Article created by: Mindaugas Balčiauskas
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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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.
Image credits: shibapop
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you cry and your nose becomes runny, it's actually your tears.
Our brains make up, on average, around 2% of our body weight but consume 20% of our caloric intake
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
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.
You can grow a new human being faster than most missing toenails can grow back
The surface area of the lungs is about the same size as a tennis court
It's possible to pull a jaw muscle while yawning. I found this out the hard way at work one day.
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
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.
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
Jaw muscles are the strongest in the human body
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.)
