The Human Body's Strangest Quirks: From Brain Freeze to Blue Field Dots
Bodily Oddities
A curated collection of 136 bodily oddities, each with a plain-language explanation and a real-world prevalence estimate. Learn why about 70% of healthy people get benign fasciculations, how BPPV is the most common cause of vertigo, and that fewer than 1% of people are truly ambidextrous. The site also covers harmless but alarming phenomena like accessory ossicles and Charles Bonnet syndrome.
A sudden, brief thought of jumping when you stand somewhere high, or of swerving while driving, with no wish to do it. About half of people get it. It is the brain's safety system being misread, not a hidden wish.
- ulrikrasmussen
The geometric nightmares! I had those as a kid whenever I was very tired or had a fever, and kept having them until my late teens. Never seen them described and didn't know it was a thing.
- smusamashah
I can move my ears. But it's not ears alone, whole scalp skin seems to move and ears get pulled from behind as a result. I learned it from my uncle as kid though by trying to do the same as him.
- hermitcrab
Interesting site.
I get the occasional Hypnopompic auditory illusion ( https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/hypnagogic-halluc... ). This is when you think you hear a sound as you wake up. For me it is normally an illusory door bell. It is very convincing. You rush down to the door and there is no-one there and my wife heard nothing. Maybe happens 2 or 3 times a year.
I also get the occasional weird nerve shock. It feels like an electric shock down through my collar bone. It lasts less than a second, is always completely unexpected and is quite unpleasant, enough to make me flinch. It doesn't seem related to what I am doing. Maybe happens 6 times a year. Didn't see it mentioned. Does anyone else get this, or am I just weird?
- alexpotato
An interesting story about the Photic Sneeze Reflex [0]:
it's one of the things that fighter pilots are screened for. The reasoning is that they can't have a pilot looking down and dark ground, look up to scan for enemy fighters and start sneezing.
Some people with the reflex can also have multiple sneezes in a row.
I find this all fascinating as:
- I have this
- I was also born with no sense of smell
- lpghatguy
The artifacts from some of the AI-generated images are a pretty significant detraction. For a site with so many pictures of hands, so many of them being malformed or having the wrong number of fingers (hithhiker's thumb, palmaris longus) is really off-putting.
- hermitcrab
Proctalgia fugax (https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/proctalgia-fugax/), also known as "shooty arse":
- RobotToaster
Since you have deja vu, you could add Jamais vu, the opposite.
Also prosopagnosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
- cmehdy
Awesome site! I didn't find canaliths on it so I might submit it to you eventually: roughly every winter I get vertigo when lying down, and apparently there is no "fix" except to "reposition my canaliths"[1].
It all goes away during the summer somehow.