Things that are actually pretty weird when you think about them?

I think the fact that we walk upright is weird.

I am used to looking at animal skeletons on Xray images but have recently had a series of Xrays myself. It got me thinking how weirdly compressed our spines are compared to quadripeds and the flattened shape of our pelvis explains why childbirth for humans is so hard when animal birth is so much easier for them.

Everything about the human form is weird when you realise what it is supposed to look like.

Eggs.
We literally eat the unfertilsed menstrual cycle of birds.

the one that your ovaries with your lifetime supply of eggs/ova inside them are there in your body when you are born. So that means that when I was inside my mum as a foetus, the eggs that became my children were already there. So technically my kids were inside their nana at one point. Freaky !!!

The fact that you 'know" that a cat is a cat and a dog is a dog, even when (dogs especially) are so varied in shape and size.

Also the pregnancy thing. Like Alien. It freaked me out.

Sometimes all 3 combined if you’ve left them in the cattery.

@Graphista Thanks for the upside down map. I’ll have a proper read later, it looks very interesting. 🙂

There is no centre to the universe & no apparent edge
How can space expand? (Interested in astronomy )
When did the first human start to think "who am I & how did I get here?"

The Douglas Adams line about humans know what’s going on in the Universe, as much an ant in Hong Kong knows about life in London.
It’s a great way to think about size perspective but then I end up thing about the life of ants in Hong Kong and what they think the point of life is and what would they think about life in London if you bought one over

Small things in general. How small is the smallest thing. And then halve it.

Saving or killing small things. Sometimes you’ll open the window, sometimes actively kill it, sometimes just leave it without thought. Is God just some big thing who sometimes bothers to help us out and sometimes has its own issues.

Languages - how there are so many different ones spoken by one animal (makes me wonder if animals have "foreign" languages, dialects etc - there's apparently evidence they do) how language developed and which countries ended up not only speaking different languages but even completely different symbols for those languages in the form of alphabets and accents et

Have a look at David Crystals works, some fascinating stuff.

A couple of things to ponder, on mainland Europe the accents / dialects spoken in boarder places are understood by the people on the other side of the boarder, this goins in continuum of about 10 miles, so if you are French but on the Belgian boarder you will understand the Flemish spoken just over the boarder.

You can go in a continuum of 'understanding' from Calais to Russia with people in the same 10 miles understanding but not understanding people further away.

Nicaraguan sign language. Nic aragua did not have many deaf people until they were sanctioned by the US in the 1970s/1980s. One thing they could not get was modern antibiotics, they had access to older ones but these have the side effect of causing deafness.

Nicaragua started a school for deaf children. Once in contact with each other the developed a language from scratch with all the grammatical features of other languages.

Oh and a final thought, there is an argument that English is not a true language but a Creole. It steals words and grammar from other languages and takes the simplest forms eg we usually add an s to make a plural, this is simpler to understand that other endings which is why it dominates English but we still have remnants from Older languages spoken in the UK eg plurals such as children, men, women, radii.

Some of our dialect words appear as real words in other languages, eg the Yorkshire word, "lake" meaning play is probably a hangover from the Vikings, leka is play in Swedish.

As others have said, reading and writing. I make a squiggle with a pen, that represents a sound. I make a collection of squiggles, that represents a word. And somehow we are able to convey the most complex ideas to anyone anywhere using just a small set of abstract shapes. Not just that though - the number of steps that we need to go through to communicate information...I think thoughts or have feelings, my brain converts those into words and breaks those words down to individual squiggles and creates those squiggles with a pen or by typing. The other person sees the squiggles, decodes them into words and then uses those words to understand exactly what I was thinking. And we can do all that without any effort at all! It boggles my brain.

Haha @ChakaDakotaRegina - cross post on similar theme!

That what we perceive is actually made up of all the things we already know, have experienced, and expect + the actual sensory information we get in. So as others have picked up on, no one sees (or hears, or feels or...) the world exactly the same as someone else. This also means there is no 'true' way to perceive the world, they are all constructs.

That a lot of brain and body processes are automated. Like another poster said, a lot of it (digestion or wound healing for example) could never be fully conscious. Instead its completely offline, controlled by cells in the brain but also cells distributed around the body (including neuron messenger cells, which dont exist only in the brain).

I also find it insane that some actions we perceive as conscious (for example motor movements), the brain circuit that makes them conscious happens after the impulse that makes it happen. So to a certain extent we did it before we decided to! Calls into Q free will for me, as the original decision was made on patterns of experience rather than rational choice.

Perspective is really weird.

Your brain is bombarded with all this information all day and all night and tries to filter it by what’s useful.
We could all read the same book or watch the same film or sit in the same room and all perceive it totally differently. It’s the same information but we’re all filtering it with really random internal criteria.

Electricity; I ponder about where it goes when I turn off the switch. My family think I am mad, but to me it is really odd.

Eggs.
A sort of daily chicken period. But we steal them and eat them. And often if you incubate them instead of eating them, they hatch. And chickens, ostriches and crocodiles come from eggs...

Languages

The thing I've always found weird is sort of this but more that it's all happening right now - people are just living their lives all around the world at the same time and we just don't know anything about pretty much all of it. When I sit down to eat my falafel wrap and watch the lunchtime news, people all over the world might be eating, going to the loo, chatting with friends/family, going to work, doing work, playing, dancing, whatever from the highflying businessman in NYC to the fisherman in Peru, all with different but also quite similar lives.

I also find it strange to think about the indigenous people who don't have contact with outsiders. There's an island in the Indian Ocean that has no contact with the outside...how different must their lives be and what would they think of us....(also there could still be people living in the Amazon that outsiders haven't come across, mental).

Every day, someone on Earth unwittingly does the biggest poo in the world for that day.

remember when my friends daughter was young she could not get her head round the fact that her gran was her mums mum.

Ahh that reminds me of my own dd when little getting very upset with her cousin as she couldn't get her head around my mum being the cousins granny too! "No that's MY granny!"

Colours, how do I know that what I see as orange is not seen as my “blue” by another person?

May I direct you to the work of sapir-Whorf and linguistic relativity? - fascinating if you're genuinely interested

@MadameMeursault I had my 2nd mc the year before I got pregnant with dd, if I'd not mc those babies I'd have still been pregnant when dd was conceived so she wouldn't be here

Does anyone get the thing where if they stare at the same word for too long or say it lots of times it starts to look/sound wrong?

that's called semantic satiation - blew my mind when I first learned there was a term for it!

Ditto most buildings, especially old ones. Who checks they are going to actually stay up? How can they check that?

this is essentially what civil engineers do

Gravity and the Southern Hemisphere. People are living upside down

only according to northern hemisphere thinking there are globes and maps with the Southern Hemisphere at the top

https://www.flourish.org/upsidedownmap/

And why, for example, to Italian people speak English with the same Italian accent and German people speak it with a German accent etc?

they don't totally - if you're a native speaker of THEIR language you'll notice their accent even if they're speaking a different language.

@Shizzlestix back injuries - the main problem comes down to the fact we're not really meant to be upright/walk on 2 legs only. I too have a spinal disability following an accident and it's life changing

Op re organs squished especially while pregnant is this your first? If so wait till after birth! You can feel the organs settling back into roughly their usual places it's very weird! I say roughly because your body changes permanently as a result of pregnancy and childbirth so your hips, rib cage etc change shape forever which means the organs aren't exactly in the place they were before.

As an endo sufferer I fucking love that description of periods!

As an insomniac I can honestly say I have NEVER been able to go to sleep by pretending to be asleep and I've never understood how people do that it's never ever worked for me I always have to be doing something (reading/tv/radio/mning) and then I eventually fall asleep when exhausted

why not tell your brain so you can take yourself to the doctor

that's what symptoms are? Your body telling you something is out of the ordinary and to prepare accordingly

If I'm on an aeroplane for example ; I'm not a confident flyer, but I tell myself that it's mind over matter and that the chances of a crash happening are very low. But then I think about those poor souls who have crashed in the planes in the past, and did they think and tell themselves the exact same thing, and it actually happened to them. And if they did tell themselves, did they get a chance to process the fact that they thought about it happening only an hour before and that it's actually happened to them?

If you haven't already definitely NEVER watch “final destination”!

Things we "know" now may be completely wrong we are no more omniscient than previous humans who at various points thought:

The Earth was flat
The sun and planets revolves around the earth
That infections were spread by poisonous air/smells
That washing hands/personal hygiene had no effect on the passing on of infections
That your tongue has "taste regions"
The atom was the smallest thing on Earth
That we would never be able to travel at the speed of sound because it would have certain effects on the body

Imagine with the speed of technological development (In less than a 100 years we've gone from computers occupying large flooor space that could barely complete basic calculations to having hand held computers that can do amazing things in mere seconds) we're currently experiencing what things we think we "know" now that will be DISproved in the next 10, 20, 50 or 100 years!

I've been on MN a very, very long time - but can honestly say this is a brilliant thread! We've got everything - from teenagers trashing kitchens to sex and outer space.

Also, time zones

not even properly time zones but the way from looking at my weather app on my phone I can at times see that it's dark here (Scotland) while my friends in London are still in daylight! Wtf!

Also, reading and writing is baffling if you think about it too much. I've actually studied this - still a bit baffled

Basically semiotics into linguistics for anyone interested but I warn you it's a HUGE subject area. Also of interest to anyone curious about language development, accents, dialects etc Wars have been fought because of minor language misunderstandings!

What if we all forgot how to read? I mean literally forgot the alphabet and it's all just a jumble of symbols that's all totally made up anyway?!

This literally happens to millions of people every day - brain injuries

harvesting breast milk for human consumption (why haven't we done that?!)

essentially contamination issues because a human blood product like breast milk especially in these times of hiv/aids, hepatitis etc will likely contain any number of infections that are human to human transferable. With cows/goats/whatever milk SOME of the infections they can get can be transferred to humans but not all and we can regulate animal exposure far more easily

Death, that even when we die some of our dust, ashes, atoms remain in minute form forever and ever