Psychology facts about human behavior

Table of Contents • • • • • • • Scientists have been trying to figure out how the brain functions for years. Yet despite the numerous findings on the organ’s physiology and psychology, there always seems to be a lot more to uncover. In this article, we unveil the 150 most fascinating facts about the brain and human behavior. Read on and you’ll possibly understand the underlying forces that often drive your actions. Mind-blowing Facts about the Brain’s Anatomy 1. The brain is made up of billions of neurons. 2. The brain consists of trillions of synapses. 3. A piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand contains 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses. 4. 60% of the human brain is fat. 5. Babies have big heads to hold rapidly growing brains. A 2-year-old’s brain is 80% of adult size. 6. Humans have more brain cells at the age of two than at any other time of their lives. 7. Neurons develop at the rate of 250,000 neurons per minute during early pregnancy. 8. The brain is 73% water. It takes only 2% dehydration to affect your attention, memory, and other cognitive skills. 9. The brain isn’t fully formed until age 25. 10. The brain takes the longest of any organ to develop and goes through more changes than any other organ. 11. The human brain weighs 3 pounds. 12. The smallest known normal brain belonged to a woman who died in 1977. Her brain weighed just 2.41 pounds. 13. The spinal cord is the main source of communication between the body and the brain. 14. The spinal cor...

human behaviour, the potential and expressed capacity for physical, mental, and social activity during the phases of human life. Humans, like other animal species, have a typical life course that consists of successive phases of growth, each of which is characterized by a distinct set of physical, physiological, and behavioral features. These phases are prenatal life, Most scientific research on human development has concentrated on the period from birth through early adolescence, owing to both the rapidity and magnitude of the psychological changes observed during those phases and to the fact that they culminate in the optimum mental functioning of early adulthood. A primary motivation of many investigators in the field has been to determine how the culminating mental abilities of adulthood were reached during the preceding phases. This essay will concentrate, therefore, on human development during the first 12 years of life. This article discusses the development of human behaviour. For see Theories of development The systematic study of Three prominent theories of human development emerged in the 20th century, each addressing different aspects of psychological growth. In retrospect, these and other theories seem to have been neither logically rigorous nor able to account for both Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Psychoanalytic theories Early psychoanalytic theories of human behaviour were set forth most notably by Austrian neur...

Guy Billout Myths come in many shades. Some notions are baldly incorrect: There is no evidence that humans use only 10 percent of their brains, for instance. Then there are misconceptions that contain a modicum of truth, or were once widely believed by experts. Some gain traction because they promise up-by-the-bootstraps solutions and a heavy dose of self-determination: It became faddish to tout 10,000 hours of practice as a surefire path to expertise. Plenty of misconceptions involve cleaving people into discrete categories, artificial distinctions that belie the complexity of the human mind. And there are myths that serve as hedges against an unjust world: If multiple intelligences exist and everyone excels at something, the world would be a bit more fair. It’s high time we put the most enduring myths about human behavior to bed, and see the mind—and the world—as it is. 1. BIRTH ORDER Personality is not shaped by whether one is a firstborn, the youngest, or an only child. You’ve heard it from grade school on: Firstborn children become strong-willed, dominant adults. And as parental helpers when younger sibs come along, the eldest grow to be the most conscientious of the bunch. Younger siblings, seeking a place in the family, become experimenters, less conformist and conventional than are firstborns. These are among the ideas proposed by psychologists who have argued that the spots children occupy in the family pecking order have lasting effects on who they are. The idea ...

Key points • Psychology is regularly accused of being a "soft science," full of intuitive information. • In fact, the behavioral sciences use rigorous methodological and statistical procedures, producing useful and novel findings. • Here are 10 findings (of thousands) from the behavioral sciences that shed important and novel light on the human experience. Source: Mix Tape/Shutterstock The behavioral sciences (which I see as a subset of psychology proper) are sometimes accused of being "soft" and of being full of intuitive findings. Honestly, if this all were true, I would have had a hard time dedicating the last three decades of my In fact, behavioral scientists are trained intensively in rigorous methodological and statistical procedures. I took seven statistics courses across my own undergraduate and graduate career as an example. One measure of how useful our field is pertains to the ability to turn up novel findings about human behavior that are not simply intuitive. OK, I'll admit that sometimes in our field, we do publish something that everyone already knows (such as research showing that kids don't like bitter vegetables). That said, when you start to look for non-intuitive findings in the field, you end up seeing many of them. And these findings provide important insight into the broader human experience. 2. Many people are capable of killing someone who is totally innocent if an authority figure requests them to do so. In his classic research on obedience to aut...