Mind-Blowing Psychology Facts that Seriously Explain Everything Part 3

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1. You're programmed to love the music you listened to in high school the most.

The music we like gives us a hit of dopamine and other feel-good chemicals, and that's even stronger when we're young because our brains are developing. From around age 12 to 22, everything feels more important, so we tend to emphasize those years the most and hang on to those musical memories.

"Researchers have uncovered evidence that suggests our brains bind us to the music we heard as teenagers more tightly than anything we'll hear as adults—a connection that doesn't weaken as we age," writes Mark Joseph Stern for Slate.

2. Memories are more like pieced-together pictures than accurate snapshots.

Even people with the best memories in the world can have "false memories." The brain generally remembers the gist of what happens, then fills in the rest—sometimes inaccurately—which explains why you insist your wife was with you at a party six years ago, even though she's adamant she wasn't.

3. There's a reason that certain color combinations are hard on your eyes.

When you see bright blue and red right next to each other, your brain thinks the red is closer than the blue, making you go practically cross-eyed. Same goes for other combinations, like red and green.

4. Putting information in bite-sized pieces helps us remember.

Your short-term memory can only hold on to so much information at a time (unless you try one of the simple ways to improve your memory), which is why you use "chunking" to remember long numbers. For instance, if you try to memorize this number: 90655372, you probably naturally thought something like 906-553-72.

5. You remember things better if you've been tested on them.

Sorry, kids! One of the most useful psychology facts is that testing really does work. One study published in the journal Psychological Science found that people are more likely to store information in their long-term memory if they've been tested on the information (the more, the better) than if they just study and don't need to remember it right away.

6. Too much choice can become paralyzing.

The whole "paradox of choice" theory has been criticized by researchers who say it hasn't been shown in studies, but there is some evidence that our brains prefer a few options to a ton. When singles at speed-dating events met more people and those people had more diversity in factors like age and occupation, the participants chose fewer potential dates.

7. When you feel like you're low on something (like money), you obsess over it.

Psychologists have found that the brain is sensitive to scarcity—the feeling that you're missing something you need. When farmers have a good cash flow, for instance, they tend to be better planners than when they're tight for money, one study found. When you're feeling cash-strapped, you might need more reminders to pay bills or do chores because your mind is too busy to remember.

8. We keep believing things, even when we know they're wrong.

Researchers in one Science study fed volunteers false information, then a week later revealed that the facts weren't actually true. Even though the volunteers knew the truth (now), fMRI scans showed that they still believed the misinformation about half the time. It's one of the psychology facts to know that could make you smarter.

9. We look for human faces, even in inanimate objects.

Most of us haven't seen Jesus in a piece of toast, but we've all noticed cartoonish faces seemingly staring back at us from inanimate objects. That's called pareidolia, and scientists think it comes from the fact that recognizing faces is so important to social life that our brains would rather find one where there isn't one than miss a real-life face.

10. We will always, always, always find a problem.

Ever wonder why when one problem resolves, another one takes its place? It's not that the world is against you—but your brain might be, in a sense. Researchers asked volunteers to pick out threatening-looking people from computer-generated faces. "As we showed people fewer and fewer threatening faces over time, we found that they expanded their definition of 'threatening' to include a wider range of faces," writes researcher David Levari, PhD. "In other words, when they ran out of threatening faces to find, they started calling faces threatening that they used to call harmless."