People Break Down The Best Little-Known Facts About The Human Body

Of course, many find the brain especially fascinating. That little jelly orb is just about the primary reason human civilization is what it is.

Still 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

Reptile Response

"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

Completing Pictures

"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

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

Other people were amazed by the human body's tendency to adapt when it needs.

Like Dust Settling

"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

How You Need To Be

"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

Saving Insurance Costs

"Our bodies have the ability to perform there own bypass procedures. My grandfather went in for a scan and it showed a 100% blockage in one of his major arteries."

"The image also showed a new portion of the artery starting .25" before the blockage and then rejoining the artery .25" after the blockage completely bypassing the obstructed portion. He had never had surgery before this discovery."

-- KlaubDestauba

And finally, some spoke about lungs and the breath. It's one of the few bodily functions we can do both involuntarily and voluntarily.

There's plenty to talk about there.

No Need to Grow

"When you get conditioned to physical activity, your circulatory system adapts -- more blood, more vessels, more blood cells. But your lungs really don't."

"This is because no matter how much blood your heart is able to deliver to your lungs, the lungs still have no problem oxygenating it. This is why your oxygen saturation doesn't drop during exercise (unless you have a heart defect.)"

-- grenudist

Not What We'd Expect

"The sensation of suffocating isn't caused by the thing that actually kills you. You'll die from a lack of oxygen, but the feeling of suffocation is the result of being unable to exhale carbon dioxide."

"So if you started breathing in pure nitrogen while being able to exhale normally, you would pass out and die without ever feeling like you were suffocating. This also explains why some languages call nitrogen something like 'suffocation gas'."

-- Wurdan

Gimme Some of That Liquid Air Please

"In theory humans could breathe a liquid if it was super saturated with oxygen. It wouldn't be easy because the density of liquid being so much higher than air so after 15 mins or so you would be too fatigued to continue breathing."

"The hardest part is getting all the liquid out of the lungs so the person doesn't get pneumonia"

-- Crackracket

Head Hurts

"Migraine pain can lessen from vomiting. Vomiting can cause dehydration. Dehydration can cause migraines.The human body is funny. Migraines are the worst. It's like your brain is asking you to troubleshoot your body like tech. Sodium levels low? Magnesium maybe? Forget to eat? Blood pressure off? Exhausted? Stressed? Who knows..."

"Try a hot shower or an ice pack, chocolate, more caffeine, less caffeine, a triptan maybe, some almonds, put some pressure on your eyes, get out of the sun, get some sleep. If all else fails there's the old migraine cocktail at the doctor's office a shot in the neck, a shot in the butt, and an anti-nausea med under the tongue."

-- Acrobatic_Classic_13

8%

"The human genome is about 8% virus DNA. Over millions of years, various sequences of virus genes have gotten stuck in our DNA and copied faithfully ever since. Most of them are now nonfunctional, but at least a few of them seem to still work and actually code for useful proteins. This suggests that viruses might occasionally serve as a helpful source of mutation in the evolutionary process."

-- zomghax92

Voices

"Some people have inner monologue. Some don’t."

OF_AmericasGoddess

"According to my teenage son, people without internal monologues 'think in pictures or scenes, but not actual words.' He doesn't have an internal monologue. I do, and mine won't shut up. It's like a news ticker of my to-do list and my worries and conversations I need to have."

-- insertcaffeine

Eyes Turning

"If you squirt cold water into someone's ear with a syringe, their eyes will automatically turn to the side that you squirted the water. If you use warm water, their eyes will automatically turn to the other side."

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caloric_reflex_test"

-- Cruithne

Brain Waves

"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."

"Upon research I should clarify, the brain survives after the heart stops for several minutes, however electroencephalomagnetic (EEG) brain activity continues for not only 30 hours but in some cases up to 72 hours after brain death. The link for the information is here. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3619714/"

-- flamingphoenix9834

Blind Spots

"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. You can test and (un)see it for yourself here."

-- Windshards2

Vitamin C

"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."

-- TexasPatrick

Palettes

"Apparently about 20% of people have a bony ridge on the roof of their mouth. Most people's palettes 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

Typed

"Positive blood type women can have positive and negative blood type babies without issue. Negative blood type women require a shot with antibodies to prevent the mothers immune system from attacking the fetus if it is a positive blood type."

-- Lipstick_On

"This was how my mother lost her son, Muhammad, late in her pregnancy. The bad joke of a government in the country my parents came from (Iraq) was notoriously unreliable at keeping records, and as such my mother’s blood type was mislabeled. It’s been 33 years and she still says she thinks about him every single day."

-- Yusi-D-Jordan

Broken Bones

"Babies can break their collarbone during delivery. It happens quite often, but heals quickly. My teacher told me that (if it happened to you ofc) you may feel a slightly higher spot on your collarbone, called the callus where the fracture grew back together."

-- jaelIlii

Perhaps now is a good time to take a few minutes and think about all that's going on inside our bodies.

But don't think too hard though, it gets pretty weird.