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
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!
My husband is one of these people. And yes, he sleeps easily every night. Falls asleep in less than 2 minutes (I've timed it). I've asked him what goes through his head while on an elevator, he said 'nothing'.
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Wow, am I the only person in this thread who is like this? I didn't realise the rest of you actually hear voices in your heads??
its like when you read a sentence, you dont actually hear a voice voice, but is a voice. kinda like imagine calling out your favorite person's name in your mind.
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I asked some deaf (from birth) people what they have as their inner monologue if they’ve never heard their own voice or any other persons voice. They all said they visualise a random pair of hands signing everything they think rapidly.
I have an inner monologue but it's not a voice at all, it's just the awareness of one word after another
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Count me in to this one. I thought "voices in your head" was a metaphor before I asked other people! I can make myself "vocalise" internally (imagining a voice reading words), but it's not what's normally going through my mind. And, yes, I can fall asleep extremely quickly!!
I did as well. I can't get my head around the fact people actually hear voices... in their thoughts. It's so weird!
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Me neither. It's like: they don't think? I don't understand.
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I didn't have one and memories and feeling were pictures. Had to learn to vocalise my thought to cope with them
I don't have an inner monologue but I also can't think/visualize pictures in my head either. I feel like my brain is rubbish lol.
Load More Replies... Also images. Some people actually have an inner eye and can "see" detailed images... like imagining yourself in a meadow with a stream running and trees and flowers around. Some cannot "see" at all. And lots like me are in the middle - I can start to picture some of that stuff but it's broad strokes only, no detail, I can only focus on the detail of one thing (maybe the petals on a flower) but I lose them instantly if I try to think of something else (e.g. the stream). I can "see" my mom's face, but only really a very broad "idea" of it or a more detailed image of any ONE feature e.g. eyes or nose or hair.
Also, some people have multiple voices in their heads (like they are literally thinking two completely different things at once, all the time) and some don't. Some have a better or worse inner ear. My husband says "counting sheep" for him is actually an image of sheep jumping a fence (for me I can see a sheep but only one at a time so the idea of counting them is kinda pointless, I might as well forget the sheep and just count) but they're cartoons and they bleat when they jump. He can't imagine it without the sound. Everybody has such different experiences in their own mind and everyone generally assumes there's just one way to think but that's not true at all. It's quite fascinating! Have a conversation or three about this stuff, you'll learn a lot about the people in your life.
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I'm one of them and I was completely stunned when I found out only last year, that some people hav a non-stop monologue in their brain. That would drive me insane!! My brain mostly works with images and concepts, not actual words.
IKR?! Monologue-based thinking just sounds like it's incredibly slow and inefficient!
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The amount of people who decided not to abide to the COVID-19’s quarantine and social distancing proves that some people don’t even have a brain, let alone a voice inside their heads.
They do have a voice, but is a bad adviser.
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I once made a small poll on a public comment section. There's several versions of inner voice: self-narrator, interview, monologue/talking to yourself in your head, dialogue, non-verbal (pictures etc.)
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I cannot imagine how productive they must be. My inner voice is a time sucking swamp witch.
Not having an inner voice doesn't mean people don't have thoughts. Those thoughts consume you as much as the voice I imagine. The voice is just how your brain expresses those thoughts.
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Then how do they read? They’d have to hear the words in their heads to be able to understand it
How do they read to themselves? They’d have to say the words in their head, right??
No, the words on the page just transform to pictures in my brain :)
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I am one of them. I see pictures and colours, but I never understood how people have a "voice" in their heads.
Likewise. I think in images and emotions more than words. So interesting to learn about how the rest of humanity is thinking.
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I think talking to yourself counts as an inner voice.
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That would account for me have many voices, I taken too many....
Yup, that's me. I can't hear my thoughts inside my head but I also can't see them and I always wonder how do I remember things? I still can't understand my own brain haha
I have a friend who says she dreams with no sound and in black and white.
Has anyone checked their pulse? Or X-rayed their heads? Perhaps the reason there's no voice is because they're without a brain?
there's a similar sort of thing where some people can read and not get a picture in their head from it, i forget what it's called
That must be a hard life; no reading, or thinking (maybe)?
I wish I had that when I'm trying to sleep and my head won't shut up
A few night ago I was so sleepy but couldn't have a sound rest because my inner f..voice kept talking non stop. At some point I thought that was my daughter who sleeps next to me is talking in her dream. I made a huge afford to open my eyes and turn my head to her when that voice shut up. I realized it was my inner voice playing games w my brain.
I wish I could get mine to shut up sometimes, she drives me batty, lol.
I hear voices sometimes, but I quit telling my husband. LOL
I am one of these people and I can't imagine how boring or restrictive it would be to think with a monologue in your head. If I'm making something, I think in flashes of experience and sensations, tagged with emotions. Like, memory of the flexibility of a similar material and scepticism, mental glimpse of diagram from a book with a strong feeling that could work. I can rattle off complex chains of reasoning within a few seconds this way, but for Pete's sake don't ask me to verbalise what I'm thinking. I reckon this type of thinking is definitely faster for some things. I also went to an international language school for awhile, most people there thought without dialogues in their heads. Maybe it makes it easier to learn languages?
Lol the opposite sounds more ridiculous, hearing voices ISN'T normal.... I don't have any "inner monologue" either, why would you need one? Sounds bit weird this
My bf is like that actually, I'll ask him what he thinks about somethin and he'll just dead pan be like "nothing"
I've also heard that there are people who don't visualise in their heads, which seems just so bizarre
Like the song says, this could be heaven or this could be hell....
So people who hold grudges feel "repeat" hurt when faced with a new unrelated situation.
It sounds like my first wife, she never had any thoughts and just did not understand when I explained what went on in my head all the time. Now I am a HSP, high sensitive person, there head is always picking up signals and triggers. She was good at het work and very intelligent. I wish I had know this then, then I would have understood her better.
I have had so many arguments with people who are convinced that everyone has an inner monologue...I have never had an inner monologue, but if I believe these folks I apparently have no idea how I think XD
Sure you imagined someone's response before? Or generally imagine other people talking? It counts as an inner voice.
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This I have heard but I can’t imagine at all. How do you think if you don’t have an inner monologue? How do you know what to say? How is it possible to read or write or form an opinion or make a decision? I can’t wrap my mind around it.
I don’t specifically hear a voice talking to me but I still hear my thoughts. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I hear a voice but it’s not an actual voice.
We librarians have a saying: the librarian who doesn't talk to themselves...is going postal.
My inner voice is a pain in the a*s. O wake up in the middle of the night to make pipi and i hear all The worries of the all world. The only moment she is out, is when i do sport.
i read somewhere that instead of having an actual inner monologue, they see the words in their head as the conversation instead of actually "hearing" them.
I always pick a random person I know and have conversations with them in my head. Like if I see a cool looking tree I'm talking about it with some in my head not just me talking to myself.
I talk to myself and I have an inner voice as well. Talking to myself makes me focused on what I am doing as there are 'many tabs' open in my mind.
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Why? I like my inner voice. It's very entertaining
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What?? I’m guessing extroverts are more likely not to have an inner voice...
actually, don't have an inner voice and i'm a massive introvert :o)
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I can think of someone who doesn't have a voice in his head...🤨 potus
Are those the people who say everything out loud? Cause I don't think my kid has an internal voice.
Are they psychopaths? Our inner voice is often said to be our conscience and since psychopaths don’t have one is it safe to say they don’t have an inter voice?
Conscience is sometimes called an inner voice, but not all inner voice is about conscience.
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Brain is magic. Think of DiD - they do speak between different personalities in their own heads.
That''s not true. Ignoring the fact that DiD hasn't been confirmed as actually being real in most parts of the developed world, people with DiD have no idea that they have it. They don't know about the other personalities, they can't talk to the other personalities and they certainly can't summon them at will. When another personality takes over the original person/personality essentially has a blackout and remembers nothing for that time. It's schizophrenia where different voices talk in your head.
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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
