The Human Body's Strangest Quirks: From Brain Freeze to Blue Field Dots
Bodily Oddities
A curated collection of 136 bodily oddities, each with a plain-language explanation and a real-world prevalence estimate. Learn why about 70% of healthy people get benign fasciculations, how BPPV is the most common cause of vertigo, and that fewer than 1% of people are truly ambidextrous. The site also covers harmless but alarming phenomena like accessory ossicles and Charles Bonnet syndrome.
A sudden, brief thought of jumping when you stand somewhere high, or of swerving while driving, with no wish to do it. About half of people get it. It is the brain's safety system being misread, not a hidden wish.
- vesterde
When I was about 11 years old, my best friend and I were playing during recess at school, and I was carrying him around on my back, presumably pretending to be a multipart attack robot. All of a sudden, my heart started hurting, and I collapsed to my knees, and the robot was no more. Every time I inhaled, it would feel like a spike was being driven into my heart, and my breathing got completely shallow. I was sure I was done for, when all of a sudden, after an exhale, it disappeared.
It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I learned this was called Precordial catch syndrome and it happens to most everyone. Every friend I've told about it was surprised, and also most knew the feeling.
I collected a growing list of strange things bodies do ever since. And now finally I made it into a little page for others to see:
https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/
It includes a form to tell me about new things, if you think they belong on the page. Feedback welcome!
- SA9G
They left out "autoheadslap", the sharp pain you get whenever anyone mentions Nvidia and you smack your forehead as you remember cancelling your massive buy order back when it was $110 and had not split yet!! It is often accompanied by uncontrolled twitching and repeatedly saying "fuuuuuuuuu" as you bite your tongue.
Yes, a rare but real human affliction.
- VCFundedGenYer
This AI website has very weak sources for many pages.
As they said in school (and is still valid here) - Wikipedia is never to be your primary citation. This website commits the sins of citing Wikipedia and ONLY Wikipedia.
- bonsai_spool
Very cool site! It's got some Claude-isms but they're not overwhelming which leads me to wonder: how did the author get the overall aesthetic to be so un-Claude-like?
- alexpotato
An interesting story about the Photic Sneeze Reflex [0]:
it's one of the things that fighter pilots are screened for. The reasoning is that they can't have a pilot looking down and dark ground, look up to scan for enemy fighters and start sneezing.
Some people with the reflex can also have multiple sneezes in a row.
I find this all fascinating as:
- I have this
- I was also born with no sense of smell