Last updated on September 22nd, 2024 at 12:47 am
Humans are a product of nature and our lives run deeper than we can imagine. Here are weird facts about humans that will make you cringe.
I have always wondered how intriguing humans are, especially the strange facts about our biology and behavior, from the peculiarities of skin shedding and the uncanny string between smell and memory.
We are so familiar with ourselves that most of this weirdness go unnoticed. But let me jolt you out of your reverie to remind you of the weird side of life that you are a part of.
Humans are interesting creatures, distinguished not only by our advanced cognitive abilities but also by many quirks that can evoke uneasy feelings and make you wonder in awe.
The study of human eccentricities covers many topics, from odd biological traits to bizarre behaviors.
11 Weird Facts About Humans
Fact 1: You Are an Animal
Yes, we know we are higher animals. But have you sat down and had a deep thought about it?
As one of the weird facts about humans, it’s quite a big lump for some people to swallow.
You are not more than an ape loitering in the wild that houses blood and bones and using the intelligence available to you to navigate life.
You developed in the womb just like other animals and passed through all the processes of animal development from single cells that merged and became a multicellular organism before becoming a brain-using infant.
Throughout your life as an infant, you will mess your mother and yourself up, you hunger and eat, bleed and feel all sorts of pain including emotional pain.
You strive to survive whether by instinct or reasoning or conform to the role placed on you by society.
No matter how much you deny that you are an animal, you will agree that you are more similar to the mice than you are different.
You will go through all the canyons and terrains there are in your surroundings, and you will finally die, be food for maggots after your short life just like every other animal in the world.
Related: Weird Facts about the Woman’s Body
Fact 2: The Skin Shedding Phenomenon
I could remember one time I went swimming during my high school days. I spent a lot of time in the river and I noticed something about my skin.
My skin was coming off when I rubbed it hard. It was rolling out of my body in the direction my finger brushed it.
This sparked enough curiosity that the memory came back a few years when I learned that our skin could shed. Wow! Shed like the slough of the snake? Nope!
The human body undergoes a remarkable process known as skin shedding, an integral part of the natural lifecycle of skin cells.
Every minute, our bodies relinquish an astonishing 30,000 to 40,000 skin cells.
This skin behavior points to the dynamism of nature expressed in our skin which constantly renews itself, even though age will eventually catch up with it.
Related: How to Sharpen Your Intuition
Fact 3. Your Hypocrisy is Mind-blowing
This would probably be familiar to you. Hypocrisy is one of the weird human facts that we hardly take cognizance of.
Most times you are unaware that you are being a hypocrite, but oftentimes you know exactly what you are doing.
You always try to manipulate the truth, hide an embarrassment, or compensate for a weak line of reasoning.
In any case, you know the real truth, but you are afraid that revealing it could cause negative consequences or that you are too big to falter.
Your hypocrisy is not your fault, it’s one of your birthmarks. You are a smokescreen, a mirror, masks, and mayhem.
You are a bunch of instinctive chaotic theatre of cloaked activities, feigned sincerity, two facades, and unending intricacies of contradictions.
Amidst your almighty hypocrisy, you will experience deception of self, dishonesty, and pretense that has its root deep down in artificiality which is just a tiny fraction of what is beneath layers upon layers of everyday behaviour.
Your hypocrisy is mind-blowing, you can however own it up.
ALSO READ: Limiting Beliefs You Won’t Be Needing For A Progressive Life
Fact 4: Smell and Memory Connection
This might be familiar to you, as it is a common experience. Yes! Smell and memory have a good connection.
The friendly relationship between the two is both intriguing and important.
Research shows that odors can evoke memories with clarity, often reaching back to periods we may not consciously recall.
This explains why the smell of a place makes you think about what it reminds you of, something you might no longer remember, but it is there.
The explanation is due to the brain’s wiring; the olfactory bulb, responsible for processing smells, is closely linked to the limbic system, which is responsible for emotions and memories.
This can lead to situations where a seemingly innocuous scent can instantaneously transport an individual to a moment from their past, thereby eliciting strong emotional responses.
Isn’t that weird?
Related: Failed Weird Inventions of the Past
Fact 5: You Are Susceptible to Breaking into Pieces
Fragility is one of the weird human facts that you can relate to. Probably you have lost a loved one, or you are yet to.
When I lost my dad, that was when I became immune to life’s adversities. There was nothing more to lose. He was the dearest thing to me ever. I was broken and steeled.
There is never a state in which you are not broken. Brokenness is an attribute of an ever-failing animal whose every move and living are embedded in survival.
Embracing your brokenness is the first step of healing by picking and fitting the pieces back together for another possible brokenness. You are constantly in a state of repair.
Heartbreak abounds but when you fight pain and heartache, you wreck yourself and deteriorate even more, evidenced in your look in the way of wrinkles, unglowing skin, and aging.
Fact 6: You Have a Repressible Dark Side
“Every man is a moon and has a [dark] side which he turns toward nobody; you have to slip around behind if you want to see it. – Mark Twain
This is one of the weird human facts you will not want to talk about. You are a dark, hollow animal and if left to your own devices, the dark side will obtrude and takeover.
Your dark side lives in your subconscious, struggling to have freedom and expression but your beliefs and the role the society foisted on you won’t let your shadow assume activities.
If you can, creating a balance between your dark side and your consciousness is key to being a great personality.
Shine a light into your dark side and dialogue with it to create balance and unity as you cannot fully know yourself without understanding what your dark side looks like and is capable of doing.
Such unity begets wisdom and the ability to experience the full range of being a higher animal in a world of uncertainties.
Fact 7: Belly Buttons
How often do you think about your belly button – why it is there, and where it leads?
The belly button is something on our body we see every day, but have little or no info about it.
The belly button, or navel, serves as a reminder of our beginnings as human beings.
It is the remnant of the umbilical cord, connecting us to our mothers during formation in the womb.
This small, often overlooked feature marks the spot where nutrients and oxygen flowed, sustaining our early development.
Each belly button’s shape and appearance can vary from one person to another, ranging from shallow depressions to protruding mounds that breathes in and out with the movement of the belly.
One striking fact about belly buttons is its association with microorganisms.
Research indicates that our belly buttons can be home to a mad range of bacteria and other debris.
In fact, a study conducted by a team of researchers discovered that your very dear belly button can house upto 67 different bacterial taxa, some of which are typically found in environments like soil and deep-sea water.
This weird microbial community can accumulate over time, resulting in cringe-inducing realization about personal hygiene and the importance of regular cleansing.
Related: Adverse Results of Impatience and Irritability
Fact 8: Your Earwax also Called Cerumen
Earwax is a sticky substance produced by the body in the ear to protect the ear canal.
This weird secretion has the duty of maintaining ear hygiene by stopping and arresting dust, debris, and microorganisms, and so preventing them from reaching the inner ear.
Isn’t nature itself beautiful? Like earwax like tears.
However, earwax can behave differently from person to person, both in terms of its consistency and color.
There are two types of earwax: wet and dry. Wet earwax tends to be soft and sticky, while dry earwax is flakier and can appear lighter in color.
This variability is largely attributable to genetic factors.
Besides the benefits of the earwax, its accumulation is associated with a cringeworthy reaction.
Many, including you, are embarrassed about earwax building up. And you could even be more embarrassed when caught scooping it out and maybe, bringing it to your nose to see how it smells like. Yes! You do it all the time.
While cleaning the ear often might be a good idea as you want to take your hygiene seriously, doctors advise against it.
Experts suggest we leave the wax to dry out and fall off. Hmm. It would be interesting to know how many who are keeping to that advice.
Fact 9: You Think More but Know Less
Your presumed certainty about many things puts a limit on your imagination, the ability to question, and creative thinking.
When you think you know more than you do, you are led unconsciously to dogmatic reasoning and a locked mind.
You find yourself in a rut created by society or culture and you refuse to apply common thought or reasoning to question why things are the way they are.
Funny enough, you are not aware you are in a rut, a place of no mental progress, a place where the status quo is always maintained, and no creative thinking to progress or do something new.
However, it doesn’t take much to emancipate yourself from mental slavery to realize that the only answer that makes sense is to keep questioning because the journey for the truth comes to an end and produces dogmatism when you stop questioning.
Fact 10: Your Life is Insignificant
“Imagine you are a character on the Simpsons, say Lisa, you hurriedly go about your day trying to fix everything that’s currently “wrong” with your world.
Homer is going to get fired, Bart is going to get expelled, Maggie is missing, it’s a nightmare. Then one day you wake up to the reality that God is none other than Matt Groening, the “creator”.
You and your zany world of characters were created as a way for your creator to amuse himself, to experience something other than “nothing”. So, in essence, your life and everything you think is something, isn’t. This is why you are insignificant.
It doesn’t mean you can’t find joy, in fact, the realization that life is pointless for Lisa means that she is now free from suffering through all those pointless tasks she was programmed to perform and can actually do all the things that she has been repeatedly thwarted from doing; go to a jazz concert, study mathematics or whatever her heart desires.
Good luck Lisa, but you won’t need it, you’re enlightened.”– Stephen Adams on Quora.
Quora
Your life is a flash in the pan, short, and will never affect the world when it is cut short. Your absence in the world will not create a wave so much so that the world will stop moving.
Your inconsequential life is only but a spark in an unimaginable dark, and meaningless in-universe.
You do not matter in the system of things, but you must exist anyway because you are the universe trying to become aware of itself. You are a conscious machine in an unconscious universe.
You are a real machine in a reality without meaning. You could be only a speck in the universe but also the whole universe in a speck.
Whichever way, you are potential dust and it won’t take long before your useless life will come to an end and the universe won’t know what happened.
Face your fear and fleeting life with boldness, laugh at the universe, curse God and be frustrated all you can, acquire all the wealth, and have a fat ego, in the end, you don’t know what you have lost or gained. You are not more than the ant and mosquito that have a lifespan of a week.
Fact 11: You are Delicate and Fragile (Human Fragility)
You are like an ant under a combat boot. The soldier steps on you, then, goodbye.
Human fragility is something you might not allude to, but we will all fade away in a short while.
You end up either in a cemetery or in ashes, which is guaranteed. Oh, boy, isn’t this human fragility?
Whatever achievement, wealth, health, or love of your life you have got and enjoyed, you will be gone. Your life is not just fragile, it’s also ephemeral. It’s pathetic.
It’s relatively easy to break your bones or snuff the life out of you. A single bullet through the body can hit an organ and your body is cold in minutes.
A hard knock on the head can cause traumatic injury to the brain that might lead to death.
That you have not died is not a miracle because your time is coming. However, you can preserve your life, or delay your death by taking calculated decisions by being more careful and conscious of where you expose your life and the risks you take.
Even if you escape all other ways to die, you will still die of old age, so accept death and be ready at any time.
Fact 12: Unusual Hair Growth
Your hair is capable of malfunctioning and growing in unexpected places that would earn your expected stares when you minding your business.
Hair growing at the back, face, on the palms, on the lobes of the ear and in other unusual places is cringeworthy.
This is however caused by hormonal and genetic action, which governs the traits each of us have.
This might be a social problem, especially for women because of societal perceptions that women who grow hair in unusual places are masculine.
But you shouldn’t fret, with grooming routines, you can take care of your unusual hair to align with whatever society wants.
Another fact worth noting is hair conditions like hypertrichosis, also called the werewolf syndrome, a condition where the entire body is covered in hairs.
This leads to serious psychosocial challenges for the person as stigmatization awaits anybody with unusual body deformity.
Despite that, it is important to understand that hair growth is a natural part of being human, and so we are expected to embrace our weirdness.
Fact 13: Millions of Bacteria in Our Bodies
Yes! The human body is an ecosystem, a bacterium platform that hosts an unimaginable number of bacteria.
Research indicates that the number of bacterial cells in the human body outnumbers human cells by approximately ten to one. Wow! You thought all bacteria was bad right?
This surprising statistical fact points to the complexity of life and how we humans are even tied to other negligible lives even without knowing it, because, these organisms serve some purpose.
Bacteria are in active service in our guts to aid digestion, reduce inflammation and break down harmful substances to neutrality.
While the thought of bacteria in our bodies can be unsettling, it is essential to view them as allies rather than adversaries.
Fact 14: The Dynamism of Human Emotions
Human emotions are fluid, complex, and sneaky. They might be there without you knowing, and that explains why they are weird.
Some emotions are capable of hijacking your actions and moving your body in ways you may regret later.
Emotions have become a part of our existence and it takes a very keen person to identify and isolate them.
One of the weird involuntary reactions caused by emotions is blushing, which occurs when blood vessels expand, resulting in a noticeable reddening of the skin.
This physiological response is caused by some emotional stimuli, such as embarrassment, shame, or even unexpected compliments.
The capacity for blushing shows a potential vulnerability in humans, as this involuntary reaction can point to inner feelings toward those around us.
In some cultures, blushing may even be regarded as a virtue, signifying sincerity or modesty, while in others, it may be viewed as a source of discomfort and weakness.
Fact 15: Crying
Have you ever thought about the mechanism involved in crying? If you have not, then you are not a paying-attention-person.
Like blushing, crying is another emotion-induced response that can happen unexpectedly.
It serves as a physiological response to a range of experiences, from sadness to overwhelming joy.
Tears can mean many things. It can be a social signal, causing empathy and eliciting support from people.
But, the context in which crying occurs can be bizarre, especially in situations where expressing sadness may seem out of place, or when experiencing pleasure.
This juxtaposition between emotional expression and social appropriateness often leads to feelings of embarrassment for the people involved.
Fact 16: Nighttime Bodily Functions
Sleep while not weird, but can evoke curiosity if you are a thinker, has some weird bodily behaviors laced with it.
Humans exhibit some strange behaviors when asleep that are cringe-worthy.
These nocturnal unconscious behaviors include sleep talking, sleepwalking, and wet dreams, which have fascinated researchers for years.
Sleep talking, or somniloquy happens when you unconsciously speak while asleep.
This condition is more prevalent than commonly realized, affecting up to 66% of children and a smaller percentage of adults.
While it typically resolves as one grows older, it poses potential privacy issues, especially if the spoken words reveal personal or embarrassing thoughts…lol.
On the weirder side, sleepwalking or somnambulism, happens when you leave your bed and start towards the door without unconsciously.
It can include, going to the fridge to take a snack, or wandering around aimlessly, while remaining unconscious.
Nothing can be more bizarre, right?
Although the driver of this behavior remains unraveled, factors such as sleep deprivation, hyperactive mind, and sleep disorders can increase occurrences.
Another awkward unexplained thing that happens when asleep is a wet dream or nocturnal emission which is more associated with men.
This happens during REM sleep, where the discharge of semen happens unconsciously.
While this may be weird enough, it has normal biological roots and is always nothing to worry about.
Fact 17: Human Tears
Tears, different from crying we discussed above, are a unique human physiology that evokes many emotions and responses.
Humans produce three different types of tears: basal, reflex, and emotional.
Basal tears, which are continuously secreted, serve a fundamental purpose in maintaining eye health by keeping the surface lubricated and free from irritants.
Reflex tears are produced in response to irritants such as smoke or onions, functioning as a protective mechanism for the eyes. However, it is emotional tears that often provoke the most curiosity and intrigue.
Emotional tears are released during moments of sadness, joy, or frustration.
What might be weird though, is that the emotional tears contain a different chemical composition than basal and reflex tears, including higher levels of stress hormones.
This distinction raises questions about the biological purpose of crying in response to emotional stimuli.
It is believed that crying may serve as a nonverbal communication method, signaling vulnerability and evoking empathy from others, yet the social implications can lead to awkward situations, particularly in public settings.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the weirdest fact about humans?
The weirdest fact about humans is that we share 60% of our DNA with bananas, showing our surprising biological connections.
Is human life insignificant?
Human life is significant in its capacity for love, creativity, and understanding. Each individual contributes to the rich tapestry of human experience.
Why do we know so little about the universe?
We know so little about the universe because its vastness and complexity surpass our current technological capabilities and understanding of fundamental physical laws.
Conclusion
Conclusion: Embracing Our Weirdness
While we have become familiar with our weird sides, it is okay to sometimes to think about some of the weird and unusual things that happen in our lives.
It also becomes evident that these weird facts are not merely oddities; they define the essence of what it means to be human.
Each quirky trait or cringe-worthy revelation demonstrates the depth of life.
From the bizarre ways our senses interact with the world to the unexpected responses our bodies exhibit, all show the many layers of humanity.
Accepting our weirdness encourages a sense of authenticity, reminding us that we are not perfect and this imperfection is not in our own making.
So, we invite you to reflect on the weirdness that exists within you and around you. Embrace it, find humor in it, and share your thoughts.
References:
- The fragility of human existence
- Reminders of how insignificant humans are
- You are a product of culture
Pious Clements is the insightful voice behind "The Conducts of Life" blog, where he writes about life ethics, self-development, life mastery, and the dynamics of people and society.
With a profound understanding of human behaviuor and societal dynamics, Pious offers thought-provoking perspectives on ethical living and personal growth.
Through engaging narratives and astute observations, he inspires readers to navigate life's complexities with wisdom and integrity, encouraging a deeper understanding of the human experience and our place within society.
