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36 Randomly Specific Facts People Have Stored In Their Brains For Absolutely No Practical Reason
I love a good rabbit hole. The kind where you might be just a tiny bit curious about something minor, and the next thing you know, you're jumping from Wikipedia page to Wikipedia page with no particular destination in mind.
It's frankly a lost art, in my opinion. Nowadays, either no one goes down rabbit holes because they don't care about anything other than TikTok videos, or they just ask AI. It's boring. But it's through rabbit holes and life experiences that people end up keeping a little drawer of useless information inside their brains, and today, they've decided to share some of the weird little facts they've learned.
More info: Reddit
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#1
If its next to a church it is called a graveyard, if it is by itself, it is called a cemetery.
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#3
You are not allowed to sell body parts on eBay. Learned that after trying to sell some gold-covered teeth found in my grandmother’s estate….
I wasn't just kidding when I said earlier that we have a drawer filled with useless facts, because that's actually pretty accurate. Your brain categorizes facts in a very different place from your personal experiences. This may sound a little weird because, well, it's all stored in the same brain, but it's organized differently.
Experts suggest that there are two conscious "buckets" that store information: episodic memory (your personal life experiences, like getting stuck at TSA) and semantic memory (your generalized vault of facts, like knowing what a rhino horn is made of). In fact, a lot of the time, you may remember the fact itself as if you're a walking encyclopedia, but not necessarily how you learned it in the first place.
#4
Cockroaches can live for weeks on wallpaper glue. They'll also munch on the labels from canned food.
#5
Around 50,000,000 bananas contain enough potassium to give you radiation poisoning.
Rick Murray 54 minutes ago (edited)
I think there will be other health issues *long* before *radiation* becomes a concern. More than ~3 a day (or maybe up to 5~6 if you don't eat them regularly) is pretty much the safe limit from potassium issues (because it's potassium, not because it goes fzzzzt fzzzzt fzzzzt 😂, pretty much the same reason it's bad to use too much salt).
#6
In 3rd grade we were playing a team based trivia game in the library, as a class. The questions were way above our age group but if I remember right we were in a tornado warning so they just used what they had on hand to keep us occupied till the storm passed. The librarian looked at a card and said "oh you guys won't know this one but why not: what was the name of the famous oil tanker that sank off the coast of Alaska?"
A kid in the class said "what's an oil tanker?", then I blurted out "the Exxon valdez".
The librarian looked at me like I was an alien. Like, what f****n 3rd grader knows that? I watched a lot of history channel growing up and they used to actually teach history
Edit: I guess I should add that this was in like 99'.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 minute ago
Knowing about the Exxon Valdez only a decade after it happened isn't "obscure" or "bizarre", IMO. It was a huge deal at the time and one of the biggest and most publicized environmental disasters of its time. Kids would hear about how many aquatic animals and marine birds were affected. I'd be surprised if a modern 3rd grader knew about it today, but in 1999, only 10 years after the oil spill? Not all that surprising.
Just because we hear a fact many times doesn't always mean it's true. Yeah, we may scroll through threads online and assume something is accurate because there's a human on the other side saying it, usually backed up by an "I have a degree in biology/history/whatever." But that doesn't automatically make it true, and we're sorry to break the news like this, but it also has to do with your brain.
Psychologists explain that there is a phenomenon called the "illusory truth effect," which essentially makes people more likely to believe a "fact" simply because they've been told it's true over and over again. They say that repetition creates cognitive fluency, making information easier for the brain to process, and therefore more likely to be perceived as true, even if it isn't.
#7
Chile is such a long country that, if you laid it over a map of Europe, it would stretch all the way from the top of Norway to Gibraltar.
#8
From a D&D session where we got off topic and started talking about Transformers.
My friend: That's how you knew Megatron was the most powerful! Because he was the only one who turned into a gun.
Me: Actually, there were three robots that turned into guns. It was a whole line of Transformers called "GunRobo." Megatron is just the only one they brought to North America.
DM: Why the f**k do you know that?
Me: I like Transformers.
#9
For years, the spiked tail of stegosaurs had no official scientific name. Then cartoonist Gary Larson coined "thagomizer" in a 1982 Far Side comic as a joke — named after a
caveman named Thag Simmons.
Paleontologists found it useful, adopted it, and today it's used in museums, textbooks, and scientific papers.
This type of false information being spread is actually... the norm. It’s scary to think that we live in an age of disinformation, and with social media in everyone’s lives and daily habits, we’re more prone to watching and reading things that are actually false. We’re no longer living in an age of accurate information, scary.
Researchers have concluded that false stories travel faster than the truth on social media, specifically. This is due to a number of reasons, but a lot of it comes down to our own reactions. Because false stories often trigger stronger emotional responses, especially negative ones, it’s much easier for us to share them for the shock factor.
#10
Fred Baur (Pringles inventor) had his ashes buried in a Pringles can.
#11
From last to fifth from last goes: Ultimate, penultimate, antepenultimate, preantepenultimate, propreantepenultimate.
#12
Immune system doesn't know our eyes exist. Eyes have "ocular immune privilege" to prevent inflammation from blinding you. If one eye gets damaged, our immune system might discover it, mistaking it for a foreign threat and attack both eyes until we go blind.
Rick Murray 45 minutes ago
The immune system does know, but like the brain the immune system has a very strict "do not touch" rule, because the immune system's approach (basically the body's version of "nuke it from space") would be catastrophically bad in both the brain and the eyes.
Not everything is bad, though. For a long time, information belonged to the elite. The studious and the wealthy paid for access to the best information available, but nowadays, it's far easier to access and share knowledge. Wikipedia may just be one of humanity's greatest tech triumphs and the perfect place to learn weird and fascinating little facts.
And while we may be the generation with the most accessible information ever, we're not necessarily the most informed. In fact, experts found out that the average person's attention span on a screen has plummeted from 150 seconds in 2004 to just 47 seconds today. This constant bombardment of information has made us very good at skimming through words, but not necessarily at absorbing them.
#13
Boss: I just bought a Sequoia. “Sequoia” has all five vowels but each only once.
Me: “Facetiously” has all *six* vowels, each only once, and in alphabetical order.
Boss: How do you *know* these things?
#14
I know that honey never spoils because archaeologists have eaten 3,000 year old honey and that stuff was still edible as all hell.
#15
Dung beetles use the milky way to navigate.
But if you truly look deep inside your little gray mass, you'll probably find plenty of useless information stored away that, in the right conversation, can come out as a party trick. A little "Did you know that...?" never really hurt anyone, and more often than not, it's an incredible conversation starter.
And speaking of which, did you know that you're not supposed to snip or cut your cuticles? That's because the little strip of skin at the base of your nail isn't actually the cuticle. The cuticle is the dry skin attached to the nail plate, while the bit most people cut is the living tissue known as the eponychium. Now that's my fun fact. What weird bit of information do you have to add to this list? Let us know!
#16
Period blood can have enough iron in it to set off a metal detector. Source: heavy flow, airports are my nemesis.
#17
Taco Bell was named after its founder, Glen Bell.
#18
Ok. English is not my native language and I'm tired. But I'll try anyway. Be patient and bear with me.
The first native pilgrims spoke to when disembarking fron the Mayflower answered them in English.
His name was Squanto. But you know about this story already.
The one you have probably never heard of was another native: Epenow.
He was a Vineyard Wampanoag kidnapped by captain Edward Harlow in 1611 and brought to England.
You see, back in that time Explorer thought that everything you needed to do for natives to love you was kidnapping them and bring them to Europe so they could recognize the superiority of western culture.
Epenow spent three years in London before convincing his captors that he could lead them to gold back in America.
Brits mounted a whole expedition and as soon as they arrived by modern day Martha's Vineyard Epenow jumped off the ship and runaway.
Epenow became the fiercest opponents of the invaders and, when the Pilgrim father's arrived, he was the one telling the other natives to not trust them.
There's one more thing about this story: I wrote that you probably never read about him. But I was wrong. You did, if you read Henry VIII by Shakespeare: Act V, scene IV.
A Porter and a man are struggling to control an unruly crowd. Wondering why all those people are there, the Porter says:
"have we some strange Indian with the great tool come to court, the women so besiege us".
Now, when Epenow arrived in London he was litterally toured around the court and the aristocrats. He was tall, nice looking and half naked. Gossip spread. And Shakespeare took the opportunity to put one of them on paper...
#19
In the mid-nineties, I was in a trivia contest which was similar to the Jeopardy style. This was at a charity event.
I was kicking b**t and made it to the finals. It was me ( f25) vs. some middle aged white guy.
Twice, after I had answered a question, the host looked at me puzzled and said “How do you know that?”
Question one: What disastrous concert had Hell’s Angels as security?
I buzzed in and said “Altamont” Which I thought was common knowledge.
Question two was even easier: What is a rhinoceros’ horn made of?
I answered “Hair”.
I started to think that people just don’t like to learn things.
The Other Guest 11 minutes ago
Except OP is wrong about the rhinocerous horn. It's made from keratin, which is a protein also found in human hair & fingernails. Unlike hair, which grows in hollow strands, rhino horns are formed of layers of keratinized skin cells.
#20
The outerbridge crossing, a bridge connecting Staten Island to New Jersey, is the southernmost bridge in New York State and arguably the “outermost” bridge in New York City
Anyway, it was named after Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.
#21
That one of the reasons mummies are rare is because of paint and human consumption.
#22
At my old job we had a Pelican-style toolbox with some specialized aircraft tools. The box always smelled like vomit inside. There were custom fabricated wrenches that had a clear yellow handles. The material used contains butyric acid which off gasses the vomit-like odor, because it's the same stuff in human vomit.
#23
There is a rare neurological symptom called Anton Syndrome, caused by brain damage (stroke or trauma). The person is blind, but they are absolutely certain they can see. They will say things are in places they are not, or that your shirt is a specific colour when it isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_syndrome.
#25
Adult cats are lactose intolerant.
#26
Octopuses have three hearts, and when they swim, two of them actually stop beating.
#27
The most concentrated place on earth for Vitamin A is in the liver of a polar bear. It’s so dense that one bite of polar bear liver and you can d*e.
#28
I was at a trivia night with a group and the question was “what is the name of the study of history and usage of flags?”
I immediately told them that the answer is Vexillology, and they looked at me like I had spoken aramaic.
#29
A lot of companies that have products that claim to use AI are actually just using sweatshop workers in 3rd world countries to process data. It's cheaper.
Michael Largey 5 hours ago
Because they don't want to be seen as robbing workers of a living wage, which of course AI would never do.
#31
Not me but my wife. Doctor prescribed me some pain pills for a broken foot. I was not going to fill it but my wife told me to just in case. I got back into the car and she looked at them. She said, "You could get $38 apiece for these on the street." O_O The dentist she worked for was apparently on d***s.
I tripped and used my foot to break my fall. Thought I might take 1/2 of one. Looked and could not find the pills. Found out later she gave them to the dentist. I found out they had been seeing each other for awhile. O_O^(2).
#32
I remember the word antidisestablishmentarianism has more letters in in than the alphabet does.
This is because in 2nd grade this kid was getting so much credit for spelling delicatessen right and they thought he was a genius because he could spell it so I found the longest word I could find to one up his a*s. Needless to say, I clearly won and his life was ruined. I have no idea what the word means but I know its got 28 letters in it!
#33
The way that screwworms are controlled (the funding US govt cut) are by irradiating the pupa until their DNA is irreversibly damaged. Then the adults are allowed to emerge and are frozen in trays that are loaded onto cargo aircraft. The adults are airdropped into an infested area and unfreeze and fly by the time they hit the ground. They still got that dawg in them and use up their single mating opportunity on sterile mates, thus culling the population. This was previously confined by the hellhole that is the Darien Gap, but have since spread to Mexico and US.
Source: worked on irradiation machines.
#34
Alcohol is the antidote to glycol poisoning...
#35
I'm an anthropologist.... That sums up my entire career.
But a few highlights include...
* Human flesh is so chemically identical to pork, that the human tongue cannot taste the difference.
* How *exactly* shrunken heads are made.
* Human leather is one of the strongest, smoothest, most buttery soft leathers you can get... and I can spot it from across the room, behind glass.
#36
Squeaky toys sound *exactly* like a squirrel screaming in pain.
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Major Harris 1 hour ago
the confederate warship c.s.s. shenandoah surrendered on 06 nov 1865, 9 months after the war had ended, to an english warship in the thames river in england. the last official lowering of a civil war battle flag.
Major Harris 1 hour ago
the confederate warship c.s.s. shenandoah surrendered on 06 nov 1865, 9 months after the war had ended, to an english warship in the thames river in england. the last official lowering of a civil war battle flag.
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