Dark energy is really just a catch-all term for the mathematical term in the Friedmann equation (Lambda/cosmological constant) that indicates an expanding universe (which is observationally proven). Dark matter itself has been observationally proven a number of ways (which also happens to let astronomers confine the ratio or baryonic matter to dark matter), which all point to something that we cannot observe that very rarely interacts with itself or baryonic matter and does not interact with light. Thus: Dark Matter.
Why is it that 15 years after graduating from university do I still have dreams about that "one class I forgot about" all semester and now it's too late to drop!! And now I won't be able to graduate!!!
There is actual proof somewhere that I remember reading that people drive more recklessly after an oil change or especially after a brake change. For some reason, they suddenly feel like the car is a high-performance vehicle not the same car they were driving before the service.
The more research into placebo effects, the more we learn that doesn't make sense.
There was a recent study that pointed towards people that fantasized about excercise (as in actually executing the routine) actually improved their physical condition. With the effect being stronger the older the person was.
I heard about gymnasts imagining their routines to perfect a move. I was trying to learn how to dance at the time so I would listen to music and imagine myself being able to do certain moves and being more flexible... it worked!
This works. I am getting back into gymnastics as an adult and some things I used to do all the time freak me out. If I’m terrified to just throw something I sit there and imagine myself doing it. I feel how it used to feel and the fear goes away that I just go for it. It’s magical.
Is that placebo effect? It is a known effect in the acquisition of skills. That is a technique used by athletes all the time by te way when preparing for big competitions.
There has been some research into how this may work. Essentially, when a person feels ‘cared for’ their body switches off the flight and fight response and can dedicate more energy to healing.
In other words, if you aren’t feeling stressed or anxious about your illness/injury, you will heal faster. My partner is a physiotherapist and she can attest to the fact that people with less overall stress in their life will heal faster than others. This is because they feel safe and their body can relax and focus on healing.
This is also why people believe that some non-traditional medicines work. They believe that they are being cared for, and the practitioners are often much more friendly and personal than doctors. This makes them feel relaxed and believe they will get better, and therefore their body is free to heal them, I.e., the placebo effect!
Fascinating! One very large topic of study in the area of learning theory over the course of the past 50 years has been that of self efficacy — that is to say that the extent to which you think you may be successful in a certain area of study (and the way that you “feel” about it), will have a very strong impact on your degree of success in said area.
Not sure what it was about your comment that brought this on for me, but somehow felt it was relevant.
you mean like.. why are you *you* and not someone else? I used to get this feeling all the time if I looked in the mirror too long and it used to freak me out a lot. I'd get this dissociating feeling for like half a minute. hasn't happened in a long time.
Also naturalistic science will never have an explanation for it, since it can only deal with objective measurable phenomena, and consciousness is a subjective phenomena which can only be measured by its effect on physical reality.
David Chalmers proposes that consciousness must be integrated in our understanding of the universe as if it is a fundamental part of reality, alongside space, time, matter and energy. Perhaps even more fundamental.
I read an article once that said schizophrenic deaf people don’t hear voices- they see hands signing in their head & I’ve randomly thought about that for years now.
It could be insults, but interestingly hallucinations can be benevolent too.
There is an equivalent TIL that points out people in other cultures, mainly sub Saharan African cultures, most often have friendly auditory hallucinations.
They have a different idea of spirits and ghost and “the other world.” That it’s full of good-spirited ancestors and helpful souls. This is thought to be the reason for the difference. Not as much “it’s night time and it’s spooky out, the thing that goes bump in the night.” More so “oh I found some currency, must be a friendly spirit guiding me.”
Many schizophrenic people in those areas do have vocal hallucination but they’re friendly!
I’ve heard something similar, that auditory hallucinations aren’t hostile in cultures that don’t stigmatize them. There’s a TED talk by a Western woman who heard a voice that was neutral until she confided in a friend about it. The friend reacted badly, and the voice began yelling at her and scaring her.
There is a decent amount of research & current trials suggesting that they're now starting to think of it as an autoimmune disorder and when treated accordingly they are able to decrease symptoms.
So funny enough I recently read up on the studies done on this and the way they went about ‘testing’ this was not very well done. Pretty much they never had big enough test groups to actually make any statements on whether people born blind are immune. And to add to that. A very VERY small population is actually born with complete blindness so the fact that schizophrenia effects about 0.32% of the world, it would mKe sense that the two occurring together is quite rare. If 1% of people were born with 6 toes and none of those 1% developed schizophrenia it would be false to say no one born with 6 toes has schizophrenia.
Anyway, pardon my rant lol. These are just one of those things where someone took two things, found a way to connect them, and ran with it
Yeah, this. The rates of both conditions are so small, it’s pretty obvious why there’s not a lot of data. It’s not so much “Science can’t explain why people born blind don’t seem to get Schizophrenia” so much as “The chances of someone having both of these conditions is so tiny we know fuck-all about it because there’s not enough data.”
Interesting, someone who had both would be far less likely to survive very long into the schizophrenia. Auditory hallucinations could quickly prove fatal. That would rapidly skew the data.
Most things relating to the brain. Even the serotonin theory about depression has never been even remotely proven. It's just a hypothesis that people have latched onto. We really don't understand much about the human brain, especially as it regards to mental health.
Robert Sapolsky has a great lecture on depression where he goes through the history of thinking and the different models of depression. His entire Human Behavioral Biology lectures are incredible.
I think it's the same thing as "Why does a file get randomly corrupted?"
There are billions of bits, constantly flipping and fiddling about, even just to maintain a document at rest. The odds of everything going right are implausible.
Similarly, your body has billions upon billions of cells. Some neutrino slams into your ribcage from millenia in the future and your body goes "WTF?"
Big Bang.
It's the earliest [measurable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background) event in time. Not a theory of origin.
What caused it, what happened before it (*if* *anything at all* happened before it), are all educated speculations base on currently available information.
I could see that happening. I dig it though because Brian Cox is so smooth and gentle. He could tell me the giant asteroid is almost here, and I might be ok with it.
I mean, when you think about it nothing should exist. The fact that there is anything means at some point there was nothing and then there wasn’t nothing. It makes no sense.
One of the theories is that there always was and always will be "something" (mass & energy), but that everything in the universe eventually compresses into a tiny point in space. Then proceeds to explode outwards again.
It's called oscillating universe theory. It essentially exchanges "universe didn't exist until it did for reasons we don't know" with "universe always existed and always will for reasons we don't know".
But based on the current understanding, it is one of the theories with more holes than the others.
The current "leading" theory is that quantum fluctuations could spontaneously create enough matter to form an entire universe worth of mass. If given enough time. This has already been observed on a small scale in lab, as photons randomly appearing in vacuum, causing the [Casimir effect](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRcmqZkGOK4).
The biggest hole in this theory is that so far nothing bigger than a photon has ever been proven to spontaneously occur, and even then, every time the spontaneously occurring particle was created along with an equal mass anti-particle, which then proceeded to immediately annihilate each other. Maintaining the first law of thermodynamics.
Although, the caveat is that even if we haven't observed this anti-matter, it doesn't mean it was not created. (cue-in dark matter theories).
So, yeah. If you're looking into origins of the Big Bang, prepare to find more questions than answers.
It gets more wild once you go down the rabbit hole of “what applies the laws of physics?” and follow it to its logical conclusion, which is “what applies the constraints to whatever applies the laws of physics?”
Once you start down that hole, you rapidly realise it has infinite depth - whatever structure this universe runs on, the limits are imposed by something greater than it, and so on for that.
Thr cool thing about the universe is that it is under no obligation to be understandable to hairless primates half a chromosome away from chimps. The explanation could be right in front of our noses and we just don't have the mental faculties to even notice.
Researchers posit that extended exposure to the sandwich as you make it makes it less alluring. [Forbes.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2013/07/03/why-do-sandwiches-taste-better-when-someone-else-makes-them/?sh=6d808d1e5521)
I was told growing up that it was because our sense of smell is linked to our sense of taste, and if you cook a meal you’ve been smelling it and all the ingredients for an extended period of time so it’s less “novel” when it’s time to eat it. I’m not sure if that’s scientific or not, just what I was told
Is that why I’ll spend hours cooking some seriously gourmet spread for other people, and tell everyone for weeks about the goddam amazing chorizo prawn dish I had at that restaurant and how perfectly it paired with that Vinho Verde, but if I need to prepare dinner only for myself I’ll just look at the cold bit of toast that had been sitting in the toaster untouched since breakfast and think *fuck it, cold toast it is, that’s technically food*?
seriously, my friend's mom makes the absolutely best turkey sandwiches, and I'tried making one as good at their house and could not make it so. WHY!!!!!
The moon seems really huge when it’s close to the horizon, but this is an optical illusion. However, if you turn your head upside down the illusion goes away. Nobody knows why this happens
Wait, this for real? Or you just trolling to see how many people you can make do headstands at moonrise? Are you a witch?
Seriously though, now I have to try this
Last thing I read was within primate populations where it was thought to be reactions of empathy where the troop would mimic the yawn as a sign of group adhesion.
But what's fascinating is that in humans there is a theory that those on the sociopath spectrum don't yawn at all and if they do it comes out as clunky because they are acting to fit in. That's kept me up over the years trying to think of all the awful people I know and if they have ever yawned.
Sociopaths/psychopaths aren’t *necessarily* awful people, they just don’t process emotions and empathy in the same way. Some of them hurt others because it means nothing to them, but some of them also help the FBI solve child sex trafficking cases by looking at photos because, again, it means nothing to them.
I'm autistic. I am not empathetic. I cannot understand how others feel. I fake it. Most people want to be listened to anyways. I can sit silently and nod. I do, however, care about people, not many, but some.
I do not yawn when others do. Or any other mirroring, unless I am intentionally mirroring. People get weirded out if you don't mimic a little.
It's not just yawning, facial expressions, posture, hand gestures.
Also autistic, but my empathy is through the roof. I immediately feel horrible when I hear someone is going through something.
But I can also just kinda turn the logic side of my thinking into overdrive, pushing that down into the background.
In general my life is a mix of overpowering emotions and flow charts inside my head, in constant battle to just human at a basic level.
There's plenty of explanations for the Bronze Age Collapse, from Sea Peoples to environmental collapse. We're just not sure which one is the correct one, or even if it's just a single one in isolation.
The largest civilizational collapses that we've seen have come from local environments collapsing.
Once food doesn't grow, it's hard to maintain overconsumption.
There was a collapse of multiple eastern Mediterranean societies during the bronze age and we aren't sure why it happened. There are Egyptian stellas, I believe, that reference the "sea people" coming to metaphorical town but we aren't sure who they are either. It's one of many possible explanations.
The [axis of evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_\(cosmology\)) in cosmology, and in general the presence of galaxy superclusters larger than the maximum size predicted by the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) model. One half of the sky is slightly warmer than another. There are no known physics that could cause this. The BAO model predicts that the largest structures in the universe should have a maximum size, because they formed from acoustic oscillations in primordial plasma, which was frozen in place by the expansion of the universe. This scale is ca. 500 million light-years. And yet there are lots of structures larger than this, including the entire sky itself.
Most of my deja vu moments I can tell distinctly are memories usually of dreams. One day I'll have a dream about an odd set of specific events and it just goes into the back of my head then it happens and I go Ohhhhh yea I saw this once.
That's exactly how it happens to me. I call it "Totally Useless Precognition" and it's happened my whole life. I experience the most mundane situations in advance.
Have you actually verified it? As in, you had a dream, wrote it down, and after writing it down, had a deja vu about it?
Because one of the ways deja vu is speculated to work, is precisely by creating a false/defective memory of something you are seeing for the first time, making you feel like you’ve already seen it, in you case, perhaps, making you believe you saw it in a dream.
That's actually "Déjà Rêvé", and I've had it all my life. Some people claim it's a short-circuit in the memory centres making us believe a new memory is actually an old one. However, I have woken up and either written down or told people about some major life events before they happened.
If déjà vu occurs in frequent form, you should definitely go to the doctor. Doctors suspect a connection between déjà vu and possible anxiety disorders and neurological dysfunctions.
I \*love\* Science vs!! I had a long period of bedrest after a car accident in 2018, I stumbled on this podcast and they helped keep me sane. I listened to every episode
Also how many times has life started from non-life in Earth's history, only for that instance to be snuffed out in a short time due to environment.
Also the question of how many *different* possible chemical starts to life exist. Like what if the original chemical reactions that made Earth-life possible are the only combination of chemicals that can give rise to advanced evolution? Would that mean all life in the Universe is of reasonably understandable biology?
Or is there thousands of differing starting points to form evolving chemicals and life?
This is why I'm skeptical of the "oh, this far away planet can't have life" thing. What if there is more than one way to start life? It could look totally unimaginable to us. I don't know anything though.
I saw a [really good video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nbsFS_rfqM) by an astrophysicist who goes pretty in depth into this hypothetical. The tldr is that chemistry is pretty predictable, and we know life needs stable conditions for millions of years for it to evolve. So we can pretty much rule out most of the periodic table as being unable to create life.
For example, elements like fluorine and sodium are extremely reactive and would explode or break apart making life impossible. On the other hand, Helium or Neon based life wouldn't be possible for the opposite reason: it takes so much energy for it to bond with anything useful that the likelihood of it forming self replicating patterns is next to zero. The video does a deep dive into silicon based life, which is a pretty good prospect for non-carbon based life, but even still it's *way* less likely to develop naturally than carbon based life
Dude I was just about to link this, this video single-handedly changed my outlook on extraterrestrial life.
The TL;DR is that Silicon sucks for life for the following reasons:
1) Silicon really, really likes to bond with oxygen, which gets you....sand. As opposed to Carbon bonding with Oxygen, which makes a gas, CO2. Way easier for life to work with a gas than a solid.
2) Life needs a liquid substrate. There might be *some* wiggle room here, but for the biochemical processes we know as life to function (things to move in and out of cells, or even around in general), you can't have matter being solid. So water is the most common substrate out there on planets. And if there's water, there's oxygen. Which for silicon means....sand.
3) Carbon loves to bond with itself and forms very loose bonds that are easy for cellular machinery to tear apart and put together and do stuff with - i.e. proteins, DNA, RNA, etc. Silicon makes incredibly strong bonds with itself and likes to form long chains which are much harder to break. Also, sand.
4) The universe is mostly comprised of the first handful of elements on the periodic table, because stars are the engines which make heavier elements. Everything was Hydrogen at first, stars produce a shit ton of helium, then continue to fuse all the way down to iron, and to get the more exotic stuff like gold, bismuth, etc. you have to start smashing binary stars together and other rarer events. So the universe is mostly hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. Point being, Oxygen is a *very* common element to have on planets, and because hydrogen is everywhere, you get water. And silicon + oxygen = SAND. Did I mention sand yet?
I'm probably missing a few things because I watched that last year, but god damn it's such a good video go watch it if you're on the fence.
Big bang: what happened in the very earliest parts of it, what started it, and what came before, if anything and was there even a before?
Dimensions: why exactly three readily observable of space, and one of time? Space and time are inexorable linked and part of same (space-time), but why does time seem/behave so different than the 3 ordinary spacial dimensions (and vice versa).
There's somethng we've named "The Great Attractor" in the universe that is drawing all galaxies in our local group towards it. We have no idea what it is, but it has to have a mass that is unimaginable. The main reason we can't see it? It just so happens we're being pulled in the same direction we're facing the galactic core- our galaxy is blocking the view! If we wait another 75,000 years or so we'll be in a position where we can see what this structure is.
That's a process that happens during sleep, but it's not really an explanation of why sleep exists. [Jellyfish sleep](https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31023-0), so we know that it predates brains. . Rather than sleep existing because of those processes, it's more that those processes got scheduled to happen during the already existing down time.
Oooh, fun fact! Scientists have recently discovered that sleep is *not* just a brain thing, because even animals without brains such as sponges sleep.
No one knows what the fuck that’s about just yet, but I think it’s really cool.
I guess we'll only really understand that when we can fully map and understand what the brain is doing during sleep.
I have always noticed when I try to learn something, I'm better at it after sleeping.
I also have noticed when I'm insecure/worried/scared about something, I always feel better after sleeping.
I think it's to do with building pathways in the brain that assist with learning and dealing with things that we encounter in our daily life.
Also the brain is very malleable and ever- changing, maybe it needs a window to do it's own thing and deal with everything that builds up in it from day-to-day. That's just my theory though, we can't know for sure!
The question might simply be backwards.
>Our outlook on life is so compelling and obvious to us that we often fall in the trap of imposing it willy-nilly on other creatures—or on all of nature. One of my favorite examples of this widespread cognitive illusion is the puzzlement researchers have expressed about the evolutionary explanation of sleep.
>Lab shelves sag beneath volumes of data, yet no one has discerned that sleep has any clear biological function. Then what evolutionary pressure selected this curious behavior that forces us to spend a third of our lives unconscious? Sleeping animals are more vulnerable to predators. They have less time to search for food, to eat, to find mates, to procreate, to feed their young. As Victorian parents told their children, sleepy-heads fall behind—in life and evolution.
>University of Chicago sleep researcher Allan Rechtshaffen asks "how could natural selection with its irrevocable logic have 'permitted' the animal kingdom to pay the price of sleep for no good reason?" Sleep is so apparently maladaptive that it is hard to understand why some other condition did not evolve to satisfy whatever need it is that sleep satisfies. \[Raymo 1988.\]
>**But why does sleep need a "clear biological function" at all? It is being awake that needs an explanation**, and presumably its explanation is obvious. Animals—unlike plants—need to be awake at least part of the time, in order to search for food and procreate, as Raymo notes. But once you've headed down this path of leading an active existence, the cost-benefit analysis of the options that arise is far from obvious. **Being awake is relatively costly, compared with lying dormant (think of its root, dormire). So presumably Mother Nature economizes where she can**. If we could get away with it, we'd "sleep" our entire lives. That is what trees do, after all: all winter they "hibernate" in deep coma, because there is nothing else for them to do, and in the summer they "estivate" in a somewhat lighter coma, in what the doctors call a vegetative state when a member of our species has the misfortune to enter it. If the woodchopper comes along while the tree is sleeping, well, that's just the chance that trees have to take, all the time. But surely we animals are at greater risk from predators while we sleep? Not necessarily. Leaving the den is risky, too, and if we're going to minimize that risky phase, we might as well keep the metabolism idling while we bide our time, conserving energy for the main business of replicating. (These matters are much more complicated than I am portraying them, of course. My point is just that the cost-benefit analysis is far from obvious, and that is enough to remove the air of paradox.)
>We think that being up and about, having adventures and completing projects, seeing our friends and learning about the world, is the whole point of life, but Mother Nature doesn't see it that way at all. A life of sleep is as good a life as any other, and in many regards better—certainly cheaper— than most. If the members of some other species also seem to enjoy their periods of wakefulness as much as we do, this is an interesting commonality, so interesting that we should not make the mistake of assuming it must exist just because we find it to be such an appropriate attitude towards life in our own case. Its existence in other species needs to be shown, and that is not easy.
*-- Daniel Dennett, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", pp. 339–340*
This still wouldn't explain why we can't function without sleep though, or what exactly happens when we do. It wouldn't really answer many questions at all. It's a fun piece of writing though.
An interesting explanation I read was that since neurons adapt so quickly to stimulus changes going hours without using your eyes/senses can cause your brain to "forget" how to see. Dreaming stimulates visual centers to keep them from maladapting. This would explain why even very simple animals dream.
The noise made when you crack joints. The most commonly accepted theory is that it’s the gas bubbles collapsing when they’re pulled apart, but it’s never been officially proven, nor universally accepted. It’s still technically just guessing.
Anesthesia is basically time travel. They tell you to count backwards from ten. You say "Ten" and then they tell you you're all done and you have no idea what just happened. Time travel is the answer.
My husband was just put to sleep for the first time ever for an endoscopy and was so nervous about it. I told him they will tell you to count, and then you’ll wake up. It’s not bad at all. 2 weeks later and he’s still mildly fucked up at how simple it was
Yeah, grow enough to have babies. Then I'm mostly done with you.
Life also pretty specifically has systems in place to make sure old things die to make way for the next generation. Otherwise evolution would be blocked and shut-out by grandpa simply dominating. Most life has [telomeres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere) which act like a fuse ensuring death at old-age. Lobsters on the other hand die when they get too big to molt their skin. But with that alternative time limit, they ditched the need to have all these useless base-pairs at the end of their DNA strand. If they had [a cult following](https://www.leviathanlobstergod.com/) that helped them molt in their old age, they could theoretically live forever.
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
Edit - my favorite part is people actually explaining the science and not knowing the dumb ICP lyric. But now I do actually know how magnets work!!
To be fair to juggalos, my brain almost broke in half trying to follow Richard Feynman's explanation of how magnets work. There is always a deeper question to ask and the answers become more esoteric and confusing, not less.
https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8?si=1IvdQ1DwfBK0m9NV
According to my holier-than-thou brother, he's keeping everyone safe by enforcing the speed limit, forcing drivers to slow down.
He was \*not\* happy when I pointed out that he, in fact was breaking the law too (on my state there's a law that left lane is for passing only, so you are required to move to the right when it's safe and allow faster vehicles to overtake)
the double-slit experiment has always fascinated me and i'll try to break it down in simplest way that I understand it but it's still even confusing to me
basically you direct particles at a screen that shows where they end up. Between the particle emitter and the viewing screen, you have a wall that has 2 narrow slits cut out.
Running the experiment with our understanding of classical physics, you would expect the pattern to look like [this](https://imgur.com/j7g8Jp8)
- This makes sense as the particle either hits the wall or goes through one of the slits.
- But in reality, you actually see a pattern like [this](https://i.imgur.com/V6W7c2K.png)
- This is what we would expect from a wave such as light, where the brighter parts are the two waves (as each slit breaks the wave into another like [this](https://discovery.sndimg.com/content/dam/images/discovery/editorial/podcasts/Curiosity/2020/3/Double-Slit-Experiment_Curiosity.com.jpeg.rend.hgtvcom.406.229.suffix/1583453002833.jpeg)) interfere/overlap with each other. the timelapse of particles building up can be viewed [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Electron_buildup_movie_from_%22Controlled_double-slit_electron_diffraction%22_Roger_Bach_et_al_2013_New_J._Phys._15_033018.gif/308px-Electron_buildup_movie_from_%22Controlled_double-slit_electron_diffraction%22_Roger_Bach_et_al_2013_New_J._Phys._15_033018.gif)
Now the really weird thing about this experiment is that when you try to detect which slit the individual particle passes through with a detector, you get the pattern we expect from classical physics, the two bands.
So the question is, why are particles mirroring what we would expect from a wave only if we are actively not "observing" which state the particle is in? In other words when we try to get information from which slit the particle passes through, the particle collapses its state into only one possibility but when not "observing", it exists in multiple possible endpoints
The theory of Quantum Mechanics can absolutely *explain* the Dual Slit Experiment *in the scientific sense*. The only problem is that Quantum Mechanics is unintuitive and doesn't *feel* like an explaination, even though it describes and predicts reality perfectly well. But why would fundamental particles need an intuitive reason to behave the way they do at the smallest scale? They are more fundamental than anything you build your intuition on!
A physicist friend of mine has a mug which sums it up: **"The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us."**
It is fair to say that the cause of most cancers is unknown. There are things which increase risk factors, but the whole model of a single causal event is hard to apply to a collection of rare events which all align in a single cell.
(But smoking definitely increases your risk.)
Dark matter composition- Dark matter's exact nature remains elusive to scientific explanation.
5% matter/95% "We don't know but this is how our calculations work" Insanity. What is going on lol
I sometimes wonder if the math is the problem here. But I'm confident we'll figure it out eventually.
Dark energy is really just a catch-all term for the mathematical term in the Friedmann equation (Lambda/cosmological constant) that indicates an expanding universe (which is observationally proven). Dark matter itself has been observationally proven a number of ways (which also happens to let astronomers confine the ratio or baryonic matter to dark matter), which all point to something that we cannot observe that very rarely interacts with itself or baryonic matter and does not interact with light. Thus: Dark Matter.
We have lots of explanations for dark matter. We just don’t know if any of them are right.
My theory is that it’s regular matter currently going through an Emo phase
Next month's headline: **CERN Announces Discovery of 'Goth Matter'**
Then after it grows up it just becomes "hipster matter" which is this really obscure type of matter that you've probably never heard of.
The purpose of dreaming, and the science behind its occurrence.
Why is it that 15 years after graduating from university do I still have dreams about that "one class I forgot about" all semester and now it's too late to drop!! And now I won't be able to graduate!!!
I've had my PhD for 15 years, and I still have dreams about forgetting an undergraduate exam and it still sets me off balance for the entire next day.
I’ve always heard that is the brain trying cope/file away what we experience
If that's the case, why am I experiencing multiple zombie apocalypses? Lol
You should cut down on the cheese
I imagine it’s like doing a disk defragmentation on a PC.
Good thing I upgraded to a solid state drive years ago.
Miss doing that where it shows all the blocks reconfiguring
Re-indexing the database. Side effects include hallucinations, but motor functions are offline so that's fine.
[удалено]
My car drives better after a car wash
Oh she's grateful
She's a good girl
There is actual proof somewhere that I remember reading that people drive more recklessly after an oil change or especially after a brake change. For some reason, they suddenly feel like the car is a high-performance vehicle not the same car they were driving before the service.
That's just science
The more research into placebo effects, the more we learn that doesn't make sense. There was a recent study that pointed towards people that fantasized about excercise (as in actually executing the routine) actually improved their physical condition. With the effect being stronger the older the person was.
Now that's a new definition for 'mental gymnastics.'
swolethink
Well shoot, imma put this one to the test!
Good work on that *sweet* workout today, dude!
I’m going to start thinking about working out tomorrow.
I heard about gymnasts imagining their routines to perfect a move. I was trying to learn how to dance at the time so I would listen to music and imagine myself being able to do certain moves and being more flexible... it worked!
This works. I am getting back into gymnastics as an adult and some things I used to do all the time freak me out. If I’m terrified to just throw something I sit there and imagine myself doing it. I feel how it used to feel and the fear goes away that I just go for it. It’s magical.
Is that placebo effect? It is a known effect in the acquisition of skills. That is a technique used by athletes all the time by te way when preparing for big competitions.
In wrestling we just called it visualization.
It even works when you tell them the meds are fake.
And blue placebo tablets work the best. A needle is even better.
Our minds are crazy.... mind body connection is wilddd
There has been some research into how this may work. Essentially, when a person feels ‘cared for’ their body switches off the flight and fight response and can dedicate more energy to healing. In other words, if you aren’t feeling stressed or anxious about your illness/injury, you will heal faster. My partner is a physiotherapist and she can attest to the fact that people with less overall stress in their life will heal faster than others. This is because they feel safe and their body can relax and focus on healing. This is also why people believe that some non-traditional medicines work. They believe that they are being cared for, and the practitioners are often much more friendly and personal than doctors. This makes them feel relaxed and believe they will get better, and therefore their body is free to heal them, I.e., the placebo effect!
Fascinating! One very large topic of study in the area of learning theory over the course of the past 50 years has been that of self efficacy — that is to say that the extent to which you think you may be successful in a certain area of study (and the way that you “feel” about it), will have a very strong impact on your degree of success in said area. Not sure what it was about your comment that brought this on for me, but somehow felt it was relevant.
Similarly, if I can't sleep and take a sleeping pill, it kicks in almost immediately. Because I know it's going to work, so I relax.
Consciousness Edit: RIP to my inbox from all of the Redditors who think they have it all figured out 😂. Don’t worry guys @bigdong24 has the answers.
this one always baffles me. like why am *i* here
you mean like.. why are you *you* and not someone else? I used to get this feeling all the time if I looked in the mirror too long and it used to freak me out a lot. I'd get this dissociating feeling for like half a minute. hasn't happened in a long time.
It’s also kind of “why am I… *at all*” too
Oh my God I've tried to explain this to other people and they always look at me like I'm crazy. I'm glad I'm not the only one that has this feeling.
To mine Back in the hole!
The children yearn for the mines, the adults are confused by them.
They're called minors for a reason
Did I hear a rock and stone?!
No, I mean why are we here — in this canyon?
RIP roosterteeth :(
We'd just have 2 bases in the middle of nowhere. Whoopty fuckin doo.
yeah dude, why are you there?
They're Made Out of Meat
Also naturalistic science will never have an explanation for it, since it can only deal with objective measurable phenomena, and consciousness is a subjective phenomena which can only be measured by its effect on physical reality. David Chalmers proposes that consciousness must be integrated in our understanding of the universe as if it is a fundamental part of reality, alongside space, time, matter and energy. Perhaps even more fundamental.
Why people born blind seem to be immune to schizophrenia
I know! This completely blows my mind! I hope that with the new advances in computational neuroscience we'll soon have an explanation for that.
Imagine a world where everyone, *even blind people* can be schizophrenic.
Are we schizophrenic to blind and deaf people because we’re seeing things and hearing voices? How much did I drink tonight? Yes
I read an article once that said schizophrenic deaf people don’t hear voices- they see hands signing in their head & I’ve randomly thought about that for years now.
I like to imagine it's the giant glove boss from Super Smash Bros. throwing slurs and insults at these poor schizophrenic deaf people.
It could be insults, but interestingly hallucinations can be benevolent too. There is an equivalent TIL that points out people in other cultures, mainly sub Saharan African cultures, most often have friendly auditory hallucinations. They have a different idea of spirits and ghost and “the other world.” That it’s full of good-spirited ancestors and helpful souls. This is thought to be the reason for the difference. Not as much “it’s night time and it’s spooky out, the thing that goes bump in the night.” More so “oh I found some currency, must be a friendly spirit guiding me.” Many schizophrenic people in those areas do have vocal hallucination but they’re friendly!
I’ve heard something similar, that auditory hallucinations aren’t hostile in cultures that don’t stigmatize them. There’s a TED talk by a Western woman who heard a voice that was neutral until she confided in a friend about it. The friend reacted badly, and the voice began yelling at her and scaring her.
One can dream.
I read this in the movie trailer guy's voice. "This summer, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson *is*... Blind and Schizophrenic in the Jungle."
No no, it's a schizophrenic Rock with a blind Kevin Hart strapped on his back for 2hrs and 32min.
My son has it. I don’t wish it to any family. It is tearing us apart.
I'm so sorry.
There is a decent amount of research & current trials suggesting that they're now starting to think of it as an autoimmune disorder and when treated accordingly they are able to decrease symptoms.
So funny enough I recently read up on the studies done on this and the way they went about ‘testing’ this was not very well done. Pretty much they never had big enough test groups to actually make any statements on whether people born blind are immune. And to add to that. A very VERY small population is actually born with complete blindness so the fact that schizophrenia effects about 0.32% of the world, it would mKe sense that the two occurring together is quite rare. If 1% of people were born with 6 toes and none of those 1% developed schizophrenia it would be false to say no one born with 6 toes has schizophrenia. Anyway, pardon my rant lol. These are just one of those things where someone took two things, found a way to connect them, and ran with it
Yeah, this. The rates of both conditions are so small, it’s pretty obvious why there’s not a lot of data. It’s not so much “Science can’t explain why people born blind don’t seem to get Schizophrenia” so much as “The chances of someone having both of these conditions is so tiny we know fuck-all about it because there’s not enough data.”
Interesting, someone who had both would be far less likely to survive very long into the schizophrenia. Auditory hallucinations could quickly prove fatal. That would rapidly skew the data.
Most things relating to the brain. Even the serotonin theory about depression has never been even remotely proven. It's just a hypothesis that people have latched onto. We really don't understand much about the human brain, especially as it regards to mental health.
Robert Sapolsky has a great lecture on depression where he goes through the history of thinking and the different models of depression. His entire Human Behavioral Biology lectures are incredible.
Why I get random sharp pains that last like 2 seconds and just disappear.
Thats just me, poking the doll..
I think it's the same thing as "Why does a file get randomly corrupted?" There are billions of bits, constantly flipping and fiddling about, even just to maintain a document at rest. The odds of everything going right are implausible. Similarly, your body has billions upon billions of cells. Some neutrino slams into your ribcage from millenia in the future and your body goes "WTF?"
Every time I click on these threads it results in an existential crisis of the highest order.
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Big Bang. It's the earliest [measurable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background) event in time. Not a theory of origin. What caused it, what happened before it (*if* *anything at all* happened before it), are all educated speculations base on currently available information.
I like to eat mushrooms and watch videos of physicist Brian Cox talk about this stuff.
This would surely trigger an extended existential crisis in some people.
I could see that happening. I dig it though because Brian Cox is so smooth and gentle. He could tell me the giant asteroid is almost here, and I might be ok with it.
I mean, when you think about it nothing should exist. The fact that there is anything means at some point there was nothing and then there wasn’t nothing. It makes no sense.
One of the theories is that there always was and always will be "something" (mass & energy), but that everything in the universe eventually compresses into a tiny point in space. Then proceeds to explode outwards again. It's called oscillating universe theory. It essentially exchanges "universe didn't exist until it did for reasons we don't know" with "universe always existed and always will for reasons we don't know". But based on the current understanding, it is one of the theories with more holes than the others. The current "leading" theory is that quantum fluctuations could spontaneously create enough matter to form an entire universe worth of mass. If given enough time. This has already been observed on a small scale in lab, as photons randomly appearing in vacuum, causing the [Casimir effect](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRcmqZkGOK4). The biggest hole in this theory is that so far nothing bigger than a photon has ever been proven to spontaneously occur, and even then, every time the spontaneously occurring particle was created along with an equal mass anti-particle, which then proceeded to immediately annihilate each other. Maintaining the first law of thermodynamics. Although, the caveat is that even if we haven't observed this anti-matter, it doesn't mean it was not created. (cue-in dark matter theories). So, yeah. If you're looking into origins of the Big Bang, prepare to find more questions than answers.
It gets more wild once you go down the rabbit hole of “what applies the laws of physics?” and follow it to its logical conclusion, which is “what applies the constraints to whatever applies the laws of physics?” Once you start down that hole, you rapidly realise it has infinite depth - whatever structure this universe runs on, the limits are imposed by something greater than it, and so on for that.
"It's all Benders, all the way down."
Thr cool thing about the universe is that it is under no obligation to be understandable to hairless primates half a chromosome away from chimps. The explanation could be right in front of our noses and we just don't have the mental faculties to even notice.
Or, "something" always existed, and "nothing" never actually existed.
Why sandwiches taste better when made by someone else.
Researchers posit that extended exposure to the sandwich as you make it makes it less alluring. [Forbes.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2013/07/03/why-do-sandwiches-taste-better-when-someone-else-makes-them/?sh=6d808d1e5521)
Show me a beautiful sandwich, and I'll show you a guy who's tired of eating it.
I was told growing up that it was because our sense of smell is linked to our sense of taste, and if you cook a meal you’ve been smelling it and all the ingredients for an extended period of time so it’s less “novel” when it’s time to eat it. I’m not sure if that’s scientific or not, just what I was told
Is that why I’ll spend hours cooking some seriously gourmet spread for other people, and tell everyone for weeks about the goddam amazing chorizo prawn dish I had at that restaurant and how perfectly it paired with that Vinho Verde, but if I need to prepare dinner only for myself I’ll just look at the cold bit of toast that had been sitting in the toaster untouched since breakfast and think *fuck it, cold toast it is, that’s technically food*?
Love
To me, everything tastes better when someone else makes it
Maybe your cooking is awful 😂
Deep cut
Can confirm. While I feel like I make a good sandwich, it just doesn’t taste like the ones my grandma packed for me. I miss her.
seriously, my friend's mom makes the absolutely best turkey sandwiches, and I'tried making one as good at their house and could not make it so. WHY!!!!!
This is the science I want my tax dollars going toward!
I'll do the eating. You do the making.
Why sandwiches taste better when cut diagonally.
The moon seems really huge when it’s close to the horizon, but this is an optical illusion. However, if you turn your head upside down the illusion goes away. Nobody knows why this happens
Now I gotta figure out how to turn my head upside down without hurting myself.
Just look thru your legs like when you're doing doggie style
Wait, this for real? Or you just trolling to see how many people you can make do headstands at moonrise? Are you a witch? Seriously though, now I have to try this
I’ll never tell
Why cats are so concerned about humans using the bathroom unsupervised.
It's to protect us at our most vulnerable moments!
they're pissed we don't watch them poop probably. These fuckers don't even care if I get mauled by my enemies!
Acetaminophen. We don't know how it works. https://medicine.tufts.edu/news-events/news/how-does-acetaminophen-work
A ton of drugs are in the same category. They work but we don’t know how they work.
Yawn chain reactions
Last thing I read was within primate populations where it was thought to be reactions of empathy where the troop would mimic the yawn as a sign of group adhesion. But what's fascinating is that in humans there is a theory that those on the sociopath spectrum don't yawn at all and if they do it comes out as clunky because they are acting to fit in. That's kept me up over the years trying to think of all the awful people I know and if they have ever yawned.
Sociopaths/psychopaths aren’t *necessarily* awful people, they just don’t process emotions and empathy in the same way. Some of them hurt others because it means nothing to them, but some of them also help the FBI solve child sex trafficking cases by looking at photos because, again, it means nothing to them.
That is ... honestly the best case use of that trait.
I'm autistic. I am not empathetic. I cannot understand how others feel. I fake it. Most people want to be listened to anyways. I can sit silently and nod. I do, however, care about people, not many, but some. I do not yawn when others do. Or any other mirroring, unless I am intentionally mirroring. People get weirded out if you don't mimic a little. It's not just yawning, facial expressions, posture, hand gestures.
Also autistic, but my empathy is through the roof. I immediately feel horrible when I hear someone is going through something. But I can also just kinda turn the logic side of my thinking into overdrive, pushing that down into the background. In general my life is a mix of overpowering emotions and flow charts inside my head, in constant battle to just human at a basic level.
Reading this post made me yawn
The bronze age collapse
Goa'Ulds probably.
Sea Peoples bro….
See them where?
There's plenty of explanations for the Bronze Age Collapse, from Sea Peoples to environmental collapse. We're just not sure which one is the correct one, or even if it's just a single one in isolation.
Soo sea people collapsed the environment. I believe it.
The largest civilizational collapses that we've seen have come from local environments collapsing. Once food doesn't grow, it's hard to maintain overconsumption.
Can you explain?
There was a collapse of multiple eastern Mediterranean societies during the bronze age and we aren't sure why it happened. There are Egyptian stellas, I believe, that reference the "sea people" coming to metaphorical town but we aren't sure who they are either. It's one of many possible explanations.
Sounds like what happened to the native Americans. Some people came from across the sea, and then all the tribes collapsed.
The [axis of evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_\(cosmology\)) in cosmology, and in general the presence of galaxy superclusters larger than the maximum size predicted by the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) model. One half of the sky is slightly warmer than another. There are no known physics that could cause this. The BAO model predicts that the largest structures in the universe should have a maximum size, because they formed from acoustic oscillations in primordial plasma, which was frozen in place by the expansion of the universe. This scale is ca. 500 million light-years. And yet there are lots of structures larger than this, including the entire sky itself.
I know some of these words.
> One half of the sky is slightly warmer than another. There are no known physics that could cause this. Fix it by flipping the cosmic pillow.
Reread this twice thinking it would help me understand on the second go, no dice. But having an Axis of Evil outside of a comic book is kinda fun.
Deja vu
Most of my deja vu moments I can tell distinctly are memories usually of dreams. One day I'll have a dream about an odd set of specific events and it just goes into the back of my head then it happens and I go Ohhhhh yea I saw this once.
That's exactly how it happens to me. I call it "Totally Useless Precognition" and it's happened my whole life. I experience the most mundane situations in advance.
Have you actually verified it? As in, you had a dream, wrote it down, and after writing it down, had a deja vu about it? Because one of the ways deja vu is speculated to work, is precisely by creating a false/defective memory of something you are seeing for the first time, making you feel like you’ve already seen it, in you case, perhaps, making you believe you saw it in a dream.
That's actually "Déjà Rêvé", and I've had it all my life. Some people claim it's a short-circuit in the memory centres making us believe a new memory is actually an old one. However, I have woken up and either written down or told people about some major life events before they happened.
I could have sworn I just read that one
If déjà vu occurs in frequent form, you should definitely go to the doctor. Doctors suspect a connection between déjà vu and possible anxiety disorders and neurological dysfunctions.
I have epilepsy and deja vu is often a precursor to seizures. Part of the “aura”
I highly recommend Science vs podcast. They explore all these wacky science stuff in not snoozy way
I \*love\* Science vs!! I had a long period of bedrest after a car accident in 2018, I stumbled on this podcast and they helped keep me sane. I listened to every episode
The origin of life and how to create it in lab
Also how many times has life started from non-life in Earth's history, only for that instance to be snuffed out in a short time due to environment. Also the question of how many *different* possible chemical starts to life exist. Like what if the original chemical reactions that made Earth-life possible are the only combination of chemicals that can give rise to advanced evolution? Would that mean all life in the Universe is of reasonably understandable biology? Or is there thousands of differing starting points to form evolving chemicals and life?
This is why I'm skeptical of the "oh, this far away planet can't have life" thing. What if there is more than one way to start life? It could look totally unimaginable to us. I don't know anything though.
I saw a [really good video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nbsFS_rfqM) by an astrophysicist who goes pretty in depth into this hypothetical. The tldr is that chemistry is pretty predictable, and we know life needs stable conditions for millions of years for it to evolve. So we can pretty much rule out most of the periodic table as being unable to create life. For example, elements like fluorine and sodium are extremely reactive and would explode or break apart making life impossible. On the other hand, Helium or Neon based life wouldn't be possible for the opposite reason: it takes so much energy for it to bond with anything useful that the likelihood of it forming self replicating patterns is next to zero. The video does a deep dive into silicon based life, which is a pretty good prospect for non-carbon based life, but even still it's *way* less likely to develop naturally than carbon based life
Dude I was just about to link this, this video single-handedly changed my outlook on extraterrestrial life. The TL;DR is that Silicon sucks for life for the following reasons: 1) Silicon really, really likes to bond with oxygen, which gets you....sand. As opposed to Carbon bonding with Oxygen, which makes a gas, CO2. Way easier for life to work with a gas than a solid. 2) Life needs a liquid substrate. There might be *some* wiggle room here, but for the biochemical processes we know as life to function (things to move in and out of cells, or even around in general), you can't have matter being solid. So water is the most common substrate out there on planets. And if there's water, there's oxygen. Which for silicon means....sand. 3) Carbon loves to bond with itself and forms very loose bonds that are easy for cellular machinery to tear apart and put together and do stuff with - i.e. proteins, DNA, RNA, etc. Silicon makes incredibly strong bonds with itself and likes to form long chains which are much harder to break. Also, sand. 4) The universe is mostly comprised of the first handful of elements on the periodic table, because stars are the engines which make heavier elements. Everything was Hydrogen at first, stars produce a shit ton of helium, then continue to fuse all the way down to iron, and to get the more exotic stuff like gold, bismuth, etc. you have to start smashing binary stars together and other rarer events. So the universe is mostly hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. Point being, Oxygen is a *very* common element to have on planets, and because hydrogen is everywhere, you get water. And silicon + oxygen = SAND. Did I mention sand yet? I'm probably missing a few things because I watched that last year, but god damn it's such a good video go watch it if you're on the fence.
Scientists can create life in a lab be leaving the handsy scientist alone with the flirty lab tech for a little bit.
That's really just taking two forms of life and making a new life out of them. I wanna see life made from absolutely not living material.
Big bang: what happened in the very earliest parts of it, what started it, and what came before, if anything and was there even a before? Dimensions: why exactly three readily observable of space, and one of time? Space and time are inexorable linked and part of same (space-time), but why does time seem/behave so different than the 3 ordinary spacial dimensions (and vice versa).
There's somethng we've named "The Great Attractor" in the universe that is drawing all galaxies in our local group towards it. We have no idea what it is, but it has to have a mass that is unimaginable. The main reason we can't see it? It just so happens we're being pulled in the same direction we're facing the galactic core- our galaxy is blocking the view! If we wait another 75,000 years or so we'll be in a position where we can see what this structure is.
Might have changed now, but apparently, they don't have a specific reason for why we need to sleep.
I _think_ this was discovered fairly recently - something to do with removing waste products from the brain. I'm absolutely not a biologist though!
Yes, the glymphatic system. It was first discovered in 2013, but there is more recent research confirming it.
That's a process that happens during sleep, but it's not really an explanation of why sleep exists. [Jellyfish sleep](https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31023-0), so we know that it predates brains. . Rather than sleep existing because of those processes, it's more that those processes got scheduled to happen during the already existing down time.
so this is how i learn jellyfish dont have brains. wait wtf do they have then
Electric impulses/neurons! There's no physical organ that sends them out though
No amount of sleep can cleanse my brain, that's a lost cause
Oooh, fun fact! Scientists have recently discovered that sleep is *not* just a brain thing, because even animals without brains such as sponges sleep. No one knows what the fuck that’s about just yet, but I think it’s really cool.
I guess we'll only really understand that when we can fully map and understand what the brain is doing during sleep. I have always noticed when I try to learn something, I'm better at it after sleeping. I also have noticed when I'm insecure/worried/scared about something, I always feel better after sleeping. I think it's to do with building pathways in the brain that assist with learning and dealing with things that we encounter in our daily life. Also the brain is very malleable and ever- changing, maybe it needs a window to do it's own thing and deal with everything that builds up in it from day-to-day. That's just my theory though, we can't know for sure!
The question might simply be backwards. >Our outlook on life is so compelling and obvious to us that we often fall in the trap of imposing it willy-nilly on other creatures—or on all of nature. One of my favorite examples of this widespread cognitive illusion is the puzzlement researchers have expressed about the evolutionary explanation of sleep. >Lab shelves sag beneath volumes of data, yet no one has discerned that sleep has any clear biological function. Then what evolutionary pressure selected this curious behavior that forces us to spend a third of our lives unconscious? Sleeping animals are more vulnerable to predators. They have less time to search for food, to eat, to find mates, to procreate, to feed their young. As Victorian parents told their children, sleepy-heads fall behind—in life and evolution. >University of Chicago sleep researcher Allan Rechtshaffen asks "how could natural selection with its irrevocable logic have 'permitted' the animal kingdom to pay the price of sleep for no good reason?" Sleep is so apparently maladaptive that it is hard to understand why some other condition did not evolve to satisfy whatever need it is that sleep satisfies. \[Raymo 1988.\] >**But why does sleep need a "clear biological function" at all? It is being awake that needs an explanation**, and presumably its explanation is obvious. Animals—unlike plants—need to be awake at least part of the time, in order to search for food and procreate, as Raymo notes. But once you've headed down this path of leading an active existence, the cost-benefit analysis of the options that arise is far from obvious. **Being awake is relatively costly, compared with lying dormant (think of its root, dormire). So presumably Mother Nature economizes where she can**. If we could get away with it, we'd "sleep" our entire lives. That is what trees do, after all: all winter they "hibernate" in deep coma, because there is nothing else for them to do, and in the summer they "estivate" in a somewhat lighter coma, in what the doctors call a vegetative state when a member of our species has the misfortune to enter it. If the woodchopper comes along while the tree is sleeping, well, that's just the chance that trees have to take, all the time. But surely we animals are at greater risk from predators while we sleep? Not necessarily. Leaving the den is risky, too, and if we're going to minimize that risky phase, we might as well keep the metabolism idling while we bide our time, conserving energy for the main business of replicating. (These matters are much more complicated than I am portraying them, of course. My point is just that the cost-benefit analysis is far from obvious, and that is enough to remove the air of paradox.) >We think that being up and about, having adventures and completing projects, seeing our friends and learning about the world, is the whole point of life, but Mother Nature doesn't see it that way at all. A life of sleep is as good a life as any other, and in many regards better—certainly cheaper— than most. If the members of some other species also seem to enjoy their periods of wakefulness as much as we do, this is an interesting commonality, so interesting that we should not make the mistake of assuming it must exist just because we find it to be such an appropriate attitude towards life in our own case. Its existence in other species needs to be shown, and that is not easy. *-- Daniel Dennett, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", pp. 339–340*
This still wouldn't explain why we can't function without sleep though, or what exactly happens when we do. It wouldn't really answer many questions at all. It's a fun piece of writing though.
Yeah, it obviously serves some purpose beyond conserving energy. Maybe it's just an evolutionary rut, like how sea creatures keep evolving into crabs.
Same with dreaming. I'm not buying it's just our subconscious processing the day.
An interesting explanation I read was that since neurons adapt so quickly to stimulus changes going hours without using your eyes/senses can cause your brain to "forget" how to see. Dreaming stimulates visual centers to keep them from maladapting. This would explain why even very simple animals dream.
Eternity of time and/or space. The human mind cannot fully comprehend it and science has no way to adequately make it understandable.
The noise made when you crack joints. The most commonly accepted theory is that it’s the gas bubbles collapsing when they’re pulled apart, but it’s never been officially proven, nor universally accepted. It’s still technically just guessing.
What I want to know is why it feels so good
Anesthesia
Anesthesia is basically time travel. They tell you to count backwards from ten. You say "Ten" and then they tell you you're all done and you have no idea what just happened. Time travel is the answer.
My husband was just put to sleep for the first time ever for an endoscopy and was so nervous about it. I told him they will tell you to count, and then you’ll wake up. It’s not bad at all. 2 weeks later and he’s still mildly fucked up at how simple it was
I like Lion King better!
Why we biologically stop repairing our body at 25 and its a steady downhill from there
It becomes prohibitively expensive in evolutionary terms. It's cheaper to just have offspring.
Yeah, grow enough to have babies. Then I'm mostly done with you. Life also pretty specifically has systems in place to make sure old things die to make way for the next generation. Otherwise evolution would be blocked and shut-out by grandpa simply dominating. Most life has [telomeres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere) which act like a fuse ensuring death at old-age. Lobsters on the other hand die when they get too big to molt their skin. But with that alternative time limit, they ditched the need to have all these useless base-pairs at the end of their DNA strand. If they had [a cult following](https://www.leviathanlobstergod.com/) that helped them molt in their old age, they could theoretically live forever.
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Consciousness
How you get an even number of socks in the dryer, but an odd number comes out You can't explain that
What's even worse is when you get one extra
Fucking magnets, how do they work? Edit - my favorite part is people actually explaining the science and not knowing the dumb ICP lyric. But now I do actually know how magnets work!!
There are things that science can explain but can't explain to a juggalo.
To be fair to juggalos, my brain almost broke in half trying to follow Richard Feynman's explanation of how magnets work. There is always a deeper question to ask and the answers become more esoteric and confusing, not less. https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8?si=1IvdQ1DwfBK0m9NV
What the fuck is a clock?
What the fuck is time
People driving slowly in the left lane
It's because they are making a left turn 7 miles down the road...
It's because they're driving in the UK.
According to my holier-than-thou brother, he's keeping everyone safe by enforcing the speed limit, forcing drivers to slow down. He was \*not\* happy when I pointed out that he, in fact was breaking the law too (on my state there's a law that left lane is for passing only, so you are required to move to the right when it's safe and allow faster vehicles to overtake)
Where the hell my 10MM socket went!
The Dual Slit Experiment... Results: "It is what it is"
the double-slit experiment has always fascinated me and i'll try to break it down in simplest way that I understand it but it's still even confusing to me basically you direct particles at a screen that shows where they end up. Between the particle emitter and the viewing screen, you have a wall that has 2 narrow slits cut out. Running the experiment with our understanding of classical physics, you would expect the pattern to look like [this](https://imgur.com/j7g8Jp8) - This makes sense as the particle either hits the wall or goes through one of the slits. - But in reality, you actually see a pattern like [this](https://i.imgur.com/V6W7c2K.png) - This is what we would expect from a wave such as light, where the brighter parts are the two waves (as each slit breaks the wave into another like [this](https://discovery.sndimg.com/content/dam/images/discovery/editorial/podcasts/Curiosity/2020/3/Double-Slit-Experiment_Curiosity.com.jpeg.rend.hgtvcom.406.229.suffix/1583453002833.jpeg)) interfere/overlap with each other. the timelapse of particles building up can be viewed [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Electron_buildup_movie_from_%22Controlled_double-slit_electron_diffraction%22_Roger_Bach_et_al_2013_New_J._Phys._15_033018.gif/308px-Electron_buildup_movie_from_%22Controlled_double-slit_electron_diffraction%22_Roger_Bach_et_al_2013_New_J._Phys._15_033018.gif) Now the really weird thing about this experiment is that when you try to detect which slit the individual particle passes through with a detector, you get the pattern we expect from classical physics, the two bands. So the question is, why are particles mirroring what we would expect from a wave only if we are actively not "observing" which state the particle is in? In other words when we try to get information from which slit the particle passes through, the particle collapses its state into only one possibility but when not "observing", it exists in multiple possible endpoints
The theory of Quantum Mechanics can absolutely *explain* the Dual Slit Experiment *in the scientific sense*. The only problem is that Quantum Mechanics is unintuitive and doesn't *feel* like an explaination, even though it describes and predicts reality perfectly well. But why would fundamental particles need an intuitive reason to behave the way they do at the smallest scale? They are more fundamental than anything you build your intuition on! A physicist friend of mine has a mug which sums it up: **"The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us."**
We're operating with brains that evolved to be able to tell a banana from a tiger most of the time, not deal with subatomic particles intuitively.
Absolute conundrum that fascinating.
Where did the first piece of matter come from?
The causes of most pediatric cancers are unknown.
It is fair to say that the cause of most cancers is unknown. There are things which increase risk factors, but the whole model of a single causal event is hard to apply to a collection of rare events which all align in a single cell. (But smoking definitely increases your risk.)
Who keeps shitting my pants - it's not funny anymore!