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 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.

Haha @ChakaDakotaRegina - cross post on similar theme!

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.

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.

@SnugglySnerd

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

It's even weirder to me to think of someone doing the same with chickpea water.

@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!! The other day I was writing a report and the word 'school' totally threw me as I'd looked at it so many times!

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.

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?"

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

@FudgeBrownie2019

Cats and dogs.

We keep them as pets, love them, treat them like heavenly beings, pet them, assign them voices, personalities and characteristics. Tiny little beings that control our lives. We don't keep beavers and rhinos in our homes - why cats and dogs?

Their willing to put up with the flip side of unrequited smooshing, ruffling their fur & the baby voice.

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

@Rockbird

Eggs. So many of them. Think about your nearest supermarket and how many eggs there are there. Then think of all the supermarkets all over the country. Then add in the corner shops, petrol stations, milkmen even butchers. All of them have eggs. Then think of all the countries that have all these shops full of eggs.

So. Many. Eggs. And they keep being replaced. Mind blowing.

I learnt that egg producers will produce eggs that will grow to be chickens that will never lay an eating egg, their job is to be grandma chicken to mum chickens who will actually lay the eggs that get sold. I guess a laying chickens life isn't that long so they have to plan succession. That blew my mind!

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.

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

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.

Oh and the perfect size of humans. Fire is a certain size as in the flames. If we were any smaller we'd have had trouble containing and taming them and civilisation would probably not have advanced as it has.

I have cadaver bone in my jaw. Part of my jaw used to be inside someone else. Freaky.

Maple syrup. Who had the idea to drill a hole in a tree, collect the sap, boil it down, and put it on pancakes? Crazy.

Ive lived in Denmark for 13 years and something that really strikes me as weird about the Uk is uniforms. Its not that your children dont look adorable but the concept is fucking ridiculous. But it always seemed perfectly normal until september 2020 and I saw lots of photos on fb and thought wtf.

I also think it's weird how so many diets and so much advice tells us to drink eight glasses of water ever day etc. when this cannot possibly be good advice.
We are designed with thirst for a reason. No animal overdrinks like this and it is counterintuitive. People that drink when not thirsty must be washing all their electrolytes and minerals out of themselves and making their kidneys and other organs work far harder than necessary. I have a theory that because a lot of people drink all the time when not actually thirsty because someone offers us a cup of tea or coffee or we go for a pint or three for example, we are in fact harming our bodies. I suspect a lot of illness is caused by us endlessly drinking when we would not if we lived as we are designed to live.
As a result of these thoughts in the middle of the night a few months ago, I have cut down the amount of fluids I take in and I believe I feel better for it. Our bladders are designed to take overflow when the body has taken what it needs, not to be full constantly and emptied every hour and a half. Just my two pen'orth.

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

I was the same. I remember having a stand off with my mum about something when I was about 4 and saying “I’ll tell my Gran on you” and her saying she would tell her mum and not believing her mum was my Gran

I can never understand how I can be lying on the sofa, can just touch the screen a couple of times, and within seconds an entire book of 100,000 words will fly through the ether into my Kindle for me to read.

Two things:

Skiing. Who decided that strapping bits of metal on your feet and pushing yourself down a mountain at high speed was a good idea? Then, when you get to the bottom a lift thingy takes you back to the top to repeat the process. And you do this for at least a week? And pay through the nose for the privilege?

Religion (again). Tbh this thought led me to atheism. The God I was brought up with, the Christian one, is similar to the Jewish one, but the Jewish one only follows the OT and there is no heaven. The bible has the OT and NT and it's a book, so it cannot be disputed, but the interpretation has led to different types of Christianity. Then, there is the Quran which is also a book but again there is more than one interpretation. And then there is Hinduism with not just one god but hundreds, and Sikhism, and Buddhism....so who is right? Or are all religions false? No-one can know, really, can they? But representatives of all religionslike a good war, don't they? And whilst religion was a way of explaining the world why did some of them restrict normal human behaviour like sex and homosexuality? Where is religion's place now we have rational explanation for many phenomena? Why do so many highly educated scientists still follow a religion? It blows my mind.

@ShizeItsWeegie

I also think it's weird how so many diets and so much advice tells us to drink eight glasses of water ever day etc. when this cannot possibly be good advice. We are designed with thirst for a reason. No animal overdrinks like this and it is counterintuitive. People that drink when not thirsty must be washing all their electrolytes and minerals out of themselves and making their kidneys and other organs work far harder than necessary. I have a theory that because a lot of people drink all the time when not actually thirsty because someone offers us a cup of tea or coffee or we go for a pint or three for example, we are in fact harming our bodies. I suspect a lot of illness is caused by us endlessly drinking when we would not if we lived as we are designed to live. As a result of these thoughts in the middle of the night a few months ago, I have cut down the amount of fluids I take in and I believe I feel better for it. Our bladders are designed to take overflow when the body has taken what it needs, not to be full constantly and emptied every hour and a half. Just my two pen'orth.

I think this too. A bit like humans overeating. It’s made us bigger as a people but the advice now is to be a bit starved to help our cells renew and prevent disease. Humans never had running water before and our bodies were surely designed to cope being dehydrated every now and then?

Hymens. Why don’t men have something to ‘lose’ when they first have sex too? I’m aware that it can be lost in ways other than sex and isn’t a conclusive proof of virginity but I do wonder why it became such symbol of repression. Who came up with the idea of keeping women virgins until they were married but allowing men to shag about? I’m guessing a man but which one?!

I often wonder if the side saddle was invented due to someone’s tearing whilst riding astride and causing such a scandal that it became taboo. I’ve been reading up on the Regency period so I’ve got a head full of questions on these kind of things but can’t seem to find any answers when I attempt to look for them. 😳

@FastFood

I was listening to Verdi's Requiem the other day, the very dramatic Dies Irae and thought: it's basically air being moved around metal, wood and human flesh.

Also:
how do you get into ski jump? How do you even start?

How do you make a living as a philosopher?

Why having 12 months of 30,31 or 28 days rather than 13 months of 28 days?
Will we ever update the calendar system?

Why no one cares that September, October, November and December are respectively the 9th,10th, 11th and 12th months when their names clearly indicate that they should be 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th?

I’m irrationally annoyed about the date thing now it’s been pointed out

The Universe.

It would take over 46 billion light-years to cross the observable universe (that's very big) and it's over 13 billion years old (that's very old).

... and what's at its edge? Apparently it is infinite in every direction. How does that work?

The only concept I have of infinity is waiting in a queue for someone at a call centre to answer me.