5 Ways Your Brain Is Tricking You into Being Miserable. Your brain contains more than 100 billion neurons that flawlessly work together to create consciousness and thought. It is an astonishing marvel of evolution and adaptation, and it is also a huge dick. What do we mean by that? Well, everyone wants to be happy, but the biggest obstacle to that is the mushy thing inside your skull that you think with. Evolution has left your brain with all sorts of mechanisms that are heavily biased toward misery. We can't guarantee that reading this article will help, for your brain is as crafty as it is sadistic. . #5. Pixland/Pixland/Getty Images At some point in the last year you've spoken to a woman with supermodel looks who would not stop talking about how horrible it was that she had gained half a pound or had a faint pimple on her forehead. Brendon Thorne/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty ImagesSeconds after this photo, she started ringing the bell frantically and shouting, "Sanctuary!
Photos.com"This is bullshit. . #4. Sure. Did it work? #3. 8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite of What You Think. Misunderstood By: Libertarians, Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck has recently found a soul mate in Thomas Paine, the Founding Father known for his Revolutionary War tract Common Sense.
So much so that he's gone so far as to rewrite Common Sense for the modern era, essentially stuffing words hand over fist into the mouth of a centuries-dead political philosopher for the soul-shriveling disgust Beck knows Paine would feel about Barack Obama. Libertarians and tea partiers are so enamored by their new ideological BFF that they've taken to dressing up like him on YouTube and spouting off about the evils of taxation, weak foreign policy and too many brown people.
But Beck and his minions could probably benefit from actually reading some Thomas Paine. "Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age. " An entitlement paying old people to support them for not working? 6 Insane Disney Comics You Won't Believe Are Real.
Is it unfair to judge old cartoons by the standards of the 21st century? Probably. Is it still amazing to see that there was a time when Disney had no problem depicting Mickey Mouse getting venereal diseases and attempting shotgun suicide? You bet! All of the below comics are real and unaltered. #6. Photos.com Comics can be a great educational tool, but we'd like to think there's a spectrum of possibilities that lie between "Let's make a public service announcement about disease" and "Let's give Mickey Mouse an STD.
" Via Cartoonbrew.com"I can help you with the clap, Mickey, but I'm afraid the herpes is here to stay. " We get that they wanted to teach as many people as possible about the new drugs, but perhaps Popeye would have been a better fit for this sort of thing. Via Cartoonbrew.comIs it Judas? Via Cartoonbrew.comYes, "blitzkrieg" was absolutely the best word to use in this context and period in time. Via Cartoonbrew.com"Oh God, mops! #5. Getty Not definitive enough for you? #4. 5 So-Called Signs of Genius That Any Idiot Can Learn. You know what would be cool? Superhuman intelligence. To walk into a room like Dr. House or Sherlock Holmes and show everyone your brain works twice as fast as theirs. Unfortunately, we can't turn you into a genius -- genetics and the public school system have already tried and failed.
But what we can do is teach you all the tricks you need to seem like one. Because with very little practice, you can ... #5. Getty When pop culture is tasked with presenting us characters who speak 17 languages, know way too much about far too many subjects, and/or are insufferably intelligent in general, speed reading tends to be the go-to skill to display their talent. Or the text is just really large. Well, here's good news for the vast majority of people who aren't Mensa-brained but want to appear to be: An ability to read quickly doesn't require a genius IQ, even if it will fool people at parties into thinking you have one.
Provided you already know how to read (in which case, hi!) #4. Rubiks.com"Hacks! " 5 Personal Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Someone. They say you should never judge a book by its cover. But when it comes to people, covers are the shit. As we've discussed before, certain personality quirks and intimate details are totally given away by our appearance.
All you need to know is how to interpret them. As before, these are not 100 percent -- we're only dealing in probabilities. . #5. We're not talking about the obvious here, the way goths and metalheads deal in black boots, hippies have their sandals, and hipsters will tie their grandmother's old curtains around their feet if it gives them an excuse to look down on someone. GettyWe're calling it: date rapist. How It Works A study by a pair of colleges found some peculiar trends in our choice of shoes, but not what you might think. -Anxious, clingy people prefer new and well-maintained footwear to ease their bundle of nerves. Getty"Ah, better than a Xanax. " -People who wear practical shoes tend to be relatively agreeable. Getty"Oh yeah, that's a pair of Class 5 Coccyx Breakers. " Comedy Workshop | Cracked.com Forums. All of Your Questions Answered Here | Cracked.com Forums.
5 Secret Languages That Stuck It to the Man. If you think about it, every group sort of has its own language -- even a bunch of dudes who hang out in college develop their own inside jokes and nicknames that sound like nonsense to the outside world. Show up to a new Internet forum and you'll be lost in all of their memes and jargon. But there have been times and places throughout history where people have literally developed an entirely new language that only their group spoke, like the old-time criminals who invented a bunch of the slang you use today.
But they were hardly the only ones ... #5. Vietnam War POWs Communicated by Tapping Getty Prisoners of war tend to have a language barrier with their captors, so it's par for the course that guards in POW camps will try to prevent their prisoners from speaking to each other, since you just can't tell whether they're complimenting each other's haircuts or discussing which guard to shank first. Photos.com"HEY, MIKE! How Did They Do It? So they came up with a tap code. . #4. . #3.