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

[PutItInYourPocket]

I've just been thinking about this as I've been lay in the bath.

I'm currently pregnant and baby goes mad when I'm in the bath and I was watching him kicking and squirming inside me and just thought... This is actually pretty odd when you think about it. I have a living thing that's moving around inside me!

A friend had to have a blood transfusion not so long ago and she can't think about that for long without feeling squeamish that someone else's blood was inside her!

What other things do you find strange when you really think about them?

That 99% of crisps have a best before date that’s on a Saturday. Whether you’re eating Walker’s, Hula Hoops, Tyrrell’s or Royster’s it’s always a Saturday. M&S crisps seem to be the only exception to the rule. I’m obsessed with checking. The security guard at Sainsbury’s must think I’m round the twist.

That the conscious part of my brain can't speak to the unconscious part. Imagine if we could tell it to not store so much fat, or that it's being excessive in snot creation when we have a cold, so could it tone it down a bit.

Or even, I really want to get pregnant so please tell me when I'm ovulating.

Surely the brain must know these things are happening. If I can control my fingers why cant I control my organs?

I sometimes think it's amazing that the person I drove past or walked past on my way to work or the shop or whatever, has a whole life, with family and friends etc...

Love this thread! So many things I find absolutely mind boggling, like:

• growing an actual person in your own body and bringing this brand new little person into the world who starts off knowing how to do nothing but then learns how to do all sorts. Like talking, that is so weird.
• that everything around you and in your house is man made or has undergone some sort of manufacturing process. In fact how humans just make so much stuff and seem to "need" so much stuff but animals don't.
• tap water - it's undergone so much chemical processing and yet we think of water as being so natural, clean and pure.
• phones, internet and any telecommunications - it's just amazing and I have no idea how it works

@CosyAcorn

That the conscious part of my brain can't speak to the unconscious part. Imagine if we could tell it to not store so much fat, or that it's being excessive in snot creation when we have a cold, so could it tone it down a bit.

Or even, I really want to get pregnant so please tell me when I'm ovulating.

Surely the brain must know these things are happening. If I can control my fingers why cant I control my organs?

Would we be able to do this sort of stuff if we had access to 100% of our brain?

@OohThatCat

Also time, just the massive age of the earth and the fact that actually a T-rex is closer in time to me right now than it was to a stegosaurus

What?!

@PutItInYourPocket

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?

Sometimes I'll question myself if it's even spelt that way even though I know it is because it looks so weird after a while.

Yes, I do this too! I'm loving this thread!

Pets. Such a strange concept.

Loads of different foods, who tried the first of something, or how someone was probably the first to add this or that to something else and do something else to it and it made something.

And on the food front, I think the fact that animals scavenge for eg eggs, would mean we’d quite naturally try for the same food sources in a pinch. And when you are properly hungry and see something else eating, even if it’s a suckling calf, you are going to think, I could eat/drink that. Or fi you had an infant and it needed milk.

What blows my mind when it comes to food is when I chop into an apple, melon, orange, cabbage, I’m the first person ever to see the inside of it. And maybe the only one. I’ve just harvested the apples from my apple trees and I chop into them, perfect white insides and I think, bloody hell, that grew because I decided it should, on a tree that I planted, and I can chop into it and be the only one ever to see that perfect slice, how bloody weird.

@PutItInYourPocket

I think of that when I drive down the motorway. All these full lives with their entire life stories, individually (or in little groups), encased in distinct and totally discrete cans on wheels. And then in service stations, we get to make eye contact with some of them...

That in order to go to sleep you have to pretend to be asleep. Weird.

Sleep. It’s like, falling unconscious for 8 hours a night. It’s just so weird!

The moon - mind blowing enough on its own but then with the tides? How?

Similar to planes, why do massively heavy cruise liners not sink?

Agree re social eating, factories as pp described, phone lines, telegraph poles, vinyl records, internet, MRI and CT machines......

@joeysapple

Also - the fact we have a smell memory!

We can smell something years after first smelling it, and it reminds us straightaway of a place, person or time. BONKERS.

I think that's because the olfactory nerve ends near the amygdala in the hippocampus, the emotional memory centre. Vague recollection from neuroscience lectures

And the fact that I have direct ancestors who lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago. A direct descendant was a cave woman. I so wish we knew the stories of all our ancestors, it blows my mind!

Illustrations in books

How does a baby know that a small circle on top of a big circle with 2 pointy triangles on top represents a cat? A lot of children’s images are very abstract to say the least. Peppa pig hardly looks like a real Life farm animal.

@SoupDragon

That stretching out behind me is an unbroken line of mothers, right back to the beginning of the human race.

I remember looking at DS1's hand when he was a newborn and
I was breastfeeding him and picturing all the tiny bones, the veins, the nerves, everything that makes up a human.... How on earth did I manage to build all that inside me?

The long line of mothers behind you. This is so beautiful

Meringue. How did somebody decide to do that with egg whites and sugar?!

Eggs full stop: who saw an egg coming out of a chicken’s arse and thought ‘Yum, I’ll cook that in various different ways!’ 😱

Also, poo. How does our body merrily extract what is useful then poo out the rest? How does it do that?! How does it know??

And why are bodies so pathetically useless sometimes? Why can lizards re-grow bits but we can’t? Will we evolve to re-grow bits? Why are bodies so vulnerable to injury? A ‘simple’ accident/back injury screws us! A little bit of nerve damage and we’re buggered! (I speak as someone with a major injury/damage, not minimising anyone who has suffered an injury)

The fact that when I had my dog spayed, I put an end to a genetic line millions of years long. I had a massive ethical dilemma about it. Who the hell do I think I am?

Organs are pretty weird too. Well just bodies in general. I sometimes wonder how does everything fit? I look at me in the mirror and think, how does everything fit in there, lungs, heart, diaphragm, stomach, bladder, kidneys and so on. It must all be so squished together. And somehow now there is another person with another set of all of those things inside me as well. HOW IS THERE ROOM?

@Eckhart

The fact that when I had my dog spayed, I put an end to a genetic line millions of years long. I had a massive ethical dilemma about it. Who the hell do I think I am?

Oh my god! I thought I was the only one. I felt like this too. Like who the hell am I to just take away this creatures fertility? I felt really guilty about it for a long time afterwards, I still feel sad now if I think about it too long. Like my dog is so precious to me and I knowingly took something away from him 😔

My contraceptive implant makes me feel weird. 99% of the time I forget it's there but now and again I will accidentally feel it and it makes me feel sick that this piece of plastic is just sitting below my skin. Sometimes it really freaks me out and I just want to rip it out.

The concept of being in love. I've legally bound myself to another person, and sacrificed a lot in the process, just because I have the right chemicals and understanding of this one bloke to want to do so (enough to give him my money and space in my bed whenever necessary). Very odd ... though of course love and marriage have their upsides

Also the fact that you can understand that healthy food is better, and from an external standpoint you'd think "Just eat healthy, it's good for you, it'll make you feel better and you'll live longer". Yet you still reach for unhealthy food solely because the impulse is strong enough to be passively apathetic to your lifespan.

We dig up a tree and bring it in doors for Xmas
How another human can come out of your vagina
Periods - you bleed for 5 days and have to use sanitary wear to protect yourself and hide it

I quite often do the ‘I’m the only person in the whole universe to eat this apple, open this tin , wear these knickers’!