“What Is A Fact About The Human Body That Not Many People Know About?” (50 Answers)
The human body is everything that makes up, well, us. However, there are plenty of fascinating things we don't know about it, or rather, ourselves.
Once you look closer, dive under the surface of the skin, explore the inner workings of the biological systems that ensure our everyday life, you just can't help but admire the marvel that you really are.
To learn more about our bits and pieces, Redditor u/Zenssei made a post on r/AskReddit, asking other platform users to share some facts about the human body that not many people know about. Their call to action was immediately answered.
u/Zenssei said the idea for this post came to them pretty naturally. "I was just watching TV, thinking of [something] I could post on r/AskReddit," they told Bored Panda.
"I have learned quite a bit from the comments such as there is a right and a wrong way to swallow, or that about 20% of people have a bone ridge on the roof of the mouth... It was fun reading through the replies."
As of this article, the post already has received over 56K upvotes and 23K comments, and has become one of the coolest online trivia archives out there!
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Your brain regulates how strong your muscles are. If your leg muscles were to contract at full strength, they would snap your femur.
Its why people in emergencies on adrenaline can lift cars off children. Your body is capable of great strength, but it could also severely damage you, so your brain keeps you a weak, soft bag of jelly.
When doing surgery where the doctors have to take out some organs, when placing them back, they don't have to be put back In the exact position there meant to be, your body kind of just, moves the organs into the correct position after the surgery
There are many ways we could look at the human body. "On an evolutionary scale, sometimes we are similar to animals, and sometimes we're not," general practitioner, medical researcher, and founder of PrimeHealth Clinical Research, Iris Gorfinkel, M.D., told Bored Panda. "We're symmetric, [our] basic body structure is similar; we have what's called homologous bone structure. In other words, you can find exact similarities between humans and other animals and how our bones are put together."
"Even our muscles and heart and vascular systems are similar. Our lungs are often similar too. [As well as] the fact that there's a long tube from the moment food enters our mouth to the point at which it goes out of our rectum," Gorfinkel explained. "Their breathing is similar to ours neurologically. Urologically (how urine is formed), we're also quite similar. In all of these aspects, we are very similar to animals."
People who live in "extreme" conditions for generations adapt in extreme ways. For example people that live in high elevations often have larger lungs and different blood makeup. Or my favorite is the Bajau people that live on the water and spend a lot of their time diving, their spleens have become 50% larger in order to store more blood.
You hate the sound of your recorded voice because it's missing the low frequency you're used to hearing.
When you talk, you hear your voice as it goes to the air and back to you ear. It also goes through your skull to your ear, and this bone conduction mechanism transmits the low frequencies better than air does.
Your recorded voice only has the air transmitted sound. That causes the dissonance between what you think your voice sounds like, and what it really does. It's also why your voice will (almost) always be higher pitch than you think.
But if we continue to measure ourselves against animals, we inevitably start noticing differences. "Animals communicate across miles of land through subsonic sound, that's true. But human beings, on the other hand, have very complex language systems," Gorfinkel said. "We have introspection—that's another critical difference, [as well as] our creativity and emotions, like joy and sorrow and grief—although grief has been described in some animals, including elephants, wolves, and sea lions. But the biggest difference that makes us humans a complete and utter separate category within the animal kingdom, is our ability to have an imagination, to use language in such a complex way, and to hold fictions in our mind."
The comparison that Gorfinkel thought of on the spot illustrates her point on a meta-level. "Let's just say the lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe. He still could never convince a monkey to give him a banana by promising the little guy, say, an unlimited supply of bananas in monkey heaven. So our ability to create and believe in collected fiction, that's what makes human beings really different."
The heart smells like mushrooms.
Source: I’m a cardiac anesthesiologist
Humans have, on average, just as many hairs on their body as chimpanzees, human hair is just a lot shorter and finer.
Some parts of our body, however, remain unknown even to science. Take the human brain for example. It has approximately 86 billion neurons, woven together by an estimated 100 trillion connections, or synapses. So untangling such a delicate network is a daunting task—we don't know the details of how those cells work, let alone how they come together to make up our sensory systems, our behavior, our consciousness.
"You would think it would be easy [to study the brain], it weighs only three pounds, and three-quarters of it is water and 60% of it is fatty tissue. And you'd also think it's easy because the brain can't feel pain. You know, surgery could be done on it, allowing for easy experimentation, as inhumane as it sounds. But there are several things that make it extremely difficult," Gorfinkel said.
"[Our billions of neurons], connected by trillions upon trillions of synapses in a barrel, is a veritable neuronal forest, and the information is moving at all different speeds, some up to, I think, 250 miles an hour. So even with things like functional MRI [we don't get close to] the nitty-gritty of understanding the very fine neuronal connections that are happening, that really define memory, that define all the complexity that I was just describing: language, reason, creativity, and emotions."
Your eyes have a separate immune system from the rest of your body and in a lot of occasions if your body's immune system finds your eyes, they will assume they are a foreign body and blind you.
Humans are bioluminescent and glow in the dark, but the light that we emit is 1,000 times weaker than our human eyes are able to pick up.
Christof Koch, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and his colleagues study the brain on a large scale. But the more they look at many or most cells in the brain rather than just a few, the more they realize that even the parts of neuroscience they thought the field had nailed down are more complicated than anyone had realized.
"There may not be any simple path to understanding complex systems shaped by natural selection,” Koch thinks. "Evolution doesn't care about elegance. The brain doesn't care if you understand it."
When you cry and your nose becomes runny, it's actually your tears.
The reason it's so easy to break your collar bone is because its designed to break.
The way it was explained to me is that its like a circuit breaker. It breaks there to stop the shock of impact getting to your spine
But that doesn't mean we should stop learning. On the contrary. There's plenty we can do as individuals and as a society to get a better understanding of ourselves and in turn, those around us. "Emotional education is sadly lacking in schools," Gorfinkel said. "We teach all kinds of useless things. And I hate to say it... They're not useless, but they're not as relative to us as understanding our emotional selves."
The doctor said there is precious little time devoted in schools to understanding emotions, such as anger, humiliation, shame, guilt, and what to do when we face them. Instead, they're often presented as something negative we need to control, as opposed to being contextualized. These emotions can actually help us, show us the path towards what needs to be done next. "They shine a light on how we need to manage our lives better," Gorfinkel explained.
"That is something that has long bothered me. Emotional education is, for the most part, not focused on; we focus on physical education, we focus on [general] education [like] mathematics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, whatever it is, but a lot of the time, the most critical part that will determine our happiness, and our productivity is completely overlooked."
Because of that, we have to do it ourselves. "Just make the most of picking the low lying fruit," Gorfinkel said. "I'm talking about [things like] sleep or finding the right amount of stress in your life—stress is an interesting thing. Too little stress is actually bad for a person, there's a sweet spot when it comes to stress. And it's kind of a bell curve, right? That if you have too little, there's not enough stimulation. And a person does not approach self-actualization. Even though stress is roundly considered a negative thing, in fact, a little bit, just the right amount is a positive thing. Of course, it can turn into a very negative thing if there's too much. But finding the sweet spot of stress is probably the best tip that I could give."
When you think about it, the Internet is a beautiful thing. One moment, u/Zenssei is chilling in front of their TV, the next, tens of thousands of people are teaching one another about the human body. More of this, please.
Our brains make up, on average, around 2% of our body weight but consume 20% of our caloric intake
Your body will reduce your muscle strength to protect your spine.
Stand on flat ground, hold your arms out in a t-pose, and have a friend push down on your hand while you try to hold it in place. That's your control, how strong you actually are.
Now, remove 1 shoe (or put a book under 1 foot) and repeat with your hips askew so your spine isn't straight. An inch is all it takes.
Your strength will be reduced to the point that your friend can use a single finger to push your hand down.
Alzheimer’s disease isn’t just gradual loss of memory. It physically exists in the brain. It’s a physical substance that attacks the brain. Like, if you were able to open the skull of a person suffering from Alzheimer’s disease to take a look at their brain, you would actually see this sticky, fibrous, grey physical matter overtaking their brain.
You will sooner die from lack of sleep than lack of food.
You can live, depending on your current body fat and health level, for months without food. Estimates are you that you will die for lack of sleep within 2 weeks
The appendix is not a vestigial organ. It actually protects good bacteria in the gut. You can live without it, but it’s not just chillin’ in there
Scars are not made of "permanent" tissue (they're held together by collagen) and are in a constant state of repair. This repair is facilitated by vitamin C (amongst other things). Yes, this means that people with scurvy (from vitamin C deficiency) will see all their old scars reopen into fresh wounds.
Some women can feel the exact moment an egg is released from the ovary during ovulation. Feels like a little pop just on one side. Pretty neat
Humans are one of a few species of mammal that oddly don't produce their own vitamin C due to lack of a certain enzyme. Other mammalian species who exhibit this mutation are those contained in the main primate suborder Haplorhinni (monkeys, apes, tarsiers), as well as bats, capybaras, and guinea pigs.
All other mammals produce vitamin C in the liver.
Fun Fact: Primates can't produce the necessary enzyme L-gulonolactone oxidase because of a mutation that probably happened 58 to 63 million years ago. It is believed that this very negative mutation survied because of the arboreal living conditions with plenty of fruity Vitmain C sources. Anyhow, another proof of common ancestry of the primates as we all have that same mutation in our genes.
You can calm yourself down by splashing cold water on your face to trigger the mammalian diving reflex.
You can grow a new human being faster than most missing toenails can grow back
Hmmm... lost a toenail in an accident, and it was back in about six months vs. nine months for preggers.
If you carry a lot of unprocessed trauma, it can cause psychosomatic autoimmune diseases.
Note that "psychosomatic" does NOT mean "imaginary." It means that emotional trauma is translated into physical trauma.
Yes!!!! Asthma has this very real and dangerous characteristic
Load More Replies...This is what happened to me! Had undiagnosed and therefore untreated PTSD since I was 11 along with a whole load of emotional abuse for the next decade or so and ended up with ulcerative colitis. I got sick so quickly the dr's originally thought I had an aggressive bowel cancer and was going to die in the next few weeks. I'm 33 and still here. :)
good for you! i'm glad they figured out what was going on, and that you're okay now, that sounds incredibly awful
Load More Replies...TO BE CLEAR: Psychosomatic does not mean hypcohondriacal! Psychosomatic illnesses are real! A psychosomatic cancer is cancer! (In fact, the difficulty in talking in discussing psychosomatic illnesses is you can't determine that they're psychosomatic in origin... all your doctor knows is that you have cancer cells metastocizing through your body about ready to kill you.)
As someone who's field is oncology, I can't not do the 'well actually' thing when cancer is mentioned. The link between psychological issues and cancer has not been proven - there is some correlation, but the current thinking is that it's the behaviours that often come with mental stress that is causing the cancer, and not the stress itself. So the cancer probably isn't psychosomatic, but rather caused by the smoking/drinking/comfort eating/alternative coping mechanism.
Load More Replies...True. And some autoimmune diseases just exist and it's not psychosomatic (said for those who blame themselves enough for being sick already). Unprocessed trauma can also lead to everyday psychosomatic symptoms such as headaches, acid-reflux, nausea, or general aches and pains for example. More extreme are things like limb paralysis or even blindness (think it's called emotional trauma blindess or something).
My dad said that the worst thing you can do is "protect" children from "dirt." He told me, when our son was born, not to make anything sterile, that it would totally destroy the ability of his immune system to recognize what it should or should not attack. And this was fifty years or so ago. So, I never boiled his bottles, never sterilized his anything, and he has no allergies and he is the healthiest kid ever.
Yes, I have suffered from chronic hyperventilation for more than 10 years which causes dizziness every day of my life. I try and try with guided breathing etc, but nothing helps and I just want to breathe normal, like before the trauma.
Load More Replies...Aaand time to go to therapy, since autoimmune diseases run in my family already; I don’t need to cause my own.
Yup! Abusive x spouse caused my fibromyalgia (PTSD, trauma, anxiety and major depression disorder too)
Quit eating sugar. Sugar is an inflammatory agent. I have psoriatic arthritis. I won't take steroids, too much cancer in my family. I have, obviously, a very active immune system. I cut out all sugar and most carbs. My pain is totally gone and the skin eruptions are about 2% of what they were and NO drugs, except for regular aspirin. It did not happen overnight, it took about six weeks to reach the point where I could walk without pain in my knees. Now I can do everything.
Load More Replies...Yup…been there.To those Thinker types out there who assume that merely THINKING your feelings is enough, it’s not. You have to create a safe space for yourself to have your messy, blubbery cry-fests, if you genuinely need to allow yourself to grieve. This is an act of compassion towards yourself, and it HAS to occur—it’s like a rite of passage. Afterwards, the inside of you will feel like the calm after a storm. Depending on how much trauma you have, you’ll have these events whenever Chiron’s doing its thing, or whenever its turn comes for other reasons.As you release your trauma, your body will begin to heal. Some parts of you may not fix itself 100%, but it’ll be there as part of your “sentient scrapbook” to remind you of your lessons. The body is resilient…just give it time to regenerate & heal. For many, there IS an “other side” to the trauma—you can overcome it, if you do the hard work of healing. 🙏✨💕
It seems a lot of the time, "paychosomatic" means "The doctor can't explain it, so the patient must be making it up."
Unprocessed Trauma leads to stress. During stress your immune system works full Power. If you're stressed all the time your full powered immune system may start to attack your own body...
I have always found one thing weird and it's that during my teenage years when I suffered the worst mentally I never was sick for exemple cold. Then when I became an adult and it got a lot better mentally, I get sick all, and I mean all, the time. I was never sick home from school but now I am home sick from work so much it's embarrassing. Does that sound crazy?
Same here, but the sicknesses started as a child. I was bullied in school, every Xmas and Easter break, I got the flu, strep throat, a sinus infection, or something else. Then as an adult, abusive marriage, vacations and holidays, I usually ended up with something. It's like my body says it can relax, let's throw a party and invite all the viruses and infections, play some beer long, winner gets to stay for a few days'.
Load More Replies...Yes, happened to me and I need people to know this is a real physical struggle and NOT imaginary. And it's an effing nightmare living with psychosomatic symptoms too as a child and your mom thinks it's just to think positive, suffer through it and it'll go away. No it didn't, I'm almost 30 and still can't wish it away. Nobody would choose to feel horrible day in and day out if they had the option to wish it away.
Cortisol is produced in the brain when you have stress. This stress, if it goes on too long, will cause you to continually release high levels of cortisol. This has a detrimental affect in your brain and on your body. It's a physical effect, it's not imaginary or 'all in your mind' or made up. Illnesses like depression have real physical symptoms and real physical causes. Still we hear the word 'psychosomatic' used wrongly to infer that a condition isn't 'real' The word should not be used any more for that reason..
And there is always those "MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS" who tell you to get over it.
I wonder if that's the reason why some people who get really really stressed sometimes loses the hair
Considering the childhood I had, I'm not surprised I have autoimmune problems.
Absolutely and it’s a real b*tch to diagnose. I had massive rashes and welts for three yrs... spent two of those yrs testing every organ, blood, allergy tests, hormones etc. all good. Finally a dr said it could be a psychosomatic autoimmune reaction due to previous severe abuse (which I always acknowledged but didn’t realize it wasn’t fully processed). Took me a bit to believe but once I accepted it as such, it went away on its own.
This is true . I raised three autistic children at a time where not much was known about autism. To say things can get traumatic is an understatement . You're always having to fight some type of battle for your child . You're always trying to find the next answer . I was diagnosed with PTSD about 10 years ago. Year before last I started to lose a lot of hair . I thought I had damaged it from processing it. Nope . I'm missing more than half of my hair now , and recently had a positive ana test (which is an indicator of autoimmune disease) . I have no doubt the high stress lifestyle we have lived , and still live has co tributes to whatever condition I have now .
Like me with psoriasis (which is an an auto-immune disease). Was suffering with sever depression and then heard that my mother had cancer. A few days later I started breaking out in psoriasis plaques until about 60% of my body was covered, I was only after my mum died and I started going to therapy for my depression that the psoriasis started to clear up considerably.
link to studies, please? there isn’t a long-term physiological response as the adrenaline and corticosteroid release is temporary. lest you blow your brain up.
maybe that's where my anxiety induced cholinergic urticaria comes from
Everyone knows that mental health issues can manifest with physical symptoms.
X-rays of childrens mouths are nightmare fuel. The second set of teeth to replace baby teeth are already grown and lodged in their skulls. So you'll see two rows of teeth and its freaky looking. They don't grow in when the old ones fall out, they are already loaded in the chamber waiting to get launched.
The surface area of the lungs is about the same size as a tennis court
If you say haaah your breath comes out warm,but when you say Woooh it comes out cold.
It's possible to pull a jaw muscle while yawning. I found this out the hard way at work one day.
It's possible to pull all sorts of muscles I only seem to have just so I can injure them
Your body must warm fluids before absorbing them, so drinking ice cold water to hydrate is only burning more energy, and you're not hydrating as quickly.
I have always assumed this, and choose ice water to burn more energy.
That there is NOT 20 lbs of toxic poop in your body at any given time. But apparently a ton of people still believe all sorts of ads about some pill or another being able to flush some imaginary "toxins" out of your body like it's going to magically cure you of 20 years of terrible eating and exercise habits.
Well that's not strictly true - because of the shape of the lower intestine and colon, they never really empty fully. It's very rarely 20lbs worth (you would be extremely ill if that was the case) but there's certainly areas that don't fully clean and bad bacteria can build up there. These drinks and pills work by irritating the gut so badly that everything gets removed, including good bacteria so they are not a healthy option, but they do technically do what they claim.
Apparently not everyone knows that women grow a new organ while pregnant.
In addition to growing a child, they grow the placenta.
Only part of the placenta is grown by the mother. The rest is grown by the baby, as evidenced by father's DNA in it. Fascinating.
39% of people have an extra bone in their knee. 100 years ago only 11% of people had this bone.
Your brain continues to try to revive the body long after the heart has stopped. In some cases 30 hours later there has been found brain activity trying to make repairs to bring the body back. This is used to indicate time of death in murder victims.
How could a brain deprived of oxygen and glucose for so long function on any level?
The proportion of your vision that is actually in sharp focus roughly equates to the size of your thumbnail at arm's length. The rest of it is just your visual cortex filling in the blanks.
In children under 11 (for some reason), cutting off the fingertip from the last knuckle will result in complete regeneration of the finger in 100% of cases, assuming the naibed is intact. There's no explanation for why this happens, why it only happens to children under 11 and why it can't be sequences to fully regenerate / grow organs. It also occurs in many animals, as observed in test rodents.
I learned that in science class in grade 8 and my dad called me a liar. I showed him my science textbook and he threw it away and said it was fake.
You can live "normally" with half your brain. In some severe drug resistant epileptic syndrom in young kids, the only option to stop the seizures is to remove a complete brain hemisphere.
After a while, with proper reeducation and all, the children can go on to have a normal life without cognitive deficit. They will have a limping, blindness from one eye and a very weark arm but can lead a normal life and not end up cognitively impaired.
One of the earliest sign of alzheimer's disease, before the memory loss, could be the loss of the sense of smell. It's also the case with Parkinson disease.
Our brain looks wrinkled because it is actually "folded" inside our skull in order to fit a maximum of surface and thus neurons & cell communications. Some animals like rodents have a completely smooth brain.
Every minute you shed over 30,000 dead skin cells off your body
The reason it feels weird when you or someone touches the inside of your belly button is because the nerves actually go to your spinal cord. These nerves lie at the same level that relay signals to your urethra and bladder. So when you feel like you have to pee when you touch the inside of your belly button, that's why.
I can't take it. That's why I don't wear elastic in my pants. Can't stand it against my belly button!
You can poop out of your mouth if your intestines get backed up enough. It's like vomit, doesn't look like actual poop per se, but it's still disgusting.
Humans have stripes, we just normally can’t see them. They’re called Blaschko’s lines and form along the paths of embryonic cell migration. The stripes are sort of U-shaped down our front, V-shaped on our back, wavy on the head and face and we have basic, simple stripes on our extremities.
Each one of your eyes has a blind spot where the optic nerve exit your eye into your brain. You can't see it because your brain tricks you not to see, it covers the spot with some made up image of what it thinks fits better with the rest of it.
We're the best marathon runners in the animal kingdom and can win a marathon against any animal out there.
AND - that's why we pair with dogs so well, because they're marathon runners also, so we could hunt prey together by wearing it down over time rather than catching it in a sprint or a super quick movement the way many animals do - alligators, bears, birds, snakes, spiders, oh, and obviously... cats ;). That's true!
The average adult has 22 square feet of skin. Perfect size for a nice rug.
Human eggs are small but big enough to be visible to the human eye
Your brain likes stimulation, if it doesn't get any it will make some up, some people are more sucepticle to it then others, the colors you see before you fall asleep are a common mild occurrence, there are several classes of these hallucinations, closed-eye visuals, which are caused by leaving your eyes closed for a long time, hypnagogia, which is caused by the onset of sleep, prisoners cinema, which is caused by looking into a dark place for a long time, ganzfeld effect, which is caused by blocking out all external stimuli, and Charles bonnet syndrome, caused by sight loss.
Most are these are simple phosphenes but some can be whole imagined scenes, or more abstract fractal-like imagery
I get the fractal imagery. It is very pretty. Box that I know it is because my brain is bored, I will try to stimulate it more.
When you have a bowel movement, your heart rhythm shifts temporarily due to a vagus response. The reason Elvis died on the toilet was because his heart was beating 200+ bpm and the quick rhythm change caused a myocardial infarction. People with low heart rates have been known to pass out on the toilet because their bodies can't handle the shift.
It's also why EMTs will absolutely not let you use the bathroom before getting on the ambulance. Especially if the bathroom is a standard 5'x8'.
What do the dimensions of the bathroom have to do with poop-based heart attacks?
It only takes about 15 pounds of force to rip off a human ear
Synovial joint fluid is the most frictionless stuff on the planet (unless they've synthetic'ed something up that recently.)
Is this the stuff people thought others were trying to steal from them?
If you faint at the sight of your own blood you may have an oversensitive vasovagal response. The theory is that this developed as a survival mechanism, kind of like an opposum playing dead.
Note: this post originally had 61 images. It’s been shortened to the top 50 images based on user votes.
those are interesting. I hate that tomorrow i will have already forgotten all of them
Interesting but many are inaccurate or need more explanation because they are not well written
Load More Replies...Who are these posters and what are their credentials? What are their sources? Some of these "facts" are just BS. Please don't believe everything you read on the internet.
The TLDR version of what i said. Agreed. they're wildly misleading, interpreted very oddly at best, or just weirdly click-baity.
Load More Replies...A few of these are nonsense. I dearly wish a bit more fact checking went on.
Virutally all are deceptive/misleading due to phrasing. If the one about muscles were true, for example, then we'd be strong enough when our brains decided we should be ----- and, in the example given, lifting a car off a child would snap our femurs. It doesn't. This is a physiological response due to *adrenaline*, and if you think you don't hurt after, you're mistaken. Situs inversus is caused by a rare combination of genetic factors, and most with SI do NOT have the ciliary dyskinesia (PCD for short). And you get PCD without having SI. And so on. So, please, do not take these as "fact". (signed, have my MD)
Well, having been a nurse they absolutely CAN believe me about the poop vomit, and CPR in a bathroom and having a cardiac arrest with the whole poop ( and vomit) thing. Worked in CCU. LOVED it BTW. Been there too many times for all 3. Cool Leo! Didn't know that.
Load More Replies...Nobody said this, but you can cut out about 40-60% of your liver and it will grow back.
A lovely function for transplant patients. Regrowth means living donors are an option.
Load More Replies...10% of the population has 6 lumbar vertebrae instead of 5. I found this out when I needed a spinal fusion.
Dear reader. You are now blinking manually. Your breathing has also been shifted into manual mode. You're welcome :)
So, the overall message is human bodies are both totally awesome and totally nonsensical ;D
Yep. In short: That's med school in a nutshell. "WOW!" and 'What the what?"....
Load More Replies...Add one more. Human DNA is way more diverse than we give it credit for. There are huge areas turned off that can give us giraffe necks, different hair and skin colors and a huge variety of other differences. It is believe that for space travel to other planets the DNA can be adjusted to adapt to our new environment.
Actually not that suprising. Just compare a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. Both are still genetically expressions of a same specie.
Load More Replies...While I agree with those who already posted that many of these are misleading because of how poorly worded they are, or plain factually wrong, I hope for our sake the general public hasn't come to expect learning medicine/anatomy/physiology on an entertainment site that holds no fact checking responsibilities. I hope this incites curiosity to learn more about the human body! Please look up reputable authors that have books accessible to the wide public. I recommend Oliver Sacks' books, a neurologist and writer for fascinating trips into the human nervous system!
Fascinating post. Thank you for creating this but get a better proof reader.
I think English isn't the first language of the authors of this page.
Load More Replies...You should be better than this, BP. WAY too much BS in this thread, and bad writing.
Your brain makes up quite a lot of the colours that you think you see. For instance there is no frequency of light that is magenta. Brain just fills in the gaps between colours
I LOVE THIS, more like it please! We all have great facts too contribute. If you think you don’t, you’re wrong. :)
those are interesting. I hate that tomorrow i will have already forgotten all of them
Interesting but many are inaccurate or need more explanation because they are not well written
Load More Replies...Who are these posters and what are their credentials? What are their sources? Some of these "facts" are just BS. Please don't believe everything you read on the internet.
The TLDR version of what i said. Agreed. they're wildly misleading, interpreted very oddly at best, or just weirdly click-baity.
Load More Replies...A few of these are nonsense. I dearly wish a bit more fact checking went on.
Virutally all are deceptive/misleading due to phrasing. If the one about muscles were true, for example, then we'd be strong enough when our brains decided we should be ----- and, in the example given, lifting a car off a child would snap our femurs. It doesn't. This is a physiological response due to *adrenaline*, and if you think you don't hurt after, you're mistaken. Situs inversus is caused by a rare combination of genetic factors, and most with SI do NOT have the ciliary dyskinesia (PCD for short). And you get PCD without having SI. And so on. So, please, do not take these as "fact". (signed, have my MD)
Well, having been a nurse they absolutely CAN believe me about the poop vomit, and CPR in a bathroom and having a cardiac arrest with the whole poop ( and vomit) thing. Worked in CCU. LOVED it BTW. Been there too many times for all 3. Cool Leo! Didn't know that.
Load More Replies...Nobody said this, but you can cut out about 40-60% of your liver and it will grow back.
A lovely function for transplant patients. Regrowth means living donors are an option.
Load More Replies...10% of the population has 6 lumbar vertebrae instead of 5. I found this out when I needed a spinal fusion.
Dear reader. You are now blinking manually. Your breathing has also been shifted into manual mode. You're welcome :)
So, the overall message is human bodies are both totally awesome and totally nonsensical ;D
Yep. In short: That's med school in a nutshell. "WOW!" and 'What the what?"....
Load More Replies...Add one more. Human DNA is way more diverse than we give it credit for. There are huge areas turned off that can give us giraffe necks, different hair and skin colors and a huge variety of other differences. It is believe that for space travel to other planets the DNA can be adjusted to adapt to our new environment.
Actually not that suprising. Just compare a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. Both are still genetically expressions of a same specie.
Load More Replies...While I agree with those who already posted that many of these are misleading because of how poorly worded they are, or plain factually wrong, I hope for our sake the general public hasn't come to expect learning medicine/anatomy/physiology on an entertainment site that holds no fact checking responsibilities. I hope this incites curiosity to learn more about the human body! Please look up reputable authors that have books accessible to the wide public. I recommend Oliver Sacks' books, a neurologist and writer for fascinating trips into the human nervous system!
Fascinating post. Thank you for creating this but get a better proof reader.
I think English isn't the first language of the authors of this page.
Load More Replies...You should be better than this, BP. WAY too much BS in this thread, and bad writing.
Your brain makes up quite a lot of the colours that you think you see. For instance there is no frequency of light that is magenta. Brain just fills in the gaps between colours
I LOVE THIS, more like it please! We all have great facts too contribute. If you think you don’t, you’re wrong. :)