The human body is one of the most fascinating things on Planet Earth. Paradoxically, it’s at once extremely fragile and tougher than you think, adapting very quickly, and designed to bounce back even after serious injuries. Some people move beyond what most of us think our bodies are capable of doing, setting new athletic achievements—David Goggins alone has shown that people can endure far more than they give themselves credit for.
However, it isn’t all gold medals and victory parties. There are some truly disturbing and even creepy things about the human body that would sound like science fiction if we didn’t know better. Folks from the r/AskReddit online community shared the weirdest facts about human biology they know, and we’re sharing the most interesting ones with you.
Scroll down if you want to learn something new. Hopefully, you’ll still be able to sleep at night knowing some of these. Got any unusual facts about our bodies to share with all the other Pandas? We’ll be waiting to read all about it in the comment section.
Bored Panda reached out to health and fitness coach Anna Armagno Toussaint to have a chat about how much exercise and movement people should strive to get every day, as well as what people's biggest diet mistakes are. (Spoiler warning: many of us are eating an excessive amount of sugar.) We also got in touch with the author of the thread, redditor u/BathNo7713, to get their perspective as well. You'll find Anna and the redditor's answers to our questions below.
#61
We are topologically a donut. We have a hole in our face that leads all the way to our butt hole.
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21points
#62
All of the DNA that encodes the amazing properties of being human is only about 770MB. Most of the complexity is the environment that the software runs in, not the software itself.
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21points
#65
Our bodies cells are constantly being subjected to mutations which could lead to transformation into cancer or pre-cancer cells. We depend on a number of DNA repair pathways and our immune system to catch these errors and destroy the affected cell but ultimately the risk grows with time.
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18points
#67
Our vaginas have enough acid in them to disintegrate a BUG. i could have disintegrated a bug with my gorilla grip and didn't even know it.
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17points
#68
We know more about earth and the universe than we do about the human brain.
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17points
#69
There is more bacteria DNA than human DNA in you. And don't get me started on the amount of fungus living on our skin.
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16points
#70
Not the most disturbing, but bones are made of living tissue that breaks down and rebuilds consistently. Progesterone (for afab) and testosterone (for amab) ensure this rebuilding, meaning that if you lose those for an extended time (long-termloss of period or unnaturally low testosterone) you'll get osteopenia: your bones will have holes in them.
Second bonus fact for afabs: If you for any reason lose your reproductve hormones for years, your uterus and ovaries "shrink" like raisins, and it takes time to get them back to their original form.
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16points
#71
It survives more trauma than people expect. People generally assume if your hurt badly that you die quickly, but most often you do not.
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15points
#72
The path for air shares some of the same path for food and water, resulting in people choking to death. Almost happened to me a few times, and they were the most terrifying moments of my life.
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15points
#74 Inside Out Inspiration
That our own Immun system can kill us by defending itself against intruders by basically blowing themselves up.
14points
#75
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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14points
#76
Heartstrings are a real thing. The proper name is chordae tendineae. If you thought 'pulling on the heartstrings' was just an expression with no basis in anatomy, it does actually relate to a real kind of tendon in the body.
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14points
#77
I'm seeing a lot of comments that apply to literally every single animal species. Here is one that specifically applies to humans. We're the only ones capable of drinking milk past infancy, many of us hold on to lactase persistence. Added bonus, were the only ones who drinks milk from another species.
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14points
#78
There are more molucules in your finger than there are fingers on planet Earth.
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14points
#79
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"?
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13points
#80
if you need to take a s**t, you can feel it on the left side of your stomach just about near your hip bone, it will feel like a harder lump than on the other side...as you have your bowel "movement" you can feel the lump moving along through your lower intestine and the "lump" goes away
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13points
