things psychology tells you about yourself

Although you like to think that all of your decisions are carefully controlled and thought out, research tells us that most of our everyday decisions are actually subconscious. There is a reason for this though. Every second our brains are bombarded with over 11 millions individual pieces of data and because there is no way we can consciously sift through all of it our subconscious mind, following certain rules of thumb, helps us out.

If you ask someone to draw a glass, for the most part they will draw it from the angle demonstrated to the left. But what is to stop them from simply drawing a circle? This would be a valid overhead view. The reason is that our brains, when left to their own devices, imagine objects in this format.

You may have heard about the 7 plus or minus two rule. Psychology tells us that you can only store between 5 and 9 chunks of information in your short term memory at a time. A chunk, however, can consists of several pieces of related data. Consider your phone number. It has a country code, area code, and then one or two more sets of numbers. Although this can be over 14 numbers long, it is usually grouped into several chunks and therefore falls well into our short memory range.

Although you prefer reading text that is separated into relatively narrow columns, you read much faster if the text takes up the width of the page. Interestingly enough, however, you believe that you are actually able to read through the column layout faster but this is only because you prefer it visually.