People Share The Best Facts They Know About The Human Body

People Share The Best Facts They Know About The Human Body
Image by www_slon_pics from Pixabay

The human body may be responsible for providing us with animated life and the unique wonders of human consciousness, but that doesn't mean we know what the heck is going on in there.


In fact, so many of the human body's inner workings are unknown to us who own and use that complicated apparatus every moment of every day.

We have, of course, made some real strides in understanding those inner workings over the last couple thousand years. We may have plenty more to learn, but at least we have a general lay of the land.

Curious to learn about the lesser known-processes of our complex physical selves, Redditor Zenssei asked:

"What is a fact about the human body that not many people know about?"


For complexity, look no further than the human brain. Redditors had no shortage of facts and tidbits about that one-of-a-kind organ.

Autopilot

"Most reflexes never make it to your brain. The sensory aspect travels to the spinal cord and the spinal cord itself sends the muscle movement signals to your limbs."

-- thundermuffin54

Keep On Kicking

"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."

-- flamingphoenix9834

Filling In the Gaps

"Your brain likes stimulation, if it doesn't get any it will make some up, some people are more susceptible 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"

-- NoCommunication7

Others reminded us that not all bodies are the same. They pointed out the anomalies that some people experience, but on average do not describe the typical human body.

Extra Bumpy

"Apparently about 20% of people have a bony ridge on the roof of their mouth. Most people's pallettes are smooth with a very slight ridge."

"The 20% like me have an exaggerated and more pronounced ridge. Apparently it's most common in women and Asian folk, and I'm neither so that's neat. I always thought it was totally normal."

-- Alagane

A Reason Not to Move

"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."

-- localhelic0pter7

C'mon, 207!

"39% of people have an extra bone in their knee. 100 years ago only 11% of people had this bone." -- Cruithne

"I drunkenly tripped off the curb and into the road after a Halloween party in college. Turns out I broke off a piece of my elbow that night."

"It ended up getting encased in what ever the human body used to trap floating bone chunks in. Now I've got a chunk of bone gift wrapped by my own body's wrapping paper floating around, right against where it broke off from." -- Tur8z

And others felt the thread was a good place to share the truly bizarre, random facts they knew about the body. Read a few of these and you'll realize just what a mystery it all is.

Shake It In to Place

"When doing surgery were the doctors have to take out some organs, when placing them back, they dont 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"

-- IamaJarJar

Disoriented Cells

"There are tiny cilia that spin in a certain direction. If they spin in the opposite direction while you're developing in the womb early on, that is how you get organs transposed onto the opposite side of your body."

-- gurgleslurp

Brain 2.0

"Your stomach is surrounded by more brain cells (half a billion neurons) than the brain of a cat contains in total."

"It's your enteric nervous system. It controls digestion, operates autonomously, has its own memory, can handle its own reflexes, it has its own senses even."

"It's thought to have come about because of the blood-brain barrier and the main brain being locked away in the skull, a spinal column and nerves away from the critical action of nutrition."

-- Hattix

Alienated Eyes

"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."

-- SlavicSquat1234

So next time you think you have a good idea of all that's going on under the hood, just remember that whole layer of microscopic processes that seem to be playing by their own rules entirely.

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People Share Unspoken First Date Rules Everyone Should Follow

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We all have nightmares about diseases and murderers.

But what if, in the end, we just choke on a pickle we inhaled too fast?

Maybe instead of a pickle, a little coleslaw would have been the wiser choice.

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Tripping over untied shoelaces.

It can break your neck.

TIE YOUR SHOES!!!

Off the Rocks

On No Falling GIF by Outside TVGiphy

"There have been too many instances of rock climbers rappelling off of the ends of their ropes, which could have been easily avoided by tying stopper knots at the ends of their ropes."

LZRDLZRD

Seconds

"I worked at a tire place for a summer and the first thing they told me was 'See that torque wrench? One mistake with this and you can kill a whole family in a matter of seconds.' I thought well, better take this thing seriously."

FrenchMicrowave

"Man for a second I was thinking 'F**k you'd have to swing that thing around fast to take out an entire family' and just bluescreened on the idea of changing a tire."

lurking_my_a**_off

How Vexing...

"THERAC-25. The world’s deadliest software error. Cost several radiation patients their lives by administering lethal amounts of radiation, and for a while, the doctors didn’t even know."

Longjumping_Event_59

"THERAC-25 suffered a particularly vexing sort of error known as a race condition. Essentially, the circuit required multiple inputs in a particular sequence, but sometimes the timing of that sequence could get thrown out of whack and it would lead to all sorts of nonsensical output."

"This is less than ideal when all you're doing is manipulating pixels, but when your software is handling radiation beams you really don't want this to happen."

"Even more vexing is that race conditions are frequently heisenbugs, which can vanish altogether when one attempts to study them. If you don't have a good idea of what's causing the error, you may never cotton on to what sort of bad input is required to test it. Under those circumstances, it's easy to write them off as imaginary, only to then find."

dancingmadkoschei

Heavy Drifting

"Leaving the stranded vehicle on the road in winter and trying to walk to get help. It happens in rural parts of our province once or twice a year and they find the body a few days later. They get disoriented and freeze."

Regina_Runner

"I got blown off a road in high winds. Heavy drifting. Less than a mile from a friend's house after I had turned around. Drifts made it impossible to complete the trip. Trying to run a mile in full blizzard conditions was a fight for my life as an in-shape 24-year-old male athlete.

"rotyag

Simple Slips

Uh Oh Omg GIF by BounceGiphy

"Almost any simple mistake can end a life if you're an anesthesiologist, that's how my grandpa died in his early 60s."

dwserps

Any second. Any moment.

Stay vigilant people.

Celibacy could be better...

Oh My Wow GIFGiphy

"Not being honest with doctors about Viagra. It has many dangerous drug interactions and can cause a lot of problems from what I’ve heard. Trust me the doctor ain’t gonna judge you guys, they have seen many more embarrassing things. And it would suck to die because you wanted to hide something just for it to be later stated in your death certificate."

The_upsetti_spagetti

Check the Numbers

"As a healthcare worker, giving the wrong amount of insulin."

UzumakiHorror

"During the first shift of my first clinical rotation in nursing school, I watched a nurse draw up insulin out of an auto-injector pen that was CLEARLY marked to specifically not do that AND she was drastically wrong about the dosage and almost killed a guy by giving him essentially like a hundred times the intended dose."

someguynamedg

Stay In

"Pulling the knife out of someone."

rcadephantom

"Yeah, I did that but it was a broken tree branch that had impaled my leg. Without even thinking I pulled it out. Blood started gushing so I pulled off my shirt and tied it into a pressure bandage. I was lucky I didn’t bleed to death."

Olddog_Newtricks2001

"Shock is an IQ reducer. I once sliced a bit off the side of my hand with a broken glass, and sort of dazedly picked off the piece of me and tried to stick it back on. It did not work."

UncannyTarotSpread

Stay Dirty

"Mixing cleaning ingredients."

Jonnysource

"My dad was trying to unclog his kitchen drain and mixed drain cleaners by adding one then adding another a few minutes later. It started bubbling and he began coughing intensely. I heard him coughing from the other room, saw what happened, and opened the nearby window to get rid of the chlorine gas he just produced."

"I forgot there was a large hive of wasps that had moved into that window and they did not appreciate this unexpected interruption. I took him to the emergency room for the gas exposure and it was tough explaining that the wasp stings were not why we were there."

CharmingTuber

Dear God

Jeff Goldblum What GIF by The Late Late Show with James CordenGiphy

"A friend’s husband locked himself out of their home. He tried to get in through a window that had security bars. While squeezing through his foot slipped and he essentially hung himself on the window sill."

Cokej01

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