When I was about 11 years old, my best friend and I were playing during recess at school, and I was carrying him around on my back, presumably pretending to be a multipart attack robot. All of a sudden, my heart started hurting, and I collapsed to my knees, and the robot was no more. Every time I inhaled, it would feel like a spike was being driven into my heart, and my breathing got completely shallow. I was sure I was done for, when all of a sudden, after an exhale, it disappeared.

It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I learned this was called Precordial catch syndrome and it happens to most everyone. Every friend I've told about it was surprised, and also most knew the feeling.

I collected a growing list of strange things bodies do ever since. And now finally I made it into a little page for others to see:

https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/

It includes a form to tell me about new things, if you think they belong on the page. Feedback welcome!

They left out "autoheadslap", the sharp pain you get whenever anyone mentions Nvidia and you smack your forehead as you remember cancelling your massive buy order back when it was $110 and had not split yet!! It is often accompanied by uncontrolled twitching and repeatedly saying "fuuuuuuuuu" as you bite your tongue.

Yes, a rare but real human affliction.

Very cool site! It's got some Claude-isms but they're not overwhelming which leads me to wonder: how did the author get the overall aesthetic to be so un-Claude-like?

When I see someone else jump or fall from a height, I sense the fall in the bottoms of my feet and my lower legs. I feel both the drop and the landing. It also happens if I approach a ledge or dropoff.

An interesting story about the Photic Sneeze Reflex [0]:

it's one of the things that fighter pilots are screened for. The reasoning is that they can't have a pilot looking down and dark ground, look up to scan for enemy fighters and start sneezing.

Some people with the reflex can also have multiple sneezes in a row.

I find this all fascinating as:

- I have this

- I was also born with no sense of smell

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex

Sleep Paralysis is for sure my favorite oddity. I've not experienced it in 20 years and I miss it. It happened about once a year when I was young and into my early 20s. Mine often had weird noises and hallucinations and creatures floating around. The first few times it was rather scary but then I realized it was pretty neat. The trick I learned is to tell myself I just have to move my toe.

Awesome site! I didn't find canaliths on it so I might submit it to you eventually: roughly every winter I get vertigo when lying down, and apparently there is no "fix" except to "reposition my canaliths"[1].

It all goes away during the summer somehow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver

I get brainzaps sometimes, even when I take my SSRIs daily and with no withdrawal

Fascinating site! TIL the human eye can detect polarization of light (search for “Haidinger's brush”).

Rare but useless Voluntary tube opener here. Ask me anything.

https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/voluntary-eustach...

Something not mentioned that I’m curious about, if I’m about to fall asleep and I happen to hear a loud noise nearby, I also see a flash of light with my closed eyelids.

How is supertasting considered "rare" if it is 25% of people? https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/kinds/rare-ability/

This AI website has very weak sources for many pages.

As they said in school (and is still valid here) - Wikipedia is never to be your primary citation. This website commits the sins of citing Wikipedia and ONLY Wikipedia.

This is a really cool collection! I feel like it needs a manual once-over though, particularly in regard to the images. Having even a handful obviously wrong images makes the rest of the site feel less trustworthy.

I wonder about these sites that appear to be vibe coded from a simple prompt. Has the author even looked at the data or just did a little sample and figured that looks about right and hit publish

Only 30-40% of people encounter brain freeze?

Fabulous site.

This is delightful! What a nice and wholesome resource.

Fascinating, but sadly LLM-assisted writing.

edit: and apparently AI-generated site layout too. Either it doesn't bother me as much as the writing, or I haven't seen enough examples, but I didn't notice that.

This should be taught in school.