Please share your mind boggling ponderings.

[Florries]

My baby is 8 months old and I find myself staring at him, thinking 'I GREW that!' I made those tiny fingers and tiny toenails. My human body actually produced another human. It's just amazing when you sit at think about it.

And what's really blown my mind is thinking that I was born with all my eggs, all ready and waiting to go - it's like I carried DS around with me my whole life until one day that particular egg desended and it met that 1 particular sperm which made DS. If it had been any of the other eggs, I could have a completely different baby!

Women's bodies are amazing.

Please share your own equally pointless but also mind bending ponderings.

I’ve always pondered who came up with the whole learning styles theory. I’m also curious about vaccinations. Like what are they made of? How do people decide if they are safe to give people or not?

There are more trees on earth than stars in our galaxy.

I love this fact and it makes me feel good knowing how many trees we have!!

Also, to answer a pp, we aren't descended from monkeys. We share a common ancestor some number of millions of years ago. Their species took a genetic turn and maximised that to end up as monkeys, we took a slightly different turn and wound up as humans.

Ovaries contain eggs. Eggs are just half a list of the building instructions needed to make the next generation person. You didn't MAKE your baby, you just allowed it to follow its own instructions and develop under its own steam inside you - you were the mobile phone charging point, if you like? So it's possible to allow a boy to grow just as easily as a girl as you are not building it, it is building itself, you are only providing lunch.
So half the instructions to make you were in your mother when she was born, yes, but YOU were not.(Still a brilliant process, don't get me wrong!, but in essence we all built and have continued to maintain ourselves - look at bones mending, wounds healing, hair growth, digestion.....flipping loved biology, me!)
What boggles my mind is all these people who hate watching adverts and will go out of their way to avoid them on their many different media platforms, yet will happily follow bloggers and buy whatever they are PAID to promote!

On the theme of language- how toddlers learn language, without being taught, just absorbing everything and making sense of it in their own little way is literally phenomenal. And what's more, we just sort of take it for granted that they learn to talk. I might have done colours, or farm animals, or vehicles but the abstract things they just absorb is amazing. And in that vein, before they talk, the depth of understanding from even very young babies- it makes me feel so sad for babies who don't grow up in happy homes because they must on some level know and understand it, if a one year old can understand simple questions and commands long before they can speak.

I usually ponder on words and think who came up with the word for that, and letters who decided what the sounds and shapes would be for the alphabet? There's probably an answer to these questions but I can't be bothered trying to find out, so I'll just keep pondering it every now and then

There are more trees on earth than stars in our galaxy.

Mind blown!

I wonder why sometimes there is no justice in this world.

If someone gets killed or maimed unlawfully (e.g. a parent who kills their children and then themselves to punish the other parent) and the perpetrator is not punished in this life, is there some divine scorekeeping that justice is done.

I guess not.

As mentioned previously- manufacturing. Just thinking about what you can get nowadays- it's been thought of, produced and distributed in huge numbers. You could buy 10 of any item if you wanted to.
And if you don't buy it, somebody else needs one at the same moment in time, and they will buy it too...this goes for almost anything. So mind boggling.

There is a living skeleton inside me walking around

Pole vault, at what point did someone decide to launch themselves on a long slightly wobbly pole over another pole high up in the air, also at what point as an athlete do you decide it's the sport for me ?

There are more trees on earth than stars in our galaxy

well, I didn't believe it, but...

Although... "Also relevant to the discussion is the fact that the authors of the tree study estimated that around 15 billion trees are cut down every year"

'We took a slightly different turn to end up as humans'...yep aliens genetically engineered us... Ancient Aliens, Zachariah Sitchin.
I think they still continue to do genetic engineering & we're just the latest prototype.

The gut biome fascinates me and also creeps me out a bit. Did you know that your gut has more neurons than in the brain of a cat? I recently read a book about it, it is incredible. They reckon the different types of bacteria create cravings for certain foods, which can be why people crave sugar for example. There's also a component of breast milk which is indigestible by humans, but digested by the gut biome, probably evolved over millions of years. The idea of a colony of bacteria living and existing and breeding inside me is amazing.

I often wonder what made someone look at random things (e.g. lobster, durian fruit etc) and think “mmmm. That looks tasty”

I agree, LucyInTheSkyy. Obviously, there are many things to criticise about capitalism and materialism, but it is truly remarkable how the incentive of wanting to make a profit ensures that a whole coordinated set of actions (from glassmakers, to fruit-growers, to manufacturers, to lorry drivers, to market researchers) which were set in motion months ago ensure that whenever I walk into a supermarket they have a vast range of orange marmalades for me to buy.

(And I wasn't being flippant, just using orange marmalade as a concrete example of the mind-boggling range of goods that one can buy on a whim).

I assume early man saw calves feeding off cows and made a few connections my thoughts are did they try the same trick with a saber tooth tiger?

Nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many have come through several supernovas.

We're all made of stardust!

They say the bravest man in the world was the first man who ate an oyster.

Who decided tripe was a good idea?

We're all made of stardust!

Or to look at it the other way, some stardust cooled and gathered together, and after a few billion years bits of it became self-aware enough to realise that it's made of stardust.

Everyone's sweaty, dirty feet smell the same (some are worse that others, but the underlying fragrance is the same). Why? Is it the case that all humans have the same bacteria colony resident on their feet? And this isn't affected by factors such as climate, diet, clothing, etc?

And presumably it's the same for dirty armpits and genitals - why do the different areas of the body smell so different?

The reason animals can walk at birth is because in relation to the size of the mother they have small heads. Humans frontal lobes are much bigger and the reason we're so much more intelligent as a species, a babies head is massive in comparison to its body (hold both arms in a circle above your head, when a baby does that their head fills the entire space) so animals often gestate longer. Even when they don't, their heads are still relatively small. If we grew babies to the size of a walking toddler we couldn't get them out. Animals basically give birth to toddlers and therefore they're dependent for less time.

'Car' has been around for longer than the 20th centruy. It was short for 'carriage'.

The one that boggles me is that women are born with all of our eggs already formed in our ovaries. This means that the eggs that created my kids were at one time inside my mum
Whoa 😮