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68 Fascinating Facts For Those Who Feel Empowered By Knowledge
It can be rather daunting to realize just how massive the world is. The overwhelming amount of things, facts, details there are to learn. It can help to break down information into much more approachable and bite-sized pieces.
So we’ve gathered some of the most interesting posts from an Instagram page dedicated to cool facts and photos that should help you learn more about the world. Get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorites and be sure to share your own examples below.
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Learning something new can feel like being handed an ocean and told to memorize it wave by wave, and your brain has a real reason for reacting that way. Working memory, the mental space you use to juggle information, can only hold a handful of things at once. Psychologist George Miller mapped this out in 1956, finding that most people can hold roughly seven items in mind before things start slipping, an idea that grew into what is now called chunking.
That is why phone numbers get broken into small groups instead of one long string of digits. Once you realize your brain cannot hold an entire subject at once, feeling overwhelmed stops seeming like a personal failure and starts looking like basic biology.
This idea has an official name in education circles too, cognitive load theory, developed largely by researcher John Sweller. It explains why cramming ten new concepts into one sitting tends to backfire so badly. Give your working memory too much at once and something gets pushed out, usually your ability to remember any of it later. The fix is refreshingly simple. Break big topics into smaller pieces and let each one settle before adding the next. Picture it less like drinking from a fire hose and more like sipping from a cup you can actually finish.
#8
Jennifer Gray 10 hours ago (edited)
A lady in Ireland did the same thing! She made a good profit.
#9
Michael Largey 39 minutes ago
For those of you who can't make it out, the baker's name was Bettius Crocerium.
Timing matters just as much as sizing. Back in 1885, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus ran memory experiments on himself, memorizing meaningless syllables and tracking exactly how fast he forgot them. What he mapped became known as the forgetting curve, and it shows that without review, new information fades shockingly fast, often within days. The encouraging part is that reviewing information at spaced intervals resets the clock and slows that fading down.
That is the whole idea behind spaced repetition, and it explains why flashcard apps built around the concept have become popular with language learners and medical students alike. You are not doomed to forget everything you pick up, you just need to revisit it before it slips away.
There is also a mindset shift that changes how all of this feels day to day. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck spent decades studying what she called a growth mindset, the belief that abilities can be built through effort rather than being fixed traits you either have or do not.
#16
David Paterson 4 hours ago
The weirdest thing is that there have been more Hurricanes in Ireland than in South America, despite South America being the correct latitude. Another weirdness is that there have never been hurricanes in the northern and southern hemispheres at the same time.
#17
BarkingSquirell 1 hour ago
Freddy Mercury had one over his headboard when he dreamed/woke up to a song idea.
People who treat a rough first attempt as part of the process, rather than proof they are simply bad at something, tend to keep going long after others quit. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Confusion during the first few days of learning anything, whether it is a language, an instrument, or a brand new hobby, is not evidence you took a wrong turn. It is usually a sign you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
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#21
Curiosity turns out to be a surprisingly effective shortcut through all of this too. Economist and psychologist George Loewenstein proposed what he called the information gap theory, the idea that curiosity kicks in the moment we notice a gap between what we know and what we want to know.
That gap feels uncomfortable enough that our brains actively push us to close it, which is one reason a good question pulls people in far more effectively than a dense textbook chapter ever could. If a subject feels dry, try hunting for the one strange question hiding inside it. Curiosity about space rarely starts with orbital mechanics. It usually starts with something like why the sky is blue or how astronauts manage to sleep while floating.
#25
Kira Okah 9 hours ago (edited)
This is on a temporary support and not fully suspended. An earthquake cracked its original suspension in 1839, and it was finally resuspended using scㅤrew jacks in 1896. It was originally suspended using water and earth, with the original canals being filled in in the process.
#26
David Paterson 5 hours ago
True, the western part of the Himalayas grows even faster. It's interesting when you extrapolate that. 4 mm a year is 4 metres each thousand years is 4 km each million years. The Himalayas are 40 to 50 million years old. Everest is 8.8 km high. Which is only 2.2 million years. A 38+ million year discrepancy.
One more trick is worth borrowing from a Nobel laureate. Physicist Richard Feynman believed that if you could not explain an idea in plain language, you probably did not understand it as well as you thought. The method built around that belief, now known as the Feynman technique, asks you to explain a new concept as though you were teaching it to a curious twelve year old. Wherever your explanation stumbles is exactly where your understanding has a gap worth filling.
#30
David Paterson 4 hours ago
It looks better than modern ones. The water spray helps to stop all three of heat, gases (carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide) and the fine fraction of the smoke.
None of this makes a subject smaller. The world is still enormous and wonderfully strange, and it always will be. What changes is your approach to it. Break things down, space them out, keep your curiosity switched on, and give yourself credit for every small piece you manage to pick up along the way. That is really all learning ever is anyway, one interesting piece at a time.
#33
Blue Bunny of Happiness 8 hours ago
I thought a straight road I clocked in Lincolnshire at just over 6 miles was bad enough! You don’t get straight roads around the Pennines…
#34
Blue Bunny of Happiness 8 hours ago
Wear your seatbelts people! Whether it’s on a plane or in the car!
#37
Michael Largey 31 minutes ago
Right below the church's chimney and connected to a secret tunnel the the North Pole.
#38
Blue Bunny of Happiness 8 hours ago
If only all wars were as short and also had minimal loss of life.
#40
michael Chock 11 hours ago
You can also just watch SNL from when it began to now to get a good snapshot of the last 50 years
#42
Michael Largey 29 minutes ago
And agents of the British Museum had been spotted in his vicinity.
#50
Balseraph 7 hours ago
My great-grandmother was born in 1899. She was alive to hear about the Wright Flyer, two world wars, the Moon landing, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union before dying at age 101 having seen the turn of two centuries. Emigrated from Sweden to New Zealand with her family at a young age.(I forget exactly when)
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#53
Miriam Insidecor 4 hours ago
When I visited the tower it was during a very wet and windy November. You could feel the upper deck swaying in the wind.
#56
Lyone Fein 11 hours ago
Encephalitis lethargica is characterized by high fever, sore throat, headache, lethargy, double vision, delayed physical and mental response, sleep inversion and catatonia.[5][10] In severe cases, patients may enter a coma-like state (akinetic mutism).[citation needed] Patients may also experience abnormal eye movements ("oculogyric crises"),[11] Parkinsonism, upper body weakness, muscular pains, tremors, neck rigidity, and behavioral changes including psychosis.[citation needed] Klazomania, a vocal tic involving compulsive screaming, is sometimes present. (from Wikipedia)
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#59
LakotaWolf (she/her) 5 hours ago
I live in Huntington Beach, which is about 50 miles/1-hour drive south of Pacific Palisades. We got tons of ashfall and the sky was smoky even where I lived :(
#62
General Anaesthesia 6 hours ago
It also helped that Microsoft made a $150 million investment in Apple non-voting stock in August 1997, to rescue it from near-bankruptcy. Even Gates didn't want a monopoly. It gave Jobs some breathing room.
#63
AskMeAboutMyPoorJudgment 9 hours ago
There is no sound that instruments CAN'T record, although it may be difficult to get a given microphone to pick up a given frequency. If the sound truly cannot be detected by instrumentation, then the sound is originating inside the people hearing it. ie. some form of tinnitus
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