Background Information for the Human Mind Science Fair Research

The Human Mind Makes Mistakes

The brain, a mysterious unknown place where people don’t know many answers to. The brain, where people make endless mistakes everyday caused by everything we do in our daily lives. The brain as many parts connecting around the whole body; the brain isn’t just one object that works in the same field. It’s like a company, they have their tasks and they perform them. Example of testing how our brain works is the show, Brain Games. The show basically points out why and how people mistaken things that should have been obvious. Another fact about the brain is how easily people will follow and trust what other people saw or do.

The brain is made of three main major important parts: the forebrain, midbrain, and the hindbrain. One part of the three parts in the forebrain would be the cerebrum. The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain. The cerebrum is broken down into four major parts, called lobes: frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and the temporal lobe. The frontal lobe is associated with the reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and the problem solving. The parietal lobe associated with movement, orientation, recognition, and the perception of stimuli. The occipital lobe is with the visual processing. The temporal lobe is with the perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech. The brain has many different connections to the body. Another one of the important connections would be the control center, or also known as the nervous system. The brain controls the body’s decision and communication throughout, the nervous system. The nervous system is made of the brain and the spinal cord. It also includes the peripheral nervous system which is made of the nerves. Working together, they both control everything that happens in our daily life’s, like breathing and blinking, memorizing facts for a test, and the beating of our heart. Nerves are all around our body, they reach from the brain to the face, ears, eyes, nose, including the spinal cord. The nerves that gather information from the environment around use is the sensory nerves, which send us signals of the info to the spinal cord. They send an immediate message to our brain, in a kind of way like Morse code. The brain, after receiving the message, quickly fires off a response. To deliver the instructions from the brain to the whole body, the motor neurons are now on their way! The spinal cord is like the train station for these Morse codes to get retrieved, it’s where a bundle of nerves runs up and down the spine. It speeds all messages to and from the brain in at least every second. Note, the brain is very wrinkly because it makes the brain more efficient by increasing the surface area of the brain and the amount of neurons within it. The National Geography Channel has been premiering a new show called Brain Games. This game show isn’t with knowledge of trivia of prices, just for curiosity. Each episode is based on different aspects of how the brain works, like using focus, fear, motion, and persuasion. During the show, the views engage in several games for the brain and show how the brain might not operate the way we expect it to. The experts on the show are knowledgeable in various fields of cognition join in to explain what’s occurring. These brain games and illusions are as if they are hacking in the brain. People might think that everything our eyes see is like a high definition TV and that they perceive the world in perfect details. The truth is, despite our vision, our brain only sees an image about the size of a thumbnail. It’s around 1/1000th of our field of view. As if people can only shine their spotlight vision on one thing at a time. The show also explains stuff like an inattentional blindness; which means that the brain has stored a model of the environment, so people may not notice something unusual even right up close. To explain how these brain games works, the show gets as many volunteers. One example of using volunteers, the host gets the volunteers to look through a deck of cards for the card they started with. So focused on the task the volunteer was assigned, they unintentionally haven’t noticed that the co-host has placed the card on top of the volunteer’s head.

People follow the crowd too much and rely on others to find out the answers based on how their dressed or how close they are with people. Some mistakes people make would be seeing patterns where none exist, sell winners and hold losers, trade too much, running with the herd even if it’s over the cliff, congratulate ourselves even for dumb luck wile blaming others for our poor choice, blindly jump into the latest trends, and telling ourselves that it’ll be different this time. Evidence has revealed itself be repeating patterns of irrationality, inconsistency, and incompetence in how the people will turn the cheek to decisions and choices when faced with lots of uncertainty. An example of this would be one experiment that has two “plants” that dress up like a news anchor squad and a camera guy. They went up to different people and asked them how they felt with the news going on, and of course, the news they said were all made up. The diverse people said to the camera how they felt about hearing this news. They displayed a fact on how easily people will fall for false information and go with the crowd.

Wrapping up all this background information, the conclusion should be that there is no definite way everyone reacts logically or emotionally. Some people act too much on emotion and competition and others are little bit more on the logic side of their brain. Even then, no one is perfect with their vision or their brain. Everyone judges people by the way they look, no doubt about that. The brain works in funny ways that no scientist or anyone would understand completely.