I recently took my first Psychology class and here are the disturbing and surprising things I found out about directly from my textbook "Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding" by Lilienfeld &co.

1. Guys have a boner for at least half the night.

Activity in the limbic system, including the amygdala, is increased during REM sleep, and the genitals become aroused, even if the content of the dreams we are having is not sexual. A typical 25-year-old man may have an erection nearly half of the night, and the common “morning erection” is left over from the last REM period before waking.

2. Wobbling lady-parts Are VERY convincing to men.

Th award for the most creative test of the two-factor theory probably goes to two researchers ( Dutton & Aron, 1974 ) who asked an attractive female confederate to approach male undergraduates on the University of British Columbia campus. She asked them for help with a survey and gave them her phone number in case they had any questions.

Half of the time, she approached them on a sturdy bridge that didn’t move, and half of the time she approached them on a swaying bridge suspended 200 feet above a river. Although only 30 percent of males in the first condition called her, 60 percent of males in the second condition did. The wobbly bridge in the second condition presumably increased male students’ arousal, leading them to feel more intense romantic emotions—just as Schachter and Singer would have predicted (Szczucka, 2012).

3. You need therapy for losing a book.

In 2007, grief counselors arrived at the scene to help traumatized college students deal with the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech, and in 1998, they even traveled to the Boston Public Library to help librarians deal with their feelings of loss following the destruction of books in a flood.

4. A girl was literally killed by her therapists.

Candace Newmaker received a treatment called rebirthing therapy, which is premised on the scientifically doubtful notion that children’s behavioral problems are attributable to difficulties in forming attachments to their parents that stem from birth—in some cases, even before birth. During rebirthing, children or adolescents reenact the trauma of birth with the “assistance” of one or more therapists (Mercer, 2002).

During Candace’s rebirthing session, two therapists wrapped her in a flannel blanket, sat on her, and squeezed her repeatedly in an effort to simulate birth contractions. During the 40-minute session, Candace vomited several times and begged the therapists for air, complaining desperately that she couldn’t breathe and felt as though she was going to die. When Candace was unwrapped from her symbolic “birth canal,” she was dead.

5. You have AMAZING senses.

The human eye can detect the equivalent of a single candle flame burning 30 miles away and can distinguish among more than 300,000 different colors. The human ear can detect sounds as low as 20 Hertz (vibrations per second) and as high as 20,000 hertz, and it can hear the tick of a clock about 20 feet away in a quiet room. We can taste a teaspoon of sugar dissolved in 2 gallons of water, and we are able to smell one drop of perfume diffused in a three-room apartment.

6. THIS WAS THE ULTIMATE PRANK

On September 6, 2007, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ summit was being held in downtown Sydney, Australia. World leaders, including the then-current U.S. president, George W. Bush, were attending the summit. Many roads in the area were closed for security reasons, and police presence was high. As a prank, eight members of the Australian television satire The Chaser’s War on Everything assembled a false motorcade made up of two black four-wheel-drive vehicles, a black sedan, two motorcycles, bodyguards, and chauffeurs (see the video below).

Group member Chas Licciardello was in one of the cars disguised as Osama bin Laden. The motorcade drove through Sydney’s central business district and entered the security zone of the meeting. The motorcade was waved on by police, through two checkpoints, until the Chaser group decided it had taken the gag far enough and stopped outside the InterContinental Hotel where former President Bush was staying.

Licciardello stepped out onto the street and complained, in character as bin Laden, about not being invited to the APEC Summit. Only at this time did the police belatedly check the identity of the group members, finally arresting them.

7. Pleasure is a creepy chemical

Olds and Milner (1954) discovered these reward centers accidentally after they had momentarily stimulated the hypothalamus of a rat. The researchers noticed that after being stimulated, the rat continued to move to the exact spot in its cage where the stimulation had occurred, as if it were trying to recreate the circumstances surrounding its original experience.

Upon further research into these reward centers, Olds (1958) discovered that animals would do almost anything to re-create enjoyable stimulation, including crossing a painful electrified grid to receive it. In one experiment a rat was given the opportunity to electrically stimulate its own hypothalamus by pressing a pedal. The rat enjoyed the experience so much that it pressed the pedal more than 7,000 times per hour until it collapsed from sheer exhaustion.

8. People drink alcohol for power?

One persistent image in the media is the hard-partying college student. How did this archetypal image begin? According to sociologist Thomas Vander Ven, the association between college and alcohol relates to social class. Consuming alcohol in a place of learning was a way to indicate that you had the money and leisure to not focus on work. Buying a round for your friends showed them that you could afford it.

Alcohol was an indicator of wealth and power. In fact, recent research suggests that heavy drinking continues to serve as a marker of high status at some colleges. Is this consistent with the image of alcohol being a tool of subversion?