. Around 63% were harbouring male cells. “Not only did we find male DNA in female human brains as a general observation, we found it to be present in multiple brain regions,” says Chan. In other words, their brains were speckled with cells from a man’s body. One logical conclusion is that it came from a baby: somehow, her own son’s stem cells had made it through the placenta and lodged in her brain. Strangely, this seemed to decrease the chances that the mother would subsequently develop Alzheimer’s – though exactly why remains a mystery. Some researchers are even beginning to wonder whether these cells might influence a mother’s mindset during
Our knowledge of the human “superorganism” is still in its infancy, so many of the consequences are purely theoretical at the moment. Kramer and Bressan's aim with their paper was not to give definitive answers, but to enlighten other psychologists and psychiatrists about the many entities that make us who we are today. “We cannot understand human behaviour by considering only one or the other individual,” Kramer says. “Ultimately, we must understand them all to understand how ‘we’ behave.”
For instance, scientists often compare sets of twins to understand the origins of behaviour, but the fact that even non-identical twins may have swapped bits of brain tissue might have muddied those results. We should be particularly careful when using these twin studies to compare conditions such as schizophrenia that may arise from faulty brain organisation, Bressan and Kramer say.
In general, however, we shouldn’t feel hostile towards these invaders – after all, they made you who you are today. “I think it is now clear that our natural immigrants are with us for the long-term, for better or for worse,” says Nelson. “And I would think “for better” outweighs ‘for worse’.”
David Robson is BBC Future’s feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter. More of Ariko Inaoka's photography, including her portraits of the Icelandic twins Erna and Hrefna, can be found here.
Except, that simple tale has now become a lot more complicated. Besides your genes from parents, you are a mosaic of viruses, bacteria – and potentially, other humans. Indeed, if you are a twin, you are particularly likely to be carrying bits of your sibling within your body and brain. Stranger still, they may be influencing how you act.
A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are struggling inside us for control
“Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms,” says Peter Kramer at the University of Padua. “A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are all incessantly struggling inside us for control.” Together with Paola Bressan, he recently wrote a paper in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science, calling for psychologists and psychiatrists to appreciate the ways this may influence our behaviour.
That may sound alarming, but it has long been known that our bodies are really a mishmash of many different organisms. Microbes in your gut can produce neurotransmitters that alter your mood; some scientists have even proposed that the microbes may sway your appetite, so that you crave their favourite food. An infection of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, meanwhile, might just lead you to your death. In nature, the microbe warps rats’ brains so that they are attracted to cats, which will then offer a cosy home for it to reproduce. But humans can be infected and subjected to the same kind of mind control too: the microbe seems to make someone risky, and increases the chance they will suffer from schizophrenia or suicidal depression. Currently, around a third of British meat carries this parasite, for instance – despite the fact an infection could contribute to these mental illnesses. “We should stop this,” says Kramer.
In this light, it becomes clear that our actions are not entirely our own. It’s enough to make you question your sense of identity, but the idea of infiltration becomes even more eerie when you realise that your brain has not just been invaded by tiny microbes – but also by other human beings.
Even non-conjoined twins could be sharing organs without realising it
The most visible example might be a case of conjoined twins sharing a brain, says Kramer, but even regular twins could have shared organs without realising it. During early development, cells can be passed between twins or triplets. Once considered a rare occurrence, we now know it is surprisingly common. Around 8% of non-identical twins and 21% of triplets, for example, have not one, but two blood groups: one produced by their own cells, and one produced by “alien” cells absorbed from their twin. They are, in other words, a chimera – a fusion of two bodies – and it may occur in many organs, including the brain.
Brothers from another mother
Women accidentally carrying a "twin's" child
Lydia Fairchild’s paternity test was meant to be straightforward, proving to the courts that her two sons’ father was the person she said he was. When the test came back, however, Fairchild herself came up as a blank: there was no trace of her DNA in her own children.
The courts threatened to convict her of illegal surrogacy – they assumed it was a scam to gain benefits. Luckily, at around the same time, a scientific paper reported a similar case in which a woman was apparently not the biological mother of two of her three children. The reason was that she was a chimera: a case in which two twins had merged into one body early in development. Being the product of two different cell lines, some of her eggs carried a genome that was different from the rest of the body.
Needless to say, the discovery has caused Fairchild to question her own identity. “Telling my sons about this was the hardest part because I felt that part of me hadn't passed on to them,” she told the website Jezebel. “I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if they'll really feel that I'm not quite their real mother somehow because the genes that I should've given to them, I didn't give to them.’”
A chimera brain could have serious consequences. For instance, we know that the arrangement of different brain regions can be crucial for its function – but the presence of foreign tissue, being directed by different genes carrying a different blueprint, may throw that intricate design into disarray. This may explain, for instance, why twins are less likely to be right-handed – a simple trait that normally relies on the relative organisation of the right and the left hemispheres. Perhaps chimerism has upset the balance.
Even if you do not think you ever had a twin, there are many other ways you might be invaded by another human’s cells. It’s possible, for instance, that you started off as two foetuses in the womb, but the twins merged during early development. Since it occurs at such an early age of development, the cells can become incorporated into the tissue and seem to develop normally, yet they are carrying another person’s genetic blueprint. “You look like one person, but you have the cells of another person in you – effectively, you have always been two people,” says Kramer. In one extreme case, a woman was surprised to be told that she was not the biological mother of her two children (See “Brother from another mother”, left). Alternatively, cells from an older sibling might stay around the mother’s body, only to find their way into your body after you are conceived.
However it happens, it’s perfectly plausible that tissue from another human could cause the brain to develop in unexpected ways, says Lee Nelson from the University of Washington. She’s currently examining whether cells from the mother herself may be implanted in the baby brain. “A difference in the amount, cell type, or the time during development at which the cells were acquired could all result in abnormalities,” she says.
Nelson has found that even as an adult, you are not immune from human invaders. A couple of years ago, Nelson and William Chan at the University of Alberta in Edmonton took slices of women’s brain tissue and screened their genome for signs of the Y-chromosome. Around 63% were harbouring male cells. “Not only did we find male DNA in female human brains as a general observation, we found it to be present in multiple brain regions,” says Chan. In other words, their brains were speckled with cells from a man’s body. One logical conclusion is that it came from a baby: somehow, her own son’s stem cells had made it through the placenta and lodged in her brain. Strangely, this seemed to decrease the chances that the mother would subsequently develop Alzheimer’s – though exactly why remains a mystery. Some researchers are even beginning to wonder whether these cells might influence a mother’s mindset during
Our knowledge of the human “superorganism” is still in its infancy, so many of the consequences are purely theoretical at the moment. Kramer and Bressan's aim with their paper was not to give definitive answers, but to enlighten other psychologists and psychiatrists about the many entities that make us who we are today. “We cannot understand human behaviour by considering only one or the other individual,” Kramer says. “Ultimately, we must understand them all to understand how ‘we’ behave.”
For instance, scientists often compare sets of twins to understand the origins of behaviour, but the fact that even non-identical twins may have swapped bits of brain tissue might have muddied those results. We should be particularly careful when using these twin studies to compare conditions such as schizophrenia that may arise from faulty brain organisation, Bressan and Kramer say.
In general, however, we shouldn’t feel hostile towards these invaders – after all, they made you who you are today. “I think it is now clear that our natural immigrants are with us for the long-term, for better or for worse,” says Nelson. “And I would think “for better” outweighs ‘for worse’.”
David Robson is BBC Future’s feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter. More of Ariko Inaoka's photography, including her portraits of the Icelandic twins Erna and Hrefna, can be found here.
Разговор со стеной
Sep. 24th, 2015 06:26 pm— Простите, сэр, меня зовут Ребекка Смит, я из CNN. Как вас зовут?
— Моисей Файнберг
— Скажите, сэр, сколько лет вы уже ходите сюда, к Стене Плача, молиться?
— Да уже лет 70, не меньше.
— 70 лет! Это потрясающе! А скажите, что вы просите у бога?
— Я прошу мира между христианами, евреями и мусульманами. Чтобы не было войн и ненависти между людьми. Молюсь, чтобы дети наши в безопасности выросли в людей, любящих друг друга и отвечающих за свои поступки. Я прошу у Бога, чтобы политики всегда говорили правду и ставили интересы народа выше собственных...
— И какие у вас ощущения после 70 лет просьб?
— Ощущение, что я говорю со стеной!
— Моисей Файнберг
— Скажите, сэр, сколько лет вы уже ходите сюда, к Стене Плача, молиться?
— Да уже лет 70, не меньше.
— 70 лет! Это потрясающе! А скажите, что вы просите у бога?
— Я прошу мира между христианами, евреями и мусульманами. Чтобы не было войн и ненависти между людьми. Молюсь, чтобы дети наши в безопасности выросли в людей, любящих друг друга и отвечающих за свои поступки. Я прошу у Бога, чтобы политики всегда говорили правду и ставили интересы народа выше собственных...
— И какие у вас ощущения после 70 лет просьб?
— Ощущение, что я говорю со стеной!