Psychology
Exploring "Why" questions about Psychology
480 articles
Why is pain “painful?” Why don’t I like feeling pain?
pain is bad mmkay. it's how your body lets you know something's going wrong with it. spice is the plant's defense, so it wont get eaten by animals, since they're not stupid enough to eat it twice if i
Why are some vivid memories pure imagination? And why do they feel so real?
Memory is kind of a plastic thing. It's not really like a video recording, but a reconstruction. And your reconstruction itself can become less accurate as time passes.
Why do certain musical chords or notes have a pleasing or chilling effect when listening? Does personality have anything to do with chord progressions that people enjoy?
A lot of it is societal. Our current popular music is still built pretty heavily on the same chord progressions as those used by Bach in the 1600s: [I-V-vi-IV](_URL_3_) of a major scale. That chord pr
Why does 30C air with 100% relative humidity feel hot and sticky while 30C water in a swimming pool feels cool and not sticky?
Because they're two totally different environments - one is 100% gas (albeit saturated with vapour), one is 100% liquid (water). And because of that, they have different heat transfer coefficient, so
Why does it sometimes feel like time slows down and and I have enhanced reflexes?
This usually happens when your brain senses that you are in danger (even if it might not seen dangerous to you) and to assess the situation better it 'slows down time' and enhances your senses
Why do we remember some skills (e.g swimming and cycling) our whole lives?
It's called procedural memory. More specifically, it's 'muscle memory' or 'motor learning' which is a type of procedural memory. Your brain's cerebellum, in particular, is very good at encoding sequen
Why is it that negative emotions can feel…nice?
When you are feeling down, your body does two things. 1 - It tries to reverse this with happy feelings, caused by dopamine and serotonin. People who can't do this suffer from clinical depression.
why do we stretch? And does it feel so good to stretch?
Stretching tenses the muscles which helps pump blood back to the heart, which is part of the cardiac cycle. The 'feel so good' part of has to do with the sudden rush of rich oxygenated blood, which fe
Why is it that brail is a thing/that blind people don’t just feel the ABC’s like those with site read them?
For most signs with braille (such as bathroom signs) tend to have bigger letters than can be read by a single finger. It would take the blind person a lot more time to trace each letter of the sign. B
Why you get a physical “sinking” feeling in response to emotional stress…
The fact that emotional responses include how organs behave: some things tighten up, some things get faster, etc.. Feelings aren't all just in the mind; the whole body reacts. The brain is not somehow