Fact-based Weird Facts
Do Sea Otters Really Hold Hands While They Sleep?
The internet loves sleeping otters holding paws, but in the wild it is a rare sight, and the anchor most otters trust for a nap is a strand of kelp.
Home Topics The body and the mind
The body and the mind
Your body and brain do an enormous amount of work that you never notice until something slips: a stair that is not there, a recording of your own voice, a room that looks wrong in a photograph.
The articles here start from those small, familiar moments and explain what is known about what is really going on.
Articles
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Déjà Vu Feel So Real?
That sudden certainty that you have lived this exact moment before is one of the strangest tricks a healthy brain plays, and psychologists have found a way to switch it on in the lab.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do Songs Get Stuck in Your Head?
Nine in ten of us get a tune stuck on repeat at least once a week, and researchers have worked out which songs do it, when they strike, and why a stick of gum can help.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Goldfish Do Not Have a Three-Second Memory
The famously forgetful goldfish can remember things for months, learn to press a lever for food, work out what time dinner is served and tell its owner apart from other people.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Can Nobody Remember Being a Baby?
You learned to walk, talk and recognise your family in your first years of life, and yet you cannot recall a single moment of it, which is a very strange thing for a brain to do.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Your Own Voice Sound So Strange on a Recording?
Hearing yourself played back is like meeting a stranger who has borrowed your words, and part of the reason is that you have spent your whole life listening from inside your own head.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Other Side of the Pillow Always Cooler?
Flipping your pillow to the cool side is the smallest holiday there is, and the reason it works is a lovely bit of physics hiding in the fluff.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Way Back Always Shorter?
The journey home takes exactly as long as the journey out, and it is over noticeably sooner, which is a strange thing for an hour to do.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do We Tidy Before the Cleaner Comes?
You are paying somebody to clean the house, and the night before, you clean the house.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does an Empty House Sound Different?
Without carpets, curtains and sofas to soak it up, sound bounces off bare walls and floors for longer, and you can hear the difference the moment you walk in.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does a Room Look Different in a Photograph?
A photo records everything from one fixed point, while your eyes see only a small area sharply and your attention picks out what matters, so the picture rarely matches what you saw.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do We Blow on Food That Has Already Gone Cold?
Blowing really does cool hot food, through convection and evaporation. On soup that is already lukewarm, it does almost nothing, and we do it anyway.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Last Stair Always the One That Gets You?
Stumbles on stairs cluster at the first and last few steps, and the reason has more to do with what your body expects than with your legs.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do We Whisper Around Very Old Things?
Nobody puts up a sign asking you to lower your voice in front of a thousand-year-old tree, and yet almost everybody does.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does a Sandwich Taste Better When Someone Else Makes It?
You used the same bread, the same butter and the same cheese, and theirs is still unmistakably better, which suggests the flavour is not kept in the sandwich.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Does Time Move Slower in a Waiting Room?
The clock ticks at the usual speed, but psychologists explain why waiting and boredom make every minute feel stretched.
Fact-based Weird Facts
That Fresh Rain Smell? You're Actually Sniffing Bacteria
The earthy smell of rain has a name, petrichor, and a key ingredient is geosmin, made by soil bacteria, which the human nose can detect at about one hundred parts per trillion.