30 Terrifying Facts People Regret Ever Learning

The fact that most people don’t want to be around when their pets are put down. Vets have stories about like 70% of the pets they put down being scared and looking for their humans and not seeing them, and dying in afraid and alone. This haunts me.

Sometimes, old people don't break their bones because they fall... They fall because they break their bones.

Most schizophrenics k**l themselves during a lucid period. I leaned that fact, but I regret the day I *understood* it.

I'm a Psychiatrist (MD) and, during medical school, I had the privilege of working at a NGBRI building as part of my psych rotation. My very last day, I stayed late to check up on a man with schizophrenia who was generally pretty disorganized. When I was questioning him, he seemed more lucid, and he mentioned something about studying literature. Having recently been half an English major in college, I engaged him, and he started rhapsodizing about Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, really insightful comments. Then he moved on to music - Jazz especially. I spent an hour after my shift with that man, just listening.

I passed an attending when I went to write my notes, told him what had happened, awe and joy in my voice. He informed me that the man was a former professor, had two PhDs. He said that many people with severe mental illness are "living in one, two rooms of a mansion, and once in a while, the lights come on in the rest of the house, and you can see what it once was."

And so can they.

Over 820 million people worldwide suffer from chronic hunger, despite there being enough food to feed everyone on the planet.

That one million seconds ago was last week, while 1 billion seconds ago was 1988.

anon:

That's a good way to show people how much wealth billionaires truly hoarde.

Tldr: Don’t retire in Vegas.

In some states in the USA particularly Nevada, your doctor can basically “sell” you to a company. If you’re a senior with an untrustworthy doctor they can throw “memory loss, hysteria, confusion” etc on a piece of paper and hand it over to a company. This company can claim guardianship over you without you ever meeting or hearing of them. And they can take you out of your house, sell your house and all of your belongings, put you in a nursing home and have full control over your finances. They can force you to take medication every day for the rest of your life that make you confused and unable to think clearly, until you die. They can bar your family from visiting you as well. And it’s all 100% legal. Before you even find out it’s happened to you, there’s already been a court hearing where the judge is persuaded into signing your life into some stranger’s hands based on your doctors false claims.

Not that I want to unlearn it though. I think more people should know about it.

There’s such a thing as fourth, fifth, and sixth degree burns.

Fourth degree means all the layers of skin at the burn site are gone.

Fifth degree means the muscle under the skin is damaged.

Sixth degree is literally down to the bone.

Yeah... I was a lot happier thinking third degree was the worst.

Manatees have v***nas that are the most anatomically similar to humans.

Manatees may also be the inspiration for myths about mermaids, beautiful half-fish women that lured sailors to their deaths.


Connecting those dots has been mentally scarring.

There are corpses on Mount Everest which are used as waypoints.

Hey look! There is no limbs Dereck, I guess we’re going the right way!

Surgeons used to operate on infants without anesthesia, including open heart surgery. They have stopped this, however. In the 1980s.

There is a phenomenon known as “stone baby” where a fetus dies and doesn’t get absorbed by the body, so it calcifies inside the mother’s abdomen. People have been known to carry around these mummified fetuses for 40 years, totally unaware.

My biology teacher had a Q&A session before Christmas and one student asked if its possible to be allergic to your own blood. Unfortunately you can. Just imagine your own immune system destroying your red blood cells, constant hemorrhaging, constantly feeling cold and out of breath. When we got back from winter break we saw a new face in class, a former student of my bio teacher who just so happened to have this disease and we spent the whole class asking questions. I feel so bad for the guy but thankfully the medicine available to suppress the immune system has made his life bearable.

Tl;dr I had a brain injury and I'm not the same. I wish I didn't know.

I wish I could forget the fact that I'm different from who I used to be. After receiving a brain injury in February 2020 I have both forgotten and relearned many things (even how to read).

I've recovered massively, but many of my old passions have become frustrating to me. I struggle reading maths, code, dense text etc. whereas I used to enjoy leading projects with friends and teaching others about Maths and Science. Although frustrating, I enjoy challenging myself to relearn these things and aim to return to my past skill level.

The real scary part is that I've fundamentally changed as a person. If I remember back to before the accident it's a different person to me. He (me?) acts in ways so alien to me that I feel I so sure never would have acted. Nothing to be ashamed of, they just weren't me. Very real relationships that I still feel strongly in my heart link to memories that feel completely fake to me, as though I'm watching some kind of movie. I even doubt their accuracy.

A person I considered a father figure and close friend passed away just before my accident and I spent my time in rehab not able to properly mourne. Sometimes I'd forget he'd passed away and other times I'd feel like an imposter for inheriting such important items from him. To me it's like I'm tarnishing his legacy. I know he wouldn't think that, but I want to be the old me again, since I can't - I wish I could at least forget that I've forgotten and changed so much.

There is traces of plastic now being found in umbilical cords 🤢.

Forgive my unscientific terminology, but basically there is a female whale (maybe a blue whale or a sperm whale? I don’t remember the species at all) who was born with some type of genetic defect or physical/anatomical abnormality (something like that) that causes her vocalizations to be produced at a different sound frequency than the other whales of her species. Because of this, the other members of her species cannot hear or perceive her vocalizations, so this poor whale has spent her whole life wandering through the world’s oceans all alone, trying unsuccessfully to communicate with other whales who basically don’t even know she exists.

EDIT Shoutout to u/Shadow_And_Polish, as well as several others, who did a little research and shared with everyone that this particular whale is called Whale 52, because the sound frequency of her vocalizations is 52 Hz. Yay knowledge! Double yay for knowledge sharing!

When the Challenger exploded in 1986, the astronauts didn't die from the explosion. Nor did they die from depressurisation as NASA has initially claimed. (There is some evidence they turned on their personal oxygen supply.) They died from impact when they hit the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

They were in free fall for two and a half minutes.

Parrots often bond with a keeper, from their perspective, as a lifelong romantic partner. If the person dies, or the parrot is displaced, they can go into massive depression and pluck out their own feathers.

Every day, approximately 150 species of plants and animals go extinct due to human activities.

Brigham Young University experimented on homosexuals. These experiments involved placing electrodes on their testicles, ect.
These were done far more recently than you'd believe.

Penguins have teeth on their tongue.