No matter how many all-nighters you pull devouring volume after volume of dust-laden encyclopedias, it will never be enough. Because learning is a process, and there’s no end visible on the horizon.
But most of us are just fine with one or two "did you know that?" facts always ready to be served at a dinner table. Except they get old fast and nobody wants to listen to another “banana is a berry,” like, ever.
Luckily, one Reddit user who goes by u/RyanBlitzpatrick did everyone a favor and asked people on r/AskReddit “What's a fact that just blows your mind?” 3.6K upvotes and 3.5K comments later, the results are in and you’d better get your notebook ready, 'cause these are some of the hand-picked knowledge bites that may honestly surprise you.
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When you dream, one part of your brain is making up the story, and another part is experiencing those events and is genuinely surprised by all the twists in the plot.
2006, which doesn’t feel THAT long ago, saw the death of two colossally old tortoises. The first, Harriet, was reportedly collected by Charles Darwin when he visited the Galápagos on the HMS Beagle. She belonged to Steve Irwin at the time of her death. Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin shared a “pet.” Estimated to have lived 176 years.
The second, Adwaita, was born before the United States declared its independence from England. Think of it: just 14 years ago, there was a land creature alive that was older than our country. Just incredible.
November 2, 2000 was the last time all humans were on the planet together. Since then at least one person has remained on the international space station
I wish it was as easy to remember these facts as it was to scroll through. In reality, we do learn things every day, but not much of that information sticks with us.
But memory is a very complex function. It turns out, much of it is generated not only through recollection, but also through the emotions that are attached to it. Shahram Heshmat, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Springfield, believes that “emotion affects all the phases of memory formation.”
For example, “Attention guides our focus to select what’s most relevant for our lives and is normally associated with novelty.” And nothing focuses the mind more than a surprise which escalates emotional intensity.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank were born in the same year.
Also, that same year, Betty White was already 7 years old.
The oldest living tree in the world methuselah is 4851 years old
That the Oxford Univeristy is older than the Aztec Empire
Oxford University established in 1096, the alliance of three city-states forming the Aztec Empire occured in 1428.
And Bologna University in Italy is even older (founded in 1088 as university but before 1067 as "schola")
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Prague's Charles University is older as well :D by nearly 100 years
I guess this is surprising only from an American point of view. In the Old World, you live among many things that are pretty ancient (like some 2000 year old Roman walls still standing in the neighbourhood) and hardly pay attention to them. Besides, the Aztec empire was one of the latest of many native states that existed in Central America, many of which had collapsed long before the conquistadors landed there.
That is kind of stupid. I mean, of course they were! The Aztecs were the _last_ of the pre-columbian Mesoamerican civilizations.
Yes. Is it older than the Maya kingdoms? The Iroquois Confederacy (the first one, not the one the Europeans encountered)? The Moche kingdoms?
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And it only took nearly 1000 years for Oxford to admit WOMEN: founded 1096, women allowed in 1961.
Lol I love how white ppl still want to make themselves feel special by claiming they are older than Aztecs... how in the hell do they know that the Aztec empire was formed in 1428... was there an stone in one of the structures that said “EST 1428”... ppl stop making everything about anglosaxon better or first Than things of color...
Yendor24, I don’t know how they dated the Aztec empire – probably the same way they date other ancient civilisations – although this is technically the Middle Ages. There are several sources that state that the Aztec Empire began in the 13th Century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_Empire (okay, it’s Wikipedia, but they do reference a lot of other sources). See also https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-americas/aztecs The original posters weren’t trying to state that Anglos are better, they were just stating that Oxford University was established before the Aztec Empire. There are those of us on here who find this interesting from an historical perspective, without turning it into a race issue.
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Actually there was never an "aztec" empire, sonce that's not their real name, but Mexicas. The y were called Aztecs before settling on the main island of lake Texcoco (when they were nomads), and THEN became Mexicas.
Hello Gabor, totally agree with you. The "Europeans also brought Africans as future slaves. Since Afro-Americans have become citizens of the USA the white supremacist and government haven't stop to eliminate them little by little. Poor housing, lousy health care or none, no fresh food in local shops, 2nd rate schooling, this what Great America offers to those living in ghettos. As for the American Indians, well most still live in federal reserves in dire straits. Reserves are through out the world are where wild animals are kept in a secure environment, not people. The land on which they are held can't be used for farming. There is a total lack of respect for human lives if you're not a WASPS.
The changes that institution has seen are truly awe-inspiring.
Another interesting thing which escalates long-term memory is not the recollection of a fact itself, but rather the so-called mood memory. Prof. Heshmat explains that “Our current emotional state facilitates recall of experiences that had a similar emotional tone.”
For example, being in a bad mood primes us to think of and remember unpleasant moments.Having said that, most of the things we forget easily have to do with our inability to put them in our long-term memory.
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and was clearly heard 3,000 miles away.
That's like you standing in New York and hearing a sound from San Francisc
If time travel were possible, you would need a time-and-space-machine to survive the trip, otherwise when you travelled back in time, the planet would be at a different point in its rotation around the sun and our solar system would be at a different point in space as it rotates, which means you'd travel back in time and be in an empty part of space
The International Space station is closer to the earth than San Francisco is to L.A
Meanwhile, forcing yourself to memorize things is likely not to be very effective because our brains are not capable of making sense of dense information quickly and forming strong associations.
It's better to use super simple tricks such as visualization (imagine what you are trying to remember), repetition (boring but effective), and learning the opposite things (create associations in your head).
And never underestimate the power of understanding that which you’re learning, because you'll never be able to remember something you can’t explain yourself.
Arctic foxes can survive temperatures as low as -70 degrees Celsius
If an underwater bubble is collapsed by loud sound, light is produced and no one knows why
Good. So next power outage I'm gonna fart in the tub and yell at it :D
Some people don’t have an inner monologue, like they literally don’t have a voice in their head.
I can't even imagine. Those must be the people who fall asleep easily!
A woman once jumped off the 86th floor of the Empire State Building but the wind pushed her back and she fell on a ledge on the 85th floor. She survived.
The fact that nobody knows that if we all see colours the same way
I think about that. It's more than just how you identify a color. There are colors in the aqua family I see as blue and my husband sees as green.
That there are people in the world who don't like music. Not one specific type, but music as a whole.
That both blows my mind and disturbs me
Hope I don't run into any of these people, because we wouldn't be vibin'!
I still can’t get over the fact that teddy roosevelt got shot and continued to give a three hour speech
Ant biologists still don't know the maximum life span of most ant queens. They just live too long to keep track, and they're not too easy to keep in captivity. The longest one on record is like 30 years old, and there could easily be species that live longer than that
There is a termite colony in the Amazon Rain Forest that is the size of Great Britain and is almost 4,000 years old. There are also hundreds of millions of termite mounds
The U.S government has an official for a Zombie apocalypse. CONPLAN 8888 also known as Counter-Zombie Dominance was written in 2011. And just in case you think it's weird bureaucratic humor, the first line reads, 'This plan was not actually designed as a joke.'
There are more trees on Earth then there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
Confirmed by NASA.
A neutron star is so dense that a teaspoon of material from one would weigh around 10 million tons
If the timeline of the universe (up to now) was compressed into a year starting on new year's day, Homo sapiens would appear at 11:54 pm on December 31st
Mitochondria is only passed down by mother so there's a concept of mitochondrial eve, all humans today have their mitochondrial dna derived from her
Hold onto your hats if you're a white supremacist. The place or origin is believed to be East Africa.
Strawberries aren’t berries.
But bananas are
The Fermi Paradox.
With the number of potentially habitable Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, it’s very strange that we haven’t detected alien signals of any kind so far.
There’s lots of theories as to why that is, but my favorite is called the great silenceDark Forest (which sounds way cooler). Basically everyone else out there is being quiet and not transmitting because they know of some danger that we are unaware of, and they don’t want it to find them. Gives me chills.
Edit: It’s interesting that most of the replies here, joking or serious, correspond to legitimate theories on the Fermi Paradox.
That the biggest bacteria species known, Thiomargarita namibiensis, can have a maximum diameter of 0.7 millimeters, which is big enough for you to see it without a microscope.
That's insane if you consider that your average bacteria species has a diameter of 0.001 millimeters.
How a computer does what it does. Blows my mind how 1's and 0's can do so much. Maybe I'm uneducated, but still mind blowing
The way the human brain works. These cells that are powered by tiny jolts of electricity are collectively having conscious thoughts, coming up with morals and empathy and every human behavior
That Neutrinos have mass and every second of every day about a billion of them are going through every square inch of your body - but the space between your atoms is so huge there's pretty much a 0% chance they will ever hit you
Note: this post originally had 59 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
I already wrote this in a comment above, but I'm kinda worried it'll get lost in all the other comments and never be read... The most mind-blowing fact I can think of is from university (animal physiology lecture, topic visual sense). There's a small experiment that shows you how crazy much your visual input is curated before it ever reaches your consciousness, in a way not other experiment ever made that clear to me: Take a flashlight, point it sideways at your eye (as in, hold it by the side of your head and point it at the nose so you eye is hit sideways), then wave it about. Then sit in stunned silence. The sensory cells don't actually detect light as such, but a CHANGE from dark to light, so cells behind blood vessels never report anything. Until you wave a light about from sideways, that is... (my other favorite weird fact from that lecture is that "penis fencing" is an actual zoological term. Flatworm mating.)
I tried it out, it's so weird O-o. There's another cool thing worth mentioning is that everything we see is in the past. It takes time for light to travel from our eye to an object and then back while also processing the image so even if that time is minimal, we only see what has already been. Same with sound. When someone speaks, it takes time for the sound the travel so we never really hear a person speak in the present, but what they said in the past. AND this includes interactions. There is a concept of space-time where each person, wherever they are standing, is their own form of "present." When I am speaking and looking at someone right in front of them, I am actually communicating with their past selves, not the present. The only way for us to be in the same "present" is when we hug :3 (amongst other touchy interactions)
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There are 7.5 Billion humans on earth. -- But there are 24 Billion CHICKENS. -- This is a magnitude larger than all other birds on Earth, combined. -- This is also enough for every two people to own 7 chickens.
The total weight of ants in the world adds up to the total weight of humans...
How long did it take you to count those suckers Jack?
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I’m amazed the math works this way. If you wrapped a belt around the equator, how much length would you need to add so the belt would be 12 inches off the ground for you to crawl underneath? The answer is 6 feet would need to be added, yes just 6 feet. 25,000 miles around and only 6 feet make that big a difference.
The Universe is 10 ^ 26 meters in diameter. Atoms are 10 ^ -15 meters in diameter. -- Quarks are 10 ^ -19 meters. Humans are just a bit closer to the size of atoms and their components, than we are to the size of the Universe. -- We're really not that consequential after all, but we do kinda straddle the middle point between atoms and the Universe, size-wise.
i'm disappointed the factoid about nintendo's origins in the 1800s isn't on here, for shame, boredpanda
I already wrote this in a comment above, but I'm kinda worried it'll get lost in all the other comments and never be read... The most mind-blowing fact I can think of is from university (animal physiology lecture, topic visual sense). There's a small experiment that shows you how crazy much your visual input is curated before it ever reaches your consciousness, in a way not other experiment ever made that clear to me: Take a flashlight, point it sideways at your eye (as in, hold it by the side of your head and point it at the nose so you eye is hit sideways), then wave it about. Then sit in stunned silence. The sensory cells don't actually detect light as such, but a CHANGE from dark to light, so cells behind blood vessels never report anything. Until you wave a light about from sideways, that is... (my other favorite weird fact from that lecture is that "penis fencing" is an actual zoological term. Flatworm mating.)
I tried it out, it's so weird O-o. There's another cool thing worth mentioning is that everything we see is in the past. It takes time for light to travel from our eye to an object and then back while also processing the image so even if that time is minimal, we only see what has already been. Same with sound. When someone speaks, it takes time for the sound the travel so we never really hear a person speak in the present, but what they said in the past. AND this includes interactions. There is a concept of space-time where each person, wherever they are standing, is their own form of "present." When I am speaking and looking at someone right in front of them, I am actually communicating with their past selves, not the present. The only way for us to be in the same "present" is when we hug :3 (amongst other touchy interactions)
Load More Replies... There are 7.5 Billion humans on earth. -- But there are 24 Billion CHICKENS. -- This is a magnitude larger than all other birds on Earth, combined. -- This is also enough for every two people to own 7 chickens.
The total weight of ants in the world adds up to the total weight of humans...
How long did it take you to count those suckers Jack?
Load More Replies... I’m amazed the math works this way. If you wrapped a belt around the equator, how much length would you need to add so the belt would be 12 inches off the ground for you to crawl underneath? The answer is 6 feet would need to be added, yes just 6 feet. 25,000 miles around and only 6 feet make that big a difference.
The Universe is 10 ^ 26 meters in diameter. Atoms are 10 ^ -15 meters in diameter. -- Quarks are 10 ^ -19 meters. Humans are just a bit closer to the size of atoms and their components, than we are to the size of the Universe. -- We're really not that consequential after all, but we do kinda straddle the middle point between atoms and the Universe, size-wise.
i'm disappointed the factoid about nintendo's origins in the 1800s isn't on here, for shame, boredpanda
