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Yale Research Confirms What You’ve Always Suspected: Nobody Is Normal
Every day, millions of people around the world ask Google some variation of the question, “Am I normal?” Burdened by shame, we turn to the internet to figure out if our behavior, our bodies, and our deepest emotions mark us as outside the mainstream.
The very fact that so many of us are typing “Is it normal to talk to yourself?” or “How often do couples have sex?” into our browsers late at night suggests that, yes, whatever your quirk, lots of other folks probably have it too. But if search engine data alone seems like a flimsy basis to determine whether or not you’re a freak, I have good news for you. Yale research has confirmed it scientifically.
A new review published by two Yale psychologists in Trends in Cognitive Sciences argues that we’re all a little bit weird, but being weird is, in fact, totally normal.
There is no such thing as normal.
In order to feel like a weirdo, you have to believe there is such a thing as normal — a standard or optimal state of being in whatever area you’re worried about. Or in other words, for talking to yourself to be strange, it must be true that not talking to yourself is objectively better. And for a question like, “How often do most couples have sex?” to make sense, you need to assume there…
