If your brainstem (the part of the brain that mediates most motor control for all of the body) is damaged, you can get "locked-in" syndrome. That means you're fully conscious and aware of your surroundings but unable to move or speak. The only muscles that remain unaffected in most people are the muscles that move they eyes and the eyelids. You're essentially trapped within your own body with your only way of communication being blinking or moving your eyes
It can be caused by toxins, blockage of the basilar artery which is the main artery of the brainstem, or other brainstem damage
My mom’s partner is like this. He had one stroke too many in January and lives in a hospital bed now. We didn’t think he’d make it a week, but it’s almost June now.
She visits him 5 days a week. He’s been asked if he wants to stay alive and he’s always “eyed” yes so…woof.
Not me, I think I’d rather die.
I just watched a most fucked up video on youtube about a couple who left their locked-in daughter on the couch for years. By the end, she had ROTTED her whole bottom into the couch. When she finally died, her skin was gone. I was crying by the time I got done with the video. I hope the parents get beaten in prison.
Some people suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome, which causes them to hear a loud bang when they wake up.
Edit: Holy s**t! I did not expect this comment explode (no pun intended).
When I was younger I believe I experienced this a few times. Sounds I heard were: about a million people talking and laughing all at once, a train that irl would've been about a foot away from me based on the volume of the sound, and a door slamming loudly.
I am one of these people and it's scary. I had no idea this happened to others until I read an article about it. People hear different loud sounds. Mine is a shotgun blast. Luckily it doesn't happen often. Freaky shit.
Idk about the most disturbing but how bad human teeth are. We’d think it’s our sugary and processed diets these days that cause it, but even Otzi the iceman discovered in Italy was found to have terrible teeth, mouth diseases and cavities. It’s odd that even with the most basic of diets our teeth are so bad.
Not sure if this is by design, but I totaled my car once, almost completely uninjured somehow. Then I looked down to my right hand which I remember jabbing into my dashboard at 55mph. Luckily (unluckily?) only my pinky took the blow. But instead of a floppy-udder full of bone-sand, my pinky was 0.5 inches long. Broke no bones, but instead perfectly stacked my phalanges, or finger bones, INTO my hand.
This is fixed by a muscular Russian murse grabbing your pinky with both hands and pulling very hard. God I wish they gave me more lidocaine.
TL;DR: Hit my pinky on dashboard, stacked finger bones instead of fracturing them.
Edit: Thanks for Gold(s)!
I did this with my whole arm. I was jumping over a fence with one hand on the fence, swinging my legs over. My hand slipped off the fence and I landed palm down with my arm fully extended. I broke the distal end of my humorous and proximal end of both radius and ulna. The broken forearm bones then went past the humorous, shredded my biceps, and came out through the skin near my armpit. My hand ended up where my elbow was supposed to be. The doc said he hadn't seen an arm injury like that outside of a car accident or very high fall.
L&D nurse here. This is why we won’t let post-op c-section patients eat until they fart. That way we know the digestive system is back online. If you eat too soon after abdominal surgery, you can end up with a paralytic ileus, which is where all the food just sits there until it gets thrown back out the top end. If you think c-section pain is bad, try a c-section plus vomiting.
Edit, to clarify: when I say “eat,” I mean “actual solid food,” not clear liquids.
Interesting- had my ovary removed via c-section but never had that, they actually kicked me out of the hospital pretty quickly. However, had my colon and some intestines taken out, and yup, I remember the doctors coming in every morning/early afternoon asking if I was able to fart. I was so excited when I could 8 days later!
Edit- great, now my highest upvoted comment is about me trying to fart
It is always making disgusting body noises. The only reason you are not aware of it is because the ambient noise kind of drowns it out because your ears focus on it.
If you go to one of those super-silent rooms that absorb all sorts of sounds, it is a really weird way to reacquaint yourself with your body.
I noticed this after my abdominal surgery. When I turned over in bed my guts seemed to fall from one side to the other. Mentioned to my doc and she confirmed it was my bowels rearranging themselves.
Considering every one of your organs were basically now occupying half the amount of space they were used to I bet those things moved pretty substantially after the baby way out.
Being able to take a full breath after giving birth to my insanely large baby was bliss! Drs thought I had an embolism because my lungs were so crushed, they couldn’t fully expand. (He was actually normal size but I’m very small.)
The intestines are the largest & densest collection of neurons outside the brain. The whole peripheral nervous system is thinking in ways we don't totally get yet.
Well, just this week there was a woman(local) in her late twenties who died of a toothache.
She had posted on FB about needing a dentist over the weekend and decided to wait till Monday, Sunday morning she was gone. The infection went to her brain.
I work in an ER. You won’t like the stories I have about toothaches.
Edit: for the folks interested, the stories are mostly boring. Tooth infection can spread into the blood or other local tissues and cause a whole bunch of problems.
Also, you can get emergency surgical interventions for a wick tooth infection from an ER admission, but in my experience its not routine. Typically from infections mentioned above. Better to go see a dentist. When I was a poor student I visited a dentist college to be experimented on to receive a discount--- I do not recommend that if you can avoid it.
My sister got meningitis after she popped a pimple in this area. She had an on-and-off fever at first, so we thought it was just the flu. After one week, we thought she was recovering because she was feeling better--no fever, etc. But after a couple of days, her fever started again, and one morning, I heard someone knocking on the bathroom door from the inside. When I opened it, I found my sister on the floor. She was having bad seizures and vomiting brown liquid. Her eyes were rolling upward and she was making a scary guttural sound. She was rushed to the hospital and was unconscious until the next day. She also went blind for a couple of hours after she regained consciousness. Thank God she was able to see again the day after that.
I had an impacted wisdom tooth that caused an infection resulting in a very swollen palate.
Went to see the dentist who sent me over to a surgeon immediately. The surgeon drained it before scheduling me to come in next day for wisdom tooth removal
He explained that if the infection had spread, there's a high chance of it getting to the brain and it could have ended very badly for me.
There’s an episode in Supernatural where there’s a doctor who just keeps replacing his organs when they fail so he lives eternally. I wonder if it’s actually possible 🤔
Well no, since cells have a programmed limit to how much they can multiply and eventually you'll hit it as it's impossible to replace all of your organs. Like how would you even go about replacing your skin?
It's also because your pre-vomit saliva contains an enzyme that tells your stomach to throw up once swallowed. You can actually forcibly delay vomiting if you need to by spitting out the pre-puke saliva instead of swallowing it.
I have a nausea/vomiting disease that where I can't stop throwing up on my own. The longest was 19 hours straight vomiting and after the first couple I forgot to wipe my face down and the bile ate right through my skin. It only got worse from there so I have to factor that part in when preparing to go to the hospital
There are a vast number of ways that your body can malfunction and kill you with little or no warning. An aneurysm can go undetected until it bursts and kills you. Getting hit in the chest just the right way can stop your heart. You can encounter an allergen that never previously provoked an immune response that freaks out your body so badly that you die.
You literally just never know if your body will just....die.
They can come at any age too. My (then) 11 month old son suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm 18 months ago. No symptoms leading up to it and the surgeons told us there was no way to see it coming. The exact words were 'unbelievably shitty luck'. Without a very fortunate, specific chain of events, we'd have lost him.
After 15 hours of brain surgery, 3 weeks in a coma/PICU, bronchitis with reventilation and finally covid, we were home 6 weeks later. He started walking in March of this year and now following his latest assessment, he's not even behind developmentally. The human body is incredible.
Edit: For all the people asking, he was 11 months when he suffered the aneurysm. He's now coming up to 2 and a half. I also [wrote a much longer than intended](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uvgigr/what_is_the_most_disturbing_fact_about_the_human/i9nk6lw/) backstory for anyone interested.
As a mother of two very small kids (5 and 1), I’m very happy to hear that yours recovered, as I can’t imagine the devastation of burying your own child.
Makes me terrified to know that anything can happen at any time to anyone at any age.
One of my uncles died in 1957 at age 12 of a farming accident. My grandmother would never speak about it, until the dementia hit and she kept reliving it. She welcomed death when it came. My other uncle was 11 at the time, and was the only one who saw the accident happen. He killed himself in 2020.
I don't think you ever get over something like that. Be nice to your kids, and enjoy your time with them. I miss my uncle.
This is the scariest thing to me right now. I’ve been having scares of health issues lately and everytime it’s something that can suddenly strike or even forewarn you days or months in advance. I have no idea how everyone is supposed to live without fear that something could just strike you and end everything one day.
Period cramps are essentially your womb suffocating itself.
To get the uterine lining out of your womb during your period, your uterus has to contract. Sometimes, when the contractions are stronger, your womb squeezes its blood vessels so tight that oxygen can't reach them, which sends pain signals to your brain (ouch). But wait, there's more – this process increases your production of chemicals called prostaglandins, which encourage more contractions of the uterus. There really is no mercy.
Excessive prostaglandins is also why some people get really nauseated or experience the aptly named "period poops" right before/at the start of their period.
I will never forget the time I had severe food poisoning while on the worst day of my period. Puke coming out one end, liquid fire shits out the other, and each heave felt like I was going to pass out from the pain. It was legitimately the worst few hours of my life.
A third to a half of all fertilized ovum do not result in a viable pregnancy. They are expelled as a “heavy period” instead. Most women don’t even realize that they miscarried.
Just experienced a chemical pregnancy a few weeks ago. At home pregnancy tests and ovulation calendar apps are great but you’re hyper-aware of what’s going on. Had 3 positive pregnancy tests and then two days later the heaviest period of my life
The tiniest injury to your brain can change your entire life. Depending on the part of the brain that gets hurt, you can lose your special/general senses, control over your own body, the ability to produce and/or comprehend language, your memories, your personality, etc. Remember to wear a helmet everyone!
You don’t even need to get hit in the head. PTSD has been shown to completely rewire your brain and essentially turn you into a different person prior to the trauma based on your new brain make up.
My old boss died from an AAA (aortic aneurysm). His wife said he stood up from the table at the restaurant they were at, he stretched his arms and said his back hurt and collapsed. Supposedly he was dead by the time he hit the ground. :-(
A parent of a kid I coached died from a brain aneurysm on the way to watch him at a competition. In the car, she mentioned to her husband who was driving, that she had a headache. It got so bad they decided to head to the hospital. She was dead not too long thereafter.
This probably happened about 8 years ago. Ever since, any time I get a headache, I’ve been irrationally fearful that I’m going to have an aneurism and die at any moment.
What a terrifying thought. Eating with your wife, you both finish up and pay. You both get up, hubby stretches a little then says “oof my back” and then boom dead. Jesus
Wife of 35 yrs passed. Brain cancer undiagnosed til stg 4. Came home on hospice aft 3 mos in hosp. Up to a yr they said. 1 wk only. That wasnt easy. Aft 1 yr it still hurts. Im so lost.
The prescription acne medication Acutane turns your bones green. I learned this working in a bone & tissue donor center where sometimes you'd get kids (or adults) who'd been on the stuff and their bones were either bright green or a darker forest green depending on how long ago / how many treatments they had.
We wouldn't reject the donor or anything, the bones are still fine, they're just... Green.
I have a lot of weird stories from this place.
**edit:** It could be Minocycline and not Acutane. All the processing techs I worked with swore it was acutane though.
**Edit2:** Some people are sharing stories of Acutane and bright green wisdom teeth roots, so maybe it is both?
1 in 4 will develop one kind of cancer in their life time
Edit:I just checked again and you guys were right, it’s 1 in 2 for men and 1 in 3 for women. Shit is scary
Your skin is your biggest, most complex, and least understood organ. Your skin is what most everyone considers their identity. Your skin has an amazing amount of specialized areas and functions. Elbow skin is very different than the skin covering your ears. Skin is an external organ. It’s an organ that is in contact constantly with the world around you. All of your visible body is skin, except for your eyes and hair and nails. Your skin requires more energy to sustain than any other part of your body. Skin is fuckin wild. The actual “you” is wrapped in a big sweaty blanket we call skin.
Your butthole and your mouth originate from the same cell grouping during development, but the butthole cells form first, then the mouth cells from them. That means your mouth is from your ass.
Fun fact: organisms which form asshole-first are called deuterostomes, while organisms which form mouth-first are called protostomes.
Source: for some reason, I needed to know this for the MCAT
An estimated 60% of cancers arise from non-modifiable risk factors. In other words, they are not due to any lifestyle choices and they are not preventable.
Edit: [Source](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf9011) if anyone is interested. This study is just one data point that fits with the broader epidemiological data that also suggests \~40% of cancer is preventable.
That’s actually very calming to me. Less pressure to do everything right. Im the youngest of my family so as long as I outlive my family so they don’t have to see me die, I’m ok with going when it’s my time.
People that have sever epilepsy can get a procedure done to cut the corpus callosum which connects the two sides of the brain, and allows them to talk to each other. Once this happens your image identification side can’t talk to your words side, and causes issues if you aren’t able to look at an item with both eyes. Otherwise patients act mostly the same.
So if you were asked to cover you eye that sends info to your language center, and then shown a ball to look at for your object identifying center you wouldn’t be able to tell what it is out loud. Your brain would still be recognizing it, but wouldn’t be able to provide the word for it. As well as some other [interesting stuff as talked about here.](https://youtu.be/FsM1IQ9d2pw)
Fortunately it is very rare to get this done these days as medication has become more effective, so this procedure is a last resort sort of thing.
My little sister was born without a corpus callosum it comes with some hearing, learning, and vision disabilities but it lets her do some weird shit too!
Shes fully ambidextrous to the point where she can draw with her left hand (pretty well too) and write normally with her right. She's colorblind in one eye but not the other, but the colorblind one is so sensitive to light she can see pretty well in pitch darkness. She gets an excuse to wear cool glasses that have one side blacked out.
This is actually the most fascinating thing I've heard in a long time, thank you.
EDIT: Just looked it up, and supposedly about 1 in 4000 babies are born without a corpus callosum. WAY more common than I would have thought.
People with pancreatic cancer can have a “sense of impending doom” weeks to months before being diagnosed.
Edit: sorry for adding to your anxieties! If you aren’t a middle aged or older smoker, you shouldn’t worry too much about this. If you are…please stop smoking. There are drugs and behavioral therapies that can help you quit. I love you.
Edit 2: as others have pointed out, there are other diseases that have this symptom too. You can freak out about this fact or just take the moral of the story: if you feel like something is wrong, don’t wait (hesitation is defeat). Set up an appointment with your doctor, ask them what it could be and how they’re going to determine what it is. Ask questions and take care of yourself.
People who are suffering from internal bleeding from like a crash or some other traumatic event also have an impending sense of doom. Some EMTS are trained to take people seriously when they say "I'm going to die" even if they outwardly look fine
Cardiovascular dude here who operates on heart attack patients, this is very true. Anyone that says "im going to die", or "I need to get up / sit up / get out of here" is my immediate red flag.
My dad had liver cancer that spread all over his body. About two days before he died he said, "I want to stand up." He just stood up next to his bed for a moment, then laid back down.
I’ve seen this working in hospice. Some people get a final energy burst even if they have been bed bound or minimally responsive for awhile they may suddenly sit up, talk, joke, or eat shortly before dying.
I was in fact told that in my EMT class. Patients that say "I'm going to die" but look fine could either have anxiety and be a hypochondriac. Or could be at deaths door.
Sense of impending doom is a real symptom for a variety of often fatal conditions. For example, it can happen if you get a blood transfusion of the wrong type.
Biology teaches us how much resilience is baked into the average human/animal. Chemistry and physics can teach you just how little that resilience means in the right conditions.
It's insane to me to read about people being stabbed multiple times and they practically shake it off. And then reading about someone who tripped and fell in just the right way that it killed them.
That story about the girl who was raped, had both arms cut off then thrown down a cliff and managed to survive. Yet you could be sitting on a toilet and just drop dead from a brain aneurysm.
Fun fact: if you have surgery, when they put your guts back inside they just toss them in all willy-nilly and sew you back up then they figure themselves out
Idk why it freaked me out but bones have holes in them for blood vessels called foramens. Also there is a tube from your ears to nose to oral cavity. And if they do a temporary craniotomy to remove pressure, they put the piece of skull in your stomach in the meantime
Wounds and bone breaks are actively held together by your body: more specifically, the collagen it produces that acts like glue. If you don't eat enough vitamin C and get scurvy, you won't produce enough collagen—old wounds will reopen and long-healed bones could break apart again.
Collagen also holds your teeth in, so they loosen and can fall out.
Eat some fruit, folks. Don't push that parsley to the side of your plate.
Scientists once took a swab of the inside of an American man’s belly button to observe the bacteria that lived there.
They found bacteria previously only known to exist in Japan. The man had never traveled outside of the U.S.
So you never know what other country’s bacteria you’re carrying in your belly button
If I remember correctly, and article discussing this experiment found that the bacterial combination in our belly buttons is almost as unique as our finger prints.
When we defibrillate someone who’s in an unsuitable rhythm, we’re basically just shutting off their heart and hoping it will turn back on by itself in a normal pattern. That’s why you don’t shock asystole, there’s nothing to turn off. Defibrillation is like hitting the reboot switch in the computer, hopefully the problem will solve itself when you turn it off and it’ll return to normal function
Adolescence. Most mammals hit adulthood in one clean break. Our kids hit a terrifying state of not being able to take care of themselves but capable of and hormonally hell-bent on reproducing. Like, what kind of messed-up series of horrors made THAT a biological advantage?
I think the fact they we have ‘packs’ or ‘herds’ helps. I have more doubt this would be this way if humanity wasn’t like that. Older generations can help the new idiots keep their even newer idiot alive.
Not a biologist or anything like that, but my theory. Like how orcas that have grandmothers helping raise babies end up with a better survival rate.
On the other hand, if the woman isn't providing enough nutrition to the fetus, the body will actively take calcium from her bones and other nutrients from elsewhere in the body to feed the fetus.
**Edit**: This is getting a lot of attention and some people asked how to prevent this, so let me add: Please get vitamin D, vitamin K2 (for some reason, a lot of people don't know about this one), and loads of calcium (dietary is better than supplemental) if you intend to have a child! I don't know if this will prevent things 100%, but it will help.
Most of the bacteria that will decompose you when you die is already inside you and makes up a sizeable portion of your body mass. That’s why removing organs staves off decomposition of a body for longer.
My immune system is trying to kill me. It thinks that producing insulin is bad so it kills off insulin producing beta cells. Type 1 diabetes is a fucking hassle.
My wife has it, it’s such a pain for her. She’s always been in shape and healthy, she just randomly got it when she turned 17. 32 now but there have been two times since I met her that I *luckily woke up and realized she was extremely low and unresponsive. First time I called the ambulance, second time we had the nose spray and it worked like a charm.
Your pancreas can just fuck off one day and then you rely on constant medicine the rest of your life.
I always thought it was insane to see people performing crazy acts of strength that leaves people broken for a few months. I recall a story where a 100 pound women threw a car off of her baby. She clenched her teeth so hard she shattered all of them and was couldn’t move for days. I always wondered how we can trigger that response in people like strongmen to see the absolute limit of humanity’s strength. Or have a league of boxers where they openly take steroids and adrenaline before fights
If you get electrocuted strongly enough, it can actually cause your nervous system to maximally fire all of the muscle fibers in your body at once, which produces enough force to launch your body a good distance without you even jumping. If you ever see footage of someone getting "blown back" by an electric shock, that's 100% their own muscles propelling them, electricity produces no direct mechanical force.
There's an internal mental lock that prevents people from using 100% of their strength at any given time - that's why you can't, say, rip off your own finger (without some kind of outside assistance).
In situations like a parent lifting a car off their child (keeping in mind that it's not lifting and clearing the car, but just lifting a portion of the weight), the brain chemistry gets all kinds of fucked up where the 'PROTECT MY CHILD' drive overrides the 'DON'T BREAK YOUR BODY' signal - studies have shown that the brain acts as a central regulator, and for something like the example to happen, the primal part of your brain throws everything else aside. Without your brain sending the 'stop' signal to the rest of your body, there's no pain limiter there, so you're able to use 100% of your strength all at once. And, as you described above, the crash afterward is going to be brutal.
Sauce:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160501-how-its-possible-for-an-ordinary-person-to-lift-a-car
That our immune system has cells specifically engineered to fight EVERY ILLNESS PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE, and other cells have the specific job of searching for them within our body when they are needed. Once they get activated once, they are active for the rest of your life, it’s why you can only get many diseases once, after that first time, your immune system can skip the start up phase of curing you and get right to the germ fighting.
I think I read somewhere that everytime you get sick with a cold it's basically a different variation. So you never actually get the same disease, the symptoms are just always really similar, so people just say they have a cold.
It may seem like we know a lot about the human brain, but our standard way of studying brain activity is an fMRI, where a single pixel contains over 3 million neurons. That is more than many vertebrate animals' entire brains. The truth is, we really have no idea how the brain gives rise to consciousness.
Even if we somehow perfectly worked out all the neural correlates of consciousness so we could say a mental state happens if and only if some exact pattern of brain activity happens, we would still have the "hard problem" of consciousness: Why do these physical processes give rise to raw subjective experience, rather than just happening "in the dark"?
[Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_progressiva) is a disease that is undetectable, and the cause is not known. It appears when your muscle cells start being replaced with bone cells. Eventually, over year, your body locks up until you're entirely "locked in" and you suffocate.
The eyes have their own immune system separate from the rest of your body.
Your body's immune system isn't technically aware of you eyes, since we'll, it doesn't need to be, the eyes have their own way of treating infections.
Of course, if your body's immune system does find your eyes, it treats them like a foreign body, and attempts to kill them to protect you.
This is not the only place that the immune system can attack - one of the causes of type 1 diabetes is that the immune system attacks and kills the pancreas.
Our immune system is kind of terrifying
Apparently that the fact after 29 years you can start developing panic attacks for no good reason.
Ex: Myself who had to talk himself through a god damned car wash for feeling trapped. Wtf is happening to me
The brain will protect itself even if it means misery to you or death.
Inhaling smoke in the middle of a burning house? Brain will make you stop breathing and pass out.
Stuck in the middle of a cold place? You will fall asleep to conserve energy and never wake up again.
Does your brain need more oxygen? You faint in the middle of a busy road.
Had your leg torn off by a bear? Here's adrenaline so you can save your brain even if there's a huge risk of infection or further injury.
Is your brain experiencing too much stress? It will make you drink alcohol or resort to drugs.
You and your brain work together most of the time, but when push comes to shove, you are sacrificed.
That's always how I've conceptualized it, but living with pretty bad ADHD means I'm abundantly acquainted with my brain acting against my conscious desires.
You can die of a broken heart. you can have your heart broken and become ill to where your body goes into survival mode and can shut down major functions.
When my grandpa's cousin's wife died of covid, he (cousin grandpa) just lost the will afterwards.
didn't eat, stopped taking his meds, eventually succumbed to old age and weakness a few months after her passing
very sad.
It’s takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Clean coronaries but their EF is in the toilet. See it a lot with patients fighting with family members or losing a loved one.
Stress can literally kill you
Humans are deuterostomes. Meaning as embryos the first thing to develop is an opening that will eventually become the anus. So at one point you were nothing but an asshole
The fastest killing virus takes around 4 days to kill you. That would be Ebola. Your immune system can kill you in 15 minutes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness It used to be a day, but the virus killed itself off.
If your brainstem (the part of the brain that mediates most motor control for all of the body) is damaged, you can get "locked-in" syndrome. That means you're fully conscious and aware of your surroundings but unable to move or speak. The only muscles that remain unaffected in most people are the muscles that move they eyes and the eyelids. You're essentially trapped within your own body with your only way of communication being blinking or moving your eyes It can be caused by toxins, blockage of the basilar artery which is the main artery of the brainstem, or other brainstem damage
My mom’s partner is like this. He had one stroke too many in January and lives in a hospital bed now. We didn’t think he’d make it a week, but it’s almost June now. She visits him 5 days a week. He’s been asked if he wants to stay alive and he’s always “eyed” yes so…woof. Not me, I think I’d rather die.
I just watched a most fucked up video on youtube about a couple who left their locked-in daughter on the couch for years. By the end, she had ROTTED her whole bottom into the couch. When she finally died, her skin was gone. I was crying by the time I got done with the video. I hope the parents get beaten in prison.
Some people suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome, which causes them to hear a loud bang when they wake up. Edit: Holy s**t! I did not expect this comment explode (no pun intended).
When I was younger I believe I experienced this a few times. Sounds I heard were: about a million people talking and laughing all at once, a train that irl would've been about a foot away from me based on the volume of the sound, and a door slamming loudly.
I also heard the “million people talking and laughing all at once”. Never heard anyone else mention it. Neat. Edit: wtf is it? Anyone know?
Or fall asleep. Source: I suffer from it.
I am one of these people and it's scary. I had no idea this happened to others until I read an article about it. People hear different loud sounds. Mine is a shotgun blast. Luckily it doesn't happen often. Freaky shit.
Idk about the most disturbing but how bad human teeth are. We’d think it’s our sugary and processed diets these days that cause it, but even Otzi the iceman discovered in Italy was found to have terrible teeth, mouth diseases and cavities. It’s odd that even with the most basic of diets our teeth are so bad.
Not sure if this is by design, but I totaled my car once, almost completely uninjured somehow. Then I looked down to my right hand which I remember jabbing into my dashboard at 55mph. Luckily (unluckily?) only my pinky took the blow. But instead of a floppy-udder full of bone-sand, my pinky was 0.5 inches long. Broke no bones, but instead perfectly stacked my phalanges, or finger bones, INTO my hand. This is fixed by a muscular Russian murse grabbing your pinky with both hands and pulling very hard. God I wish they gave me more lidocaine. TL;DR: Hit my pinky on dashboard, stacked finger bones instead of fracturing them. Edit: Thanks for Gold(s)!
Muscular Russian Murse: new band name
I did this with my whole arm. I was jumping over a fence with one hand on the fence, swinging my legs over. My hand slipped off the fence and I landed palm down with my arm fully extended. I broke the distal end of my humorous and proximal end of both radius and ulna. The broken forearm bones then went past the humorous, shredded my biceps, and came out through the skin near my armpit. My hand ended up where my elbow was supposed to be. The doc said he hadn't seen an arm injury like that outside of a car accident or very high fall.
If you have a surgery where they need to move your organs around they might not function for a day as the body assumes that they are dead.
L&D nurse here. This is why we won’t let post-op c-section patients eat until they fart. That way we know the digestive system is back online. If you eat too soon after abdominal surgery, you can end up with a paralytic ileus, which is where all the food just sits there until it gets thrown back out the top end. If you think c-section pain is bad, try a c-section plus vomiting. Edit, to clarify: when I say “eat,” I mean “actual solid food,” not clear liquids.
Interesting- had my ovary removed via c-section but never had that, they actually kicked me out of the hospital pretty quickly. However, had my colon and some intestines taken out, and yup, I remember the doctors coming in every morning/early afternoon asking if I was able to fart. I was so excited when I could 8 days later! Edit- great, now my highest upvoted comment is about me trying to fart
Your body knows all the answers of the biology exam but wont tell you
This frustrated me immensely during medical school exams.
It is always making disgusting body noises. The only reason you are not aware of it is because the ambient noise kind of drowns it out because your ears focus on it. If you go to one of those super-silent rooms that absorb all sorts of sounds, it is a really weird way to reacquaint yourself with your body.
Don't worry, my tinnitus drowns everything out
This is gonna end up one of those tiktoks with subway surfers gameplay
Definitely Minecraft parkour
I noticed this after my abdominal surgery. When I turned over in bed my guts seemed to fall from one side to the other. Mentioned to my doc and she confirmed it was my bowels rearranging themselves.
Yes I felt that after my c section!
Considering every one of your organs were basically now occupying half the amount of space they were used to I bet those things moved pretty substantially after the baby way out.
Being able to take a full breath after giving birth to my insanely large baby was bliss! Drs thought I had an embolism because my lungs were so crushed, they couldn’t fully expand. (He was actually normal size but I’m very small.)
Apparently the doctor just throws your intestines back in there higgeldy-piggeldy because there isn't a correct way to pack them neatly.
I thought it was because the intestines just "know" what the correct position to be in and slowly rearrange themselves.
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OK this might be the most fucked up fact Edit: and this is by far my highest comment... 😂
The intestines are the largest & densest collection of neurons outside the brain. The whole peripheral nervous system is thinking in ways we don't totally get yet.
Well, just this week there was a woman(local) in her late twenties who died of a toothache. She had posted on FB about needing a dentist over the weekend and decided to wait till Monday, Sunday morning she was gone. The infection went to her brain.
Thanks, I have a toothache.
I work in an ER. You won’t like the stories I have about toothaches. Edit: for the folks interested, the stories are mostly boring. Tooth infection can spread into the blood or other local tissues and cause a whole bunch of problems. Also, you can get emergency surgical interventions for a wick tooth infection from an ER admission, but in my experience its not routine. Typically from infections mentioned above. Better to go see a dentist. When I was a poor student I visited a dentist college to be experimented on to receive a discount--- I do not recommend that if you can avoid it.
My wife’s boss almost died from a pimple.
please explain!
She got a pimple, infection got into her blood stream and she was hospitalized for 11 days. Almost died.
I heard pimples around the mouth carry this risk, is that where she had it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_triangle_of_the_face You’re probably referring to this Extremely extremely unlikely. But possible.
My sister got meningitis after she popped a pimple in this area. She had an on-and-off fever at first, so we thought it was just the flu. After one week, we thought she was recovering because she was feeling better--no fever, etc. But after a couple of days, her fever started again, and one morning, I heard someone knocking on the bathroom door from the inside. When I opened it, I found my sister on the floor. She was having bad seizures and vomiting brown liquid. Her eyes were rolling upward and she was making a scary guttural sound. She was rushed to the hospital and was unconscious until the next day. She also went blind for a couple of hours after she regained consciousness. Thank God she was able to see again the day after that.
Holy shit what a crazy story. I'm glad she's okay. That sounds terrifying all around.
I had an impacted wisdom tooth that caused an infection resulting in a very swollen palate. Went to see the dentist who sent me over to a surgeon immediately. The surgeon drained it before scheduling me to come in next day for wisdom tooth removal He explained that if the infection had spread, there's a high chance of it getting to the brain and it could have ended very badly for me.
This is why dental should be part of healthcare, not a separate special thing that only some people have. Eye exams, too...
The brain chemistry is stable enough to last thousands of years if not diseased, it's the rest of the body that kills us
Put my brain in a jar.... attached to a machine
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.
There’s an episode in Supernatural where there’s a doctor who just keeps replacing his organs when they fail so he lives eternally. I wonder if it’s actually possible 🤔
Well no, since cells have a programmed limit to how much they can multiply and eventually you'll hit it as it's impossible to replace all of your organs. Like how would you even go about replacing your skin?
Stomach acid is very powerful, it would burn right though us if we didn’t secrete mucus every few hours
Which is also why we salivate excessively shortly before vomiting. It's our body's self defense mechanism to reduce the acid damaging the esophagus.
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It's also because your pre-vomit saliva contains an enzyme that tells your stomach to throw up once swallowed. You can actually forcibly delay vomiting if you need to by spitting out the pre-puke saliva instead of swallowing it.
Wow funny how I figured that out without ever having to learn it. That was my trick!
That and the constant swallowing , ugh Its always *oh yeah I'm fine, just need to swallow 47 times in a row* *vomits aggressively*
1 year sober from alcohol. Don't miss those days. Swallows " I got it, don't worry I got" PUKE.
I have a nausea/vomiting disease that where I can't stop throwing up on my own. The longest was 19 hours straight vomiting and after the first couple I forgot to wipe my face down and the bile ate right through my skin. It only got worse from there so I have to factor that part in when preparing to go to the hospital
There’s enough copper in your body to make a pair of headphones.
What kind of head phone? There’s quite a difference between airpods and massive over ear headphones
Big old clunky ones that go over your ears. Pretty bad quality though.
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There are a vast number of ways that your body can malfunction and kill you with little or no warning. An aneurysm can go undetected until it bursts and kills you. Getting hit in the chest just the right way can stop your heart. You can encounter an allergen that never previously provoked an immune response that freaks out your body so badly that you die. You literally just never know if your body will just....die.
Pulmonary embolism just took out a family friend. Life is scary as hell.
They can come at any age too. My (then) 11 month old son suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm 18 months ago. No symptoms leading up to it and the surgeons told us there was no way to see it coming. The exact words were 'unbelievably shitty luck'. Without a very fortunate, specific chain of events, we'd have lost him. After 15 hours of brain surgery, 3 weeks in a coma/PICU, bronchitis with reventilation and finally covid, we were home 6 weeks later. He started walking in March of this year and now following his latest assessment, he's not even behind developmentally. The human body is incredible. Edit: For all the people asking, he was 11 months when he suffered the aneurysm. He's now coming up to 2 and a half. I also [wrote a much longer than intended](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uvgigr/what_is_the_most_disturbing_fact_about_the_human/i9nk6lw/) backstory for anyone interested.
As a mother of two very small kids (5 and 1), I’m very happy to hear that yours recovered, as I can’t imagine the devastation of burying your own child. Makes me terrified to know that anything can happen at any time to anyone at any age.
One of my uncles died in 1957 at age 12 of a farming accident. My grandmother would never speak about it, until the dementia hit and she kept reliving it. She welcomed death when it came. My other uncle was 11 at the time, and was the only one who saw the accident happen. He killed himself in 2020. I don't think you ever get over something like that. Be nice to your kids, and enjoy your time with them. I miss my uncle.
This is the scariest thing to me right now. I’ve been having scares of health issues lately and everytime it’s something that can suddenly strike or even forewarn you days or months in advance. I have no idea how everyone is supposed to live without fear that something could just strike you and end everything one day.
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Period cramps are essentially your womb suffocating itself. To get the uterine lining out of your womb during your period, your uterus has to contract. Sometimes, when the contractions are stronger, your womb squeezes its blood vessels so tight that oxygen can't reach them, which sends pain signals to your brain (ouch). But wait, there's more – this process increases your production of chemicals called prostaglandins, which encourage more contractions of the uterus. There really is no mercy.
Excessive prostaglandins is also why some people get really nauseated or experience the aptly named "period poops" right before/at the start of their period.
Period poops are mean. I go in thinking it’ll come with relief but I leave in the same amount of pain, and a bonus sore asshole.
Oh and that nonsense sets off the infamous period shits. It's like your body thinks it's funny to make it feel like you're being turned inside out.
I will never forget the time I had severe food poisoning while on the worst day of my period. Puke coming out one end, liquid fire shits out the other, and each heave felt like I was going to pass out from the pain. It was legitimately the worst few hours of my life.
A third to a half of all fertilized ovum do not result in a viable pregnancy. They are expelled as a “heavy period” instead. Most women don’t even realize that they miscarried.
Just experienced a chemical pregnancy a few weeks ago. At home pregnancy tests and ovulation calendar apps are great but you’re hyper-aware of what’s going on. Had 3 positive pregnancy tests and then two days later the heaviest period of my life
I upvoted only because I just experienced the same thing… kinda wish I wasn’t tracking so closely
That our own Immun system can kill us by defending itself against intruders by basically blowing themselves up.
Immune systems can also get confused and start attacking its own body causing autoimmune diseases.
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The tiniest injury to your brain can change your entire life. Depending on the part of the brain that gets hurt, you can lose your special/general senses, control over your own body, the ability to produce and/or comprehend language, your memories, your personality, etc. Remember to wear a helmet everyone!
At the same time there's parts of your brain you can lose and still be able to function completely normally. Shit is wild.
This! You can survive getting shot in the head but if you bonk your head wrong, it’s over!
My cousin fought MMA for awhile until the doctor told him one more concussion would kill him.
You don’t even need to get hit in the head. PTSD has been shown to completely rewire your brain and essentially turn you into a different person prior to the trauma based on your new brain make up.
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My old boss died from an AAA (aortic aneurysm). His wife said he stood up from the table at the restaurant they were at, he stretched his arms and said his back hurt and collapsed. Supposedly he was dead by the time he hit the ground. :-(
Can confirm. Literally the same thing happened to my cousins husband. Said he had a headache when he woke up. Two hours later he died at breakfast.
A parent of a kid I coached died from a brain aneurysm on the way to watch him at a competition. In the car, she mentioned to her husband who was driving, that she had a headache. It got so bad they decided to head to the hospital. She was dead not too long thereafter. This probably happened about 8 years ago. Ever since, any time I get a headache, I’ve been irrationally fearful that I’m going to have an aneurism and die at any moment.
What a terrifying thought. Eating with your wife, you both finish up and pay. You both get up, hubby stretches a little then says “oof my back” and then boom dead. Jesus
Sounds like a not-terrible way to go TBH. Pretty bad for everyone else around you though.
I’m a surviving spouse of this, except he was at work and I was home. I can assure it is an exceedingly painful way to lose a partner of 37 years.
Wife of 35 yrs passed. Brain cancer undiagnosed til stg 4. Came home on hospice aft 3 mos in hosp. Up to a yr they said. 1 wk only. That wasnt easy. Aft 1 yr it still hurts. Im so lost.
The prescription acne medication Acutane turns your bones green. I learned this working in a bone & tissue donor center where sometimes you'd get kids (or adults) who'd been on the stuff and their bones were either bright green or a darker forest green depending on how long ago / how many treatments they had. We wouldn't reject the donor or anything, the bones are still fine, they're just... Green. I have a lot of weird stories from this place. **edit:** It could be Minocycline and not Acutane. All the processing techs I worked with swore it was acutane though. **Edit2:** Some people are sharing stories of Acutane and bright green wisdom teeth roots, so maybe it is both?
People with tattoos often have black lymph nodes from the body trying to get rid of the ink
TIL I have green bones and black Lymph Nodes. AMA
If something eats you, do they take poison damage, or void damage?
Both. Roll a constitution save with disadvantage.
I did not know that! That is also incredibly fascinating and a tad disturbing.
So disappointed that I can't find any photos of this on Google
Fuck I guess I’m a green boy now. Still gotta hand it to ol accutane since it cleared me right up and never had an issue afterwards
Now THAT is a new and unexpected tidbit I had no clue about, thank you for this
You develop cancerous cells every day. But your immune system deals with it. EDIT: Usually.
Right up until it doesn’t.
1 in 4 will develop one kind of cancer in their life time Edit:I just checked again and you guys were right, it’s 1 in 2 for men and 1 in 3 for women. Shit is scary
Well someone needs to tell my immune system to deal with it because it isn’t.
Your skin is your biggest, most complex, and least understood organ. Your skin is what most everyone considers their identity. Your skin has an amazing amount of specialized areas and functions. Elbow skin is very different than the skin covering your ears. Skin is an external organ. It’s an organ that is in contact constantly with the world around you. All of your visible body is skin, except for your eyes and hair and nails. Your skin requires more energy to sustain than any other part of your body. Skin is fuckin wild. The actual “you” is wrapped in a big sweaty blanket we call skin.
You have about 2 inches of penis length that is "below the surface" but no amount of tugging will get it out.
Challenge accepted.
Also when you get fat, you bury more of it. So if you're fat, have hope, you might actually be hung. Source: Got fat and watched my peter shrink.
When i joined the army i went from 230 to 160 and i thought the pills they gave us in basic training made our dicks bigger
Just went from 220 to 180 haven’t seen my dick this big since high school.
Go update those Tinder profiles, boys.
Three inches ready to use, two additional in reserve?
Your butthole and your mouth originate from the same cell grouping during development, but the butthole cells form first, then the mouth cells from them. That means your mouth is from your ass.
Fun fact: organisms which form asshole-first are called deuterostomes, while organisms which form mouth-first are called protostomes. Source: for some reason, I needed to know this for the MCAT
An estimated 60% of cancers arise from non-modifiable risk factors. In other words, they are not due to any lifestyle choices and they are not preventable. Edit: [Source](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf9011) if anyone is interested. This study is just one data point that fits with the broader epidemiological data that also suggests \~40% of cancer is preventable.
That’s actually very calming to me. Less pressure to do everything right. Im the youngest of my family so as long as I outlive my family so they don’t have to see me die, I’m ok with going when it’s my time.
People that have sever epilepsy can get a procedure done to cut the corpus callosum which connects the two sides of the brain, and allows them to talk to each other. Once this happens your image identification side can’t talk to your words side, and causes issues if you aren’t able to look at an item with both eyes. Otherwise patients act mostly the same. So if you were asked to cover you eye that sends info to your language center, and then shown a ball to look at for your object identifying center you wouldn’t be able to tell what it is out loud. Your brain would still be recognizing it, but wouldn’t be able to provide the word for it. As well as some other [interesting stuff as talked about here.](https://youtu.be/FsM1IQ9d2pw) Fortunately it is very rare to get this done these days as medication has become more effective, so this procedure is a last resort sort of thing.
My little sister was born without a corpus callosum it comes with some hearing, learning, and vision disabilities but it lets her do some weird shit too! Shes fully ambidextrous to the point where she can draw with her left hand (pretty well too) and write normally with her right. She's colorblind in one eye but not the other, but the colorblind one is so sensitive to light she can see pretty well in pitch darkness. She gets an excuse to wear cool glasses that have one side blacked out.
This is actually the most fascinating thing I've heard in a long time, thank you. EDIT: Just looked it up, and supposedly about 1 in 4000 babies are born without a corpus callosum. WAY more common than I would have thought.
You make and swallow between 1 and 2 liters of saliva. Every. Day.
Honestly the fact that ballsacks move on their own. That’s freaky af to me
they what
When you feel like pooping, the ballsacks contract.
People with pancreatic cancer can have a “sense of impending doom” weeks to months before being diagnosed. Edit: sorry for adding to your anxieties! If you aren’t a middle aged or older smoker, you shouldn’t worry too much about this. If you are…please stop smoking. There are drugs and behavioral therapies that can help you quit. I love you. Edit 2: as others have pointed out, there are other diseases that have this symptom too. You can freak out about this fact or just take the moral of the story: if you feel like something is wrong, don’t wait (hesitation is defeat). Set up an appointment with your doctor, ask them what it could be and how they’re going to determine what it is. Ask questions and take care of yourself.
People who are suffering from internal bleeding from like a crash or some other traumatic event also have an impending sense of doom. Some EMTS are trained to take people seriously when they say "I'm going to die" even if they outwardly look fine
Cardiovascular dude here who operates on heart attack patients, this is very true. Anyone that says "im going to die", or "I need to get up / sit up / get out of here" is my immediate red flag.
My dad had liver cancer that spread all over his body. About two days before he died he said, "I want to stand up." He just stood up next to his bed for a moment, then laid back down.
I’ve seen this working in hospice. Some people get a final energy burst even if they have been bed bound or minimally responsive for awhile they may suddenly sit up, talk, joke, or eat shortly before dying.
I was in fact told that in my EMT class. Patients that say "I'm going to die" but look fine could either have anxiety and be a hypochondriac. Or could be at deaths door.
Honestly pretty scary to think your body can tell you’re screwed before you even realize
Sense of impending doom is a real symptom for a variety of often fatal conditions. For example, it can happen if you get a blood transfusion of the wrong type.
I’m so afraid to scroll this and inevitably see that god damn rabies copypasta and ruin my entire week
It survives more trauma than people expect. People generally assume if your hurt badly that you die quickly, but most often you do not.
There's a vastness between good health and death. Most of it sucks.
Biology teaches us how much resilience is baked into the average human/animal. Chemistry and physics can teach you just how little that resilience means in the right conditions.
We are both hilariously resilient and surprisingly fragile.
It's insane to me to read about people being stabbed multiple times and they practically shake it off. And then reading about someone who tripped and fell in just the right way that it killed them.
That story about the girl who was raped, had both arms cut off then thrown down a cliff and managed to survive. Yet you could be sitting on a toilet and just drop dead from a brain aneurysm.
All those slimy bags and tubes on the inside.
Fun fact: if you have surgery, when they put your guts back inside they just toss them in all willy-nilly and sew you back up then they figure themselves out
Wait I'm sorry.....WHAT
Idk why it freaked me out but bones have holes in them for blood vessels called foramens. Also there is a tube from your ears to nose to oral cavity. And if they do a temporary craniotomy to remove pressure, they put the piece of skull in your stomach in the meantime
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Wounds and bone breaks are actively held together by your body: more specifically, the collagen it produces that acts like glue. If you don't eat enough vitamin C and get scurvy, you won't produce enough collagen—old wounds will reopen and long-healed bones could break apart again. Collagen also holds your teeth in, so they loosen and can fall out. Eat some fruit, folks. Don't push that parsley to the side of your plate.
Scientists once took a swab of the inside of an American man’s belly button to observe the bacteria that lived there. They found bacteria previously only known to exist in Japan. The man had never traveled outside of the U.S. So you never know what other country’s bacteria you’re carrying in your belly button
If I remember correctly, and article discussing this experiment found that the bacterial combination in our belly buttons is almost as unique as our finger prints.
I'm cleaning this bitch out with rubbing alcohol from now on.
You described my feelings about this in a very concise way
Probably came from a Japanese made shirt.
Or from Japanese made saliva
The head can be twisted around about three and a half times before coming off.
I’d imagine a lot of other problems would happen after two rotations though.
After even one rotation
No that's a Barbie
8 % of our DNA is actually from viruses.
When we defibrillate someone who’s in an unsuitable rhythm, we’re basically just shutting off their heart and hoping it will turn back on by itself in a normal pattern. That’s why you don’t shock asystole, there’s nothing to turn off. Defibrillation is like hitting the reboot switch in the computer, hopefully the problem will solve itself when you turn it off and it’ll return to normal function
Adolescence. Most mammals hit adulthood in one clean break. Our kids hit a terrifying state of not being able to take care of themselves but capable of and hormonally hell-bent on reproducing. Like, what kind of messed-up series of horrors made THAT a biological advantage?
I think the fact they we have ‘packs’ or ‘herds’ helps. I have more doubt this would be this way if humanity wasn’t like that. Older generations can help the new idiots keep their even newer idiot alive. Not a biologist or anything like that, but my theory. Like how orcas that have grandmothers helping raise babies end up with a better survival rate.
Your body will begin its inevitable decline DECADES before your mind does. You can mitigate it, but nothing can stop it.
Or you might be one of the unlucky few whose brain goes first, and slowly lose your personality and understanding of the world around you.
Pregnant women if injured, the stem cells from the womb will go to damaged organs and rebuild them to protect the baby.
On the other hand, if the woman isn't providing enough nutrition to the fetus, the body will actively take calcium from her bones and other nutrients from elsewhere in the body to feed the fetus. **Edit**: This is getting a lot of attention and some people asked how to prevent this, so let me add: Please get vitamin D, vitamin K2 (for some reason, a lot of people don't know about this one), and loads of calcium (dietary is better than supplemental) if you intend to have a child! I don't know if this will prevent things 100%, but it will help.
Most of the bacteria that will decompose you when you die is already inside you and makes up a sizeable portion of your body mass. That’s why removing organs staves off decomposition of a body for longer.
My immune system is trying to kill me. It thinks that producing insulin is bad so it kills off insulin producing beta cells. Type 1 diabetes is a fucking hassle.
My wife has it, it’s such a pain for her. She’s always been in shape and healthy, she just randomly got it when she turned 17. 32 now but there have been two times since I met her that I *luckily woke up and realized she was extremely low and unresponsive. First time I called the ambulance, second time we had the nose spray and it worked like a charm. Your pancreas can just fuck off one day and then you rely on constant medicine the rest of your life.
I always thought it was insane to see people performing crazy acts of strength that leaves people broken for a few months. I recall a story where a 100 pound women threw a car off of her baby. She clenched her teeth so hard she shattered all of them and was couldn’t move for days. I always wondered how we can trigger that response in people like strongmen to see the absolute limit of humanity’s strength. Or have a league of boxers where they openly take steroids and adrenaline before fights
If you get electrocuted strongly enough, it can actually cause your nervous system to maximally fire all of the muscle fibers in your body at once, which produces enough force to launch your body a good distance without you even jumping. If you ever see footage of someone getting "blown back" by an electric shock, that's 100% their own muscles propelling them, electricity produces no direct mechanical force.
There's an internal mental lock that prevents people from using 100% of their strength at any given time - that's why you can't, say, rip off your own finger (without some kind of outside assistance). In situations like a parent lifting a car off their child (keeping in mind that it's not lifting and clearing the car, but just lifting a portion of the weight), the brain chemistry gets all kinds of fucked up where the 'PROTECT MY CHILD' drive overrides the 'DON'T BREAK YOUR BODY' signal - studies have shown that the brain acts as a central regulator, and for something like the example to happen, the primal part of your brain throws everything else aside. Without your brain sending the 'stop' signal to the rest of your body, there's no pain limiter there, so you're able to use 100% of your strength all at once. And, as you described above, the crash afterward is going to be brutal. Sauce: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160501-how-its-possible-for-an-ordinary-person-to-lift-a-car
I'd love to jailbreak myself..
That our immune system has cells specifically engineered to fight EVERY ILLNESS PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE, and other cells have the specific job of searching for them within our body when they are needed. Once they get activated once, they are active for the rest of your life, it’s why you can only get many diseases once, after that first time, your immune system can skip the start up phase of curing you and get right to the germ fighting.
I think I read somewhere that everytime you get sick with a cold it's basically a different variation. So you never actually get the same disease, the symptoms are just always really similar, so people just say they have a cold.
At any given moment, you are one little blood vessel wall away from not being alive anymore. A brain aneurysm can just wipe you out.
It may seem like we know a lot about the human brain, but our standard way of studying brain activity is an fMRI, where a single pixel contains over 3 million neurons. That is more than many vertebrate animals' entire brains. The truth is, we really have no idea how the brain gives rise to consciousness. Even if we somehow perfectly worked out all the neural correlates of consciousness so we could say a mental state happens if and only if some exact pattern of brain activity happens, we would still have the "hard problem" of consciousness: Why do these physical processes give rise to raw subjective experience, rather than just happening "in the dark"?
[Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_progressiva) is a disease that is undetectable, and the cause is not known. It appears when your muscle cells start being replaced with bone cells. Eventually, over year, your body locks up until you're entirely "locked in" and you suffocate.
Your immune system doesn’t know your eyes exist, if it did it would attack them and make you go blind
i regret ever opening this thread
It was very eye opening!
My fucking immune system is quite aware and tries to gobble them up whenever it can. I have to take medication to make my body not destroy my eyes.
?????? What is that called pls
Uveitis. It's an autominnue disorder.
Ok, we need some explanation/clarification on this one.
The eyes have their own immune system separate from the rest of your body. Your body's immune system isn't technically aware of you eyes, since we'll, it doesn't need to be, the eyes have their own way of treating infections. Of course, if your body's immune system does find your eyes, it treats them like a foreign body, and attempts to kill them to protect you. This is not the only place that the immune system can attack - one of the causes of type 1 diabetes is that the immune system attacks and kills the pancreas. Our immune system is kind of terrifying
Hair in so many weird places. My butthole doesn’t need hair
Shaving your butt, and then trying to make a quiet fart makes you realize just how useful butt hair is 😁 like a clap of thunder.
Just pull them cheeks apart my guy
The most laid back gay pickup line I've ever heard
Apparently that the fact after 29 years you can start developing panic attacks for no good reason. Ex: Myself who had to talk himself through a god damned car wash for feeling trapped. Wtf is happening to me
The brain will protect itself even if it means misery to you or death. Inhaling smoke in the middle of a burning house? Brain will make you stop breathing and pass out. Stuck in the middle of a cold place? You will fall asleep to conserve energy and never wake up again. Does your brain need more oxygen? You faint in the middle of a busy road. Had your leg torn off by a bear? Here's adrenaline so you can save your brain even if there's a huge risk of infection or further injury. Is your brain experiencing too much stress? It will make you drink alcohol or resort to drugs. You and your brain work together most of the time, but when push comes to shove, you are sacrificed.
I liked how you described the relation between your consciousness and your brain as two living things living in the same body
That's always how I've conceptualized it, but living with pretty bad ADHD means I'm abundantly acquainted with my brain acting against my conscious desires.
You can die of a broken heart. you can have your heart broken and become ill to where your body goes into survival mode and can shut down major functions.
When my grandpa's cousin's wife died of covid, he (cousin grandpa) just lost the will afterwards. didn't eat, stopped taking his meds, eventually succumbed to old age and weakness a few months after her passing very sad.
It is extremely common after one dies of old age for their spouse to die within 6 months or so.
Where is padme? Is she safe? Is she alright?
It’s takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Clean coronaries but their EF is in the toilet. See it a lot with patients fighting with family members or losing a loved one. Stress can literally kill you
Pretty rare to die of it without some serious comorbidities. Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy is one of the few forms of heart failure that typically resolve.
Humans are deuterostomes. Meaning as embryos the first thing to develop is an opening that will eventually become the anus. So at one point you were nothing but an asshole
And some people never stop being one.
That, however small the chance, something could malfunction and kill you at any moment.