Whether people are setting up Trivial Pursuit at home or attending a pub trivia night, the basic premise remains the same: they're enjoying the thrill of providing correct answers to questions about lesser-known facts.
"You get a rush or a neuro-reward signal or a dopamine burst from winning," John Kounios, Ph.D., professor of psychology and director of the doctoral program in applied cognitive and brain sciences at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, told Healthline. "I think whenever you’re challenged with a trivia question and you happen to know it, you get a rush. It's sort of like gambling."
Only it doesn't really have any downsides.
To prepare you for these battles (or at least to make your Friday more interesting), Bored Panda snuck inside the 'Today I Learned' (TIL) subreddit and hand-picked some of the most interesting tidbits of information that people have shared there.
#21
TIL that after the Black Plague, depopulation in Europe caused a shortage of laborers, who then were able to demand higher wages for work. Some estimates state that the typical worker's wages had increased by 50 percent
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141points
#22
TIL According to the convention of Geneva an ejected pilot in the air is not a combatant and therefore attacking him is a war crime.
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140points
#23
TIL about "lonely negatives". These are words with common prefixes or suffixes such as "dis-", "in-", "un-", "-less" but they don't have positive counterparts such as the words "disgust", "disappoint", "reckless" - they don't have "gust", "appoint", or "reckful" as their opposites.
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139points
#24
TIL the last French soldier to die in WW1 was killed 15 minutes before the ceasefire. He was delivering a message to his unit that soup would be served for lunch.
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137points
#25
TIL that in USA, parents are 12.7% less likely to be happy than childless people.
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136points
#26
TIL that the North America — and the USA in particular, has the world's most extreme weather, averaging more than 10,000 severe thunderstorm events per year, with more than 1,000 tornadoes.
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130points
#27
TIL the U.S. military has used superstition and pretended to be vampires and ghosts to scare enemies away. They dispersed scary horoscopes in Germany, staged vampire attacks in the Philippines, and in Vietnam blasted ghost tapes which consisted of spooky music and eerie voices. Only vampires worked.
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122points
#28
TIL there were no tomatoes, potatoes, blueberries, peanuts, corn, beans, chocolate, vanilla, or tobacco in the old world until about the year 1500, as they are native to the Americas. This was part of the Columbian Exchange which also included many other plants, animals, fungi and diseases.
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112points
#29
TIL in WWII, Germany carried out only one land operation in north America, the installation of a secret weather station in Newfoundland. They scattered American cigarette packets and planted a sign saying "Canadian Meteor Service" in case anyone found it, and the site wasn't rediscovered until 1977.
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94points
#30
TIL Hitler planned to replace Berlin with a megacity, Germania, to showcase Nazi power. The plan was a metropolis of madness, with wide thoroughfares only for military parades, car and foot traffic directed to underground tunnels, and no traffic lights anywhere.
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80points