The fun fact thread

Hey duders. I recently learned a fun fact that really blew my mind. For that reason, I thought it could be awesome to create a thread full of fun facts. It's a great way to both have your mind blown, and learn something at the same time.

There's just one rule to this thread. You have to be able to prove your fun fact. There's tons of fun facts out there that simply aren't true. So include a reference along with your fun fact.

Okay, let me get this ball rolling. So what's the thing I learned that sparked this whole thread? The fact that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is prequel! I really had no idea until I saw this Watchmojo Top 10 video. I had to double check it, and it seems to be true. Weird!

Okay, that shouldn't be too hard to top, so you're up!

I have a few psychology ones from school. These came from my undergrad and grad school and I've been out of grad school for about 2-3 years now so these might not be true anymore. That said...

-We still don't know how Asprin works.

-We also don't know, for certain, why we sleep and dream. We just have models and theories.

-No one can literally live in the present, strictly speaking. This is because of how signals are sent through our brains. There's always a delay before we are aware of something happening. This delay is in milliseconds. But still.

-Nearly every diagnosis that can be given, with the DSM-V, has 'difficulty concentrating' as a symptom. Which makes diagnosing ADHD a bit difficult. In fact, there's so much symptom overlap and so many diagnoses that one client could be given wildly different diagnoses by different clinicians.

-I believe the last predicted number of neurons in the average brain was 300 billion.

-Your body runs on electricity...kinda. In order for your neurons to release neurotransmitters, they need to reach a certain electrical charge. When I was in school, the charge was between -70 to -80 millivolts.

-Serotonin, a neurotransmitter, is believed to be involved with mood. It's thought that if you have too little serotonin you become depressed. But, oddly, if you have too much serotonin you can become psychotic. If you have way too much serotonin you can develop 'serotonin syndrome' and die.

-Freud was one of the first people to study the effects of war on soldiers (after WW1). In fact, Freud has gotten a bit of an unfair rep considering how much people steal from him (often without giving him much credit). Transference and countertransference, projection, the idea that childhood experiences could effect adults, the therapeutic relationship, splitting. All Freud's doing.

-You have a blind spot. Your brain fills in that spot for you.

-Reflexes, such as pulling your hand back away from something that's hot, doesn't require your brain's input. A reflex response sends a signal which travels from the effected area, to the spine and here it splits. One signal travels up to your brain so that you're aware you are hurt. The second signal stops at the spine and a new signal is sent to the effected area so that it can react more quickly. If your body had to wait for your brain to respond you would be in the hurtful situation even longer. So your body, specifically your spine, has evolved to take over this function. So in essence your body has the ability to think without your brain's approval.

Fun Fact!

im gay

I would try and write it down myself but i'm a bit too tired after all this studying. Anyway's here's what I'm studying from wiki:

In three dimensions the consequence of the Brouwer fixed-point theorem is that, no matter how much you stir a cocktail in a glass, when the liquid has come to rest some point in the liquid will end up in exactly the same place in the glass as before you took any action, assuming that the final position of each point is a continuous function of its original position, and that the liquid after stirring is contained within the space originally taken up by it.

@jasonr86: Recent research on sleep are increasingly pointing towards memory consolidation as one of the multiple functions of sleep and then there are findings by neuroscientists that we become conscious of our body's actions 7~8 seconds after our body has gone ahead with the action.

You can play tic-tac-toe against DNA. Scientists used DNA circuits to create logic gates, and the system called MAYA-II is smart enough to play the game and win.

Information is a definite quantity in physics. Weird things can happen with things such a black holes, as the singularity effect would destroy information, so there could be an virtual holographic projection effect to conserve information. Some scientists are looking for pixelisation of the universe at very the smallest level, meaning the universe as we know it could be virtual.

Due to quantum uncertainty, even if you had a completely empty box there would still be a bunch of energy in it. This because you are not allowed to know there is zero energy. You can actually get a force out of empty space, this is called the Casimir effect. This leads to space being interpreted as having infinite energy, which is side-stepped by physics not solved.

Atoms are 99% empty space and our observations directly effect the way we perceive matter in our reality. Or something like that. *kanye shrug*

The Chupa Chups logo was designed by Salvador Dali

In my psychology class I learned that woman have more taste buds on their tongue compared to men. why I learned that in psyche and not bio or something else is beyond me.

Seth MacFarlane was supposed to be on one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center Towers, but missed his flight due to a night of drinking!

REAL men have long ring fingers. No seriously, the lenght of your ring finger is a measure for how much testorone a man has experienced in the womb.

The solution to obesity is going to be activation of brown fat tissue. Brown fat tissue is meant for heat production to keep your body temperature warm. If scientists engineer a way to turn regular fat tissue into brown fat tissue, losing weight would be as simple as taking a trip to alaska.

There are very strange neurological diseases like the inability to recognize faces (prosopagnosia), the inability to see motion (akinetopsia) and the inability to do math (acalculia).

Strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries aren't berries at all. But bananas, avocados, pumpkins, and tomatoes are! Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry

Most tanks have less ground pressure than the average automobile.

It's more lethal to be run over by a 1.5 ton car than a 50 ton main battle tank. The latter lasts way longer, and both can still ultimately kill you, but yeah

Did you know Ryan Reynolds favorite actors are Albert Brooks and Steve Martin. His favorite singer is Neil Young.

NOW YOU KNOW.

Human saliva contains a painkiller called opiorphin that is six times more powerful than morphine.

It's pounds per square inch, not overall pressure. Weight distribution doesn't magically make something not smash you into a pancake if it runs you over.

At any rate - this topic is essentially a copy & paste spam thread with little to no discussion value. You can find unlimited stuff like this by Googling "Fun Facts" or looking at TIL on Reddit.