49 Amazing Facts About The Human Body That’ll Surprise You

The tongue map chart you remember from school that showed parts of the tongue responsible for different aspects of taste is the result of a mistranslation from a German paper and is not true.

2. Although “bitter” has over 40 different types of receptors on the human tongue, “sweet” only has one. Being able to detect a greater range of “bitter” is evolutionarily advantageous because the bitter taste usually signifies potential toxin.

3. There is one bone in the human body that is not connected to any other bones. The hyoid bone is located within the neck and is connected only by muscles and ligaments. It is used to help support the tongue, and aid in swallowing.

4. The reason why taking Pepto Bismol can cause your tongue and poop to turn black is because the active ingredient, Bismuth, reacts with the trace amounts of sulfur found in saliva and the gastrointestinal tract.

5. Aztecs took two showers a day and used flowers as soap and cleaned their mouth with them as well. The Spaniards at that time avoided water because it was thought that water on your skin made you more susceptible to the plague and they used urine to clean their mouths and teeth.

People’s teeth used to randomly explode in the 1800s due to bad fillings. Before the advent of mercury amalgam, a wide variety of metals were used to fill cavities. Using two different metals could create an electrochemical cell, effectively turning the whole mouth into a low-volt battery.

7. Athletes are more likely to get cavities. Regular exercisers are “mouth breathers”, which causes plaque to dry on their teeth.

8. In 2009, a woman named Natasha Timarovic was cleaning her teeth at her home in the Croatian city of Zadar when lightning struck the building. The lightning had traveled down the water pipe and struck her mouth, passing through her body. Her rubber shoes prevented the electricity from exiting through her feet, so it shot out of her butthole.

9. Your resting tongue position differs based on what your first language is: English speakers tend to keep their tongues towards the top of their mouths.

10. Mouth-breathing can cause weak jaw development, crooked teeth, and other unattractive facial features. It literally makes you ugly.

The human tongue is made of 8 different muscles, 4 of which (called the intrinsic muscles) are not even connected to a bone.

12. Approximately 1/3 of people have jaws that pop or click when they are opened all the way.

13. Before agriculture, human jaws were a perfect fit for human teeth. The emergence of agricultural practices initiated major changes to the jaw structure of ancient humans, leading to dental problems we still experience.

14. When our inner voice speaks in our head, it is always accompanied by a subtle muscle movements from our larynx.

15. There is a growing consensus that bare-knuckle boxing is safer than gloved boxing. The bones in the hand are considerably weaker than those in the skull, meaning the bare-knuckle fighter can’t punch with full force to the head.

A man with a chronic ear infection cured himself with his own earwax. He was given a number of drugs by doctors, but nothing worked. In desperation, he took earwax from his good ear and placed it in his bad. Two days later he was fine.

17. If you pour cold water into a person’s ear, their eyes will move in direction of the opposite ear, if you pour warm water into their ear, their eyes will move towards that ear. This is used to test for brain damage and is called ‘caloric stimulation’.

18. The reason why we hate the recorded sound of our voice is that our skull changes the resonance of our voice from within and creates more bass. When we hear a digital recording of our voice, although slightly unfamiliar to ourselves, it’s exactly how other people hear it.

19. Human ears can’t tell where low-frequency sounds come from. Therefore subwoofers can be hidden in home theaters or in trunks of cars.

20. Superior canal dehiscence is a disease that affects the inner ear and amplifies all internal sounds. It gets to the point where the sound of the eyeballs moving in their sockets sounds like “sandpaper on wood.”

The lump you feel in your throat when you’re nervous or crying is an autonomic response to stress that expands the glottis in an attempt to provide you with more oxygen.

22. The presence of eyebrows is more important for facial recognition than the presence of eyes. Eyebrows may serve as high-contrast lines that give the appearance of the brow greater clarity and emphasis, and their associated musculature allows for sophisticated, often involuntary gestures that may be discerned from a relatively large distance. As such, the eyebrows appear to play an important role in the expression of emotions and in the production of other social signals, and they may also contribute to the sexual dimorphism.

23. People with red hair are more sensitive to thermal pain, are less sensitive to electrically induced pain, and require larger amounts of anesthetics than people without red hair due to a mutation in their melanocortin 1 receptor.

24. Body hair doesn't stop growing at a certain length, it just lives a shorter life and falls out before the hair on your head.

25. Hair texture is caused by follicle shape. Round follicles grow straight hair, flat follicles grow curly hair.