Is your childhood causing brain farts?

Have you ever wondered what makes you have a brain fart? (Can I mention here that I love that the term "brain fart" seems to be the official term for it by the way)

According to this article by Yahoo News, there are "five common things that unexpectedly throw our brains for a loop, revealing some of the bizarre quirks in their structure and function that usually manage to slip under the radar."

Naturally, my attention was heightened, when I got to this part in the article, and I was particularly interested in what they had to say about photographs.

Photos

Just as we didn't evolve hearing beeps, we also didn't evolve seeing photographs. Like your grandmother learning to use the Internet but never developing an intuitive feel for it, we consciously "get" photographs, but our subconscious brains can't quite separate them from the objects or people pictured.

Case in point: Studies show that people are much less accurate when throwing darts at pictures of JFK, babies, or people they like than when throwing darts at Hitler or their worst enemy. Another study found that people start to sweat profusely when asked to cut up photographs of their cherished childhood possessions. Lacking millions of years of practice, our brains fail when it comes to separating appearance from reality.

Isn't that fascinating? (No, just me?) This is where my science side meets my art side. The photograph is an art form. Lines, color, shadow, composition. But the connection, that part of why as humans, we LOVE photos of our family and friends, is because of the scientific reason that our brains can't separate that physical photo in our hands, from the emotion we have from the subject it frames.

By taking photos, and treating them as keepsakes, we're keeping the connection alive to that person and that time in which it was taken. And until someone actually invents a reliable source of time travel, we're going to have to keep taking all these photos we love so much. :o)

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