Sit back. Relax. Close your eyes. Now, tell me all the things you see in your mind.

In the late 1800s, Wilhelm Wundt, a German doctor, was pioneering a new tool in the field of psychology. He was trying to learn how to take people’s conscious thoughts and break them down into smaller pieces that could be studied. It was called… wait for it… introspection, and it quickly became one of the leading research tools in the field.

But there was a small problem with introspection. Many patients being studied simply didn’t have the wherewithal to perform deep introspection on themselves, and most psychologists didn’t know how to coax it from them.

A researcher would ask a subject, “What are you thinking about now?” The subject would respond, “Well, I guess I see a table.” And that was the end of it.

“Subject thought of a table. Conclusion: undetermined.” Not very helpful!

This problem wasn’t fixed until a few years later when Edward Titchener, a British psychologist, coined this phenomenon as the “stimulus error” and started creating a procedure to fix it.

You can use his findings to improve your own life…