Your thoughts can release abilities beyond your normal limits

 There seems to be a simple way to instantly
increase a person’s level of general knowledge.
Psychologists Ulrich Weger and Stephen
Loughnan recentlyasked two groups of people to answer questions. People in one group were
told that before each question, the answer would
be briefly flashed on their screens — too quickly
to consciously perceive, but slow enough for
their unconscious to take it in. The other group
was told that the flashes simply signaled the next question. In fact, for both groups, a random
string of letters, not the answers, was flashed.
But, remarkably, the people who thought the
answers were flashed did better on the test.
Expecting to know the answers made people
more likely to get the answers right. Our cognitive and physical abilities are in
general limited, but our conceptions of the
nature and extent of those limits may need
revising. In many cases, thinking that we are
limited is itself a limiting factor. There is
accumulating evidence that suggests that our thoughts are often capable of extending our
cognitive and physical limits. Can our thoughts improve our vision? We tend
to believe that an essentially mechanical process
determines how well we see.Recent research by Ellen Langer and colleagues suggests
otherwise. It is a common belief that fighter
pilots have very good vision. The researchers
put people in the mindset of an Air Force pilot
by bringing them into a flight simulator. The
simulator consisted of an actual cockpit including flight instruments. The cockpit was
mounted on hydraulic lifts that mimic aircraft
movement and performance. People were given
green army fatigues; they sat in the pilot’s seat,
and performed simple flight maneuvers. They
took a vision test while “flying” the simulator. A control group took the same vision test in the
cockpit while the simulator was inactive.
People’s vision improved only if they were in the
working simulator. To rule out the possible effect of motivation, the
researchers brought another group of people
into the cockpit and asked them to read a brief
essay on motivation. After people finished
reading, they were strongly urged to be as
motivated as possible and try hard to perform well in the vision test. The test was conducted
while the simulator was inactive. They did not
show a significant improvement. In an eye exam, we are used to start experiencing
problems at the bottom third of the eye chart,
where letters start to get small. In another
experiment, Ellen Langer and colleagues showed
people a shifted chart. At the top, it included
letters equivalent to the medium-size letters on the normal eye chart and the chart progressed to
letters of very small size at the bottom. Because
people were expecting to read the top two thirds
of the shifted chart as well, they were able to
read much smaller letters. We also tend to think that our bodies respond to
physical exercise in a mechanical way. We count
our calorie intake, the calories we lose on a
treadmill, etc. However, merely changing our
thoughts about our physical activity seems
capable of changing our bodies. Hotel room attendants clean on average 15 rooms per day,
each room taking between 20 and 30 minutes to
complete. (The physical activity involved meets
the Surgeon General’s recommendation of at
least 30 minutes of physical exercise per day for
a healthy lifestyle.) However, most hotel room attendants believe that they do not get regular
exercise; and a lot of them believe that they do
not get any exercise at all. Alia Crum and Ellen
Langertold hotel room attendants that their work provided the recommended exercise for a
healthy lifestyle. This treatment group was
monitored for 4 weeks. A control group of hotel
room attendants, who were not told that their
work provided the recommended exercise, was
similarly monitored. People in the treatment group lost weight; their body fat percentages,
waist-to-hip ratios, and systolic blood pressures
dropped. People in the control group showed no
such improvement. These changes occurred
despite the fact that the hotel room attendants’
amount of work, amount of exercise outside of work, and diets stayed the same. 1 2 3 Next » Read more:Nudity Found to Offer New Social Benefits