destinylaharris

Tag: fun facts

  • 🧠 Brain Static #11: Crows Have Receipts

    Here’s an unnecessary fact for your Monday:

    Crows can remember human faces. For YEARS.

    Researchers at the University of Washington wore specific masks while capturing and banding crows. Later, the birds still reacted angrily to people wearing the “dangerous” masks—and other crows could learn that those faces were bad news just by watching the original crows react. 

    So basically…

    If you piss off a crow, you might not have just made one enemy.

    You may have created a whole little bird gossip network.

    Imagine walking outside and getting screamed at by a crow you have never met because his aunt told him you were an asshole in 2012.

    Absolutely not. 😂

    Anyway, be nice to crows.

    I do not have the emotional bandwidth for a multigenerational bird vendetta.

    You’re welcome for the unnecessary information. 🖤

    Until next time,

    -Destiny

    P.S. Be honest—if a crow started screaming at you every time you went outside, how long would it take before you started apologizing to it? 😂

  • 🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole #3: The Color in Your Head Might Not Exist

    I want you to do something before we start.

    Pick something near you that has a distinct color.

    Your shirt.

    A coffee cup.

    A blanket.

    A book.

    Whatever.

    Look at it for a few seconds.

    Really look at the color.

    Now look away.

    Don’t cheat.

    Try to picture the exact color you just saw.

    Not blue.

    Not green.

    Not red.

    The exact shade.

    Got it?

    Okay.

    Now look back at it.

    Is that actually the color you were picturing?

    Because this week’s rabbit hole started with a question that seemed incredibly simple:

    How well do we actually remember color?

    And apparently the answer is:

    Not nearly as literally as I thought.

    Which is how I ended up reading research papers about whether the color in my head is lying to me.

    Because apparently even remembering the color green couldn’t just be simple.

    Your Brain Apparently Has a “Close Enough” Button

    When we look at a color, it feels like our brain should be taking a little mental screenshot.

    That’s blue.

    Save.

    We’ll need that later.

    Except that’s not really how color memory seems to work.

    In experiments where people see a particular color and later have to reproduce it, their memories can shift toward the more typical version of the color category it belongs to.

    So instead of your brain perfectly preserving:

    that exact green

    it may be hanging onto a combination of the actual shade and:

    GREEN.

    Researchers have found evidence that these categories can bias what we remember. Our memories aren’t necessarily storing a perfect copy of the color we originally saw.

    Basically, your brain may remember:

    GREEN.

    Meanwhile, the actual green is standing in the corner screaming:

    “BITCH, I WAS SAGE.”

    And honestly?

    Rude.

    But this is where it starts getting interesting.

    There Are a Lot of Colors and We’re Out Here Calling Them Like Eleven Things

    Think about how many versions of green you can recognize.

    Mint.

    Forest.

    Olive.

    Emerald.

    Lime.

    Sage.

    Seafoam.

    Kelly green.

    Chartreuse.

    And those are just the ones we’ve bothered naming.

    Color itself exists along continuous dimensions, but our brains are really fond of categories. Research into categorical color perception has found that the boundaries we use to separate colors can influence how we distinguish them. The relationship between the colors we physically see, the categories our brains create, and the words we use for them is complicated—and researchers are still arguing about parts of it.

    Which creates a weird problem for memory.

    If I show you one particular shade for a few seconds and then take it away, you have to hold onto something that isn’t actually in front of you anymore.

    And your brain likes shortcuts.

    So you may lose some of the exact shade while keeping:

    purple.

    Or:

    green.

    Or:

    blue.

    Which means two people could look at the same object, walk away, and later disagree about exactly what color it was.

    And neither one necessarily has a perfect little photograph stored in their head to settle the argument.

    They’re reconstructing it.

    You Don’t Necessarily Remember the Color. You Remember What Color It Should Be.

    Imagine a banana.

    What color is it?

    Yellow.

    You probably didn’t have to work very hard for that one.

    You’ve seen enough bananas in your life that banana = yellow is already sitting comfortably inside your brain.

    And apparently those associations can get involved in how we deal with color too.

    One particularly interesting experiment asked people to adjust images of familiar objects until they appeared gray.

    If memory had nothing to do with what people were seeing, you’d expect them to stop at neutral gray.

    They didn’t.

    For familiar objects strongly associated with a particular color, people tended to adjust the image slightly toward the opposite color before they thought it looked gray—as though their knowledge of the object’s usual color was still influencing what they saw.

    So if the object was normally yellow, the brain seemed to be bringing a little bit of yellow to the party whether anybody invited it or not.

    Which is fascinating.

    Except—

    Of course it couldn’t be that simple.

    Later research has questioned how consistently that effect appears and found that it doesn’t necessarily reproduce the same way across different objects and experimental conditions.

    And THAT is exactly the kind of thing that gets me.

    Because the answer isn’t:

    Your brain automatically paints bananas yellow.

    It’s more like:

    What you see, what you know, what you expect, and what you remember may all be interacting in ways we’re still trying to untangle.

    Great.

    Can’t even trust the banana.

    Apparently Some Colors Stick Better Than Others

    Then I found another study that personally offended me.

    Researchers ran several experiments looking at memory for objects and their colors.

    They used four:

    Red.

    Blue.

    Yellow.

    Green.

    And memory for the colors wasn’t equal.

    Across the experiments, red and yellow tended to be remembered particularly well.

    Green?

    Green did poorly.

    As someone whose favorite color is green:

    Excuse the fuck out of me.

    😂

    Now, this doesn’t mean we’ve discovered some universal law declaring green the world’s most forgettable color.

    Memory depends on what you’re looking at, what you’re being asked to remember, attention, context, shade, associations, and a whole pile of other variables.

    But the experiments demonstrate something I hadn’t really thought about before:

    Remembering an object and remembering the color attached to that object aren’t necessarily the exact same memory problem.

    You can remember what you saw without perfectly remembering exactly what it looked like.

    Which sounds obvious when I say it like that.

    It did not feel obvious before I fell down this rabbit hole.

    And Then Language Walked Into the Room

    This is where I almost lost the plot completely.

    Because if our brains categorize colors…

    what happens when different languages don’t divide colors into exactly the same categories?

    The visible spectrum doesn’t come with labels.

    There isn’t a little line floating through nature that says:

    BLUE | GREEN

    Humans did that part.

    And different languages haven’t necessarily drawn all of those lines in exactly the same places.

    That has made color a fascinating testing ground for a much bigger question:

    Does language affect the way we perceive the world?

    There is evidence that the color categories and labels we learn can influence how we distinguish and organize colors. But that’s very different from saying someone literally can’t see a color because their language doesn’t have the same word for it. The relationship between language and color perception is considerably messier than that.

    So now the innocent question:

    “What color was it?”

    has somehow become a question involving vision, memory, categories, language, expectation, and culture.

    This is why I can’t Google anything like a normal person.

    So…What Color Was It?

    And this is where my perfectly reasonable question completely fell apart.

    I started with:

    How accurately do we remember colors?

    Now I’m thinking about the fact that our eyes receive light.

    Our visual system processes it.

    Our brains organize colors into categories.

    Objects come with learned associations.

    Language gives us words for those categories.

    Memory has to hold onto the information after the original color disappears.

    And then, sometime later, we confidently announce:

    “It was green.”

    Ma’am.

    There were approximately seventeen things happening between the green and that sentence.

    😂

    None of this means color isn’t real.

    And it doesn’t mean we’re all wandering around inside completely separate color universes where your red could secretly be my green and we’ll never know.

    That’s an entirely different rabbit hole, and I am not going down there today.

    I have boundaries.

    Sometimes.

    What this does show is that seeing something and remembering seeing it aren’t the same process.

    Memory isn’t a perfect recording.

    It’s a reconstruction.

    And color gives us a really simple way to watch that reconstruction get messy.

    That wall you swear was darker?

    Maybe it was.

    That shirt your friend insists was blue when you remember teal?

    Well…

    That extremely specific shade of green you’re convinced you can match at the store without bringing a sample?

    Good fucking luck.

    So go back to the object I told you to look at in the beginning.

    Look at it again.

    Really look.

    Because a few seconds ago, when it wasn’t in front of you anymore, you weren’t necessarily holding its exact color inside your head.

    You were holding your brain’s reconstruction of it.

    And those aren’t always the same thing.

    Well.

    That answers the question I started with.

    Unfortunately, it has also given me about twelve new ones.

    See you down the next rabbit hole.

    —Destiny

    P.S. What completely random question should I fall down the rabbit hole with next?

  • 🧠 Brain Static #10

    The speed of a computer mouse is measured in “mickeys.”

    Yes.

    Mickeys.

    A British scientist first invented the roller-ball device in 1946 while working for the Royal Navy, but the word “mouse” didn’t come along until 1965.

    Which means somewhere along the way, somebody looked at the computer mouse and apparently decided its movement needed its own unit of measurement.

    And they called it a fucking mickey.

    This really takes Mickey Mouse to a whole new level. 😂

    I don’t know what to do with this information.

    But now every time I move my mouse, I’m going to wonder how many mickeys I just moved it.

    …and now you know.

    So if I had to carry it around…

    You do too.

    Until next time,
    —Destiny

    P.S. Did you know a computer mouse was measured in mickeys, or is this information ruining Mickey Mouse for you too? 😂

  • 🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole #2: Bananas Are Weirder Than They Have Any Right to Be

    I learned something about bananas.

    And unfortunately, I kept looking.

    It started with this:

    The bananas we eat are basically clones.

    Which sounds fake.

    So naturally, I needed to know more.

    Most of the bananas you see sitting in grocery stores are Cavendish bananas.

    And unlike the wild bananas they came from, the bananas we eat don’t reproduce normally through seeds. If you’ve ever noticed those tiny little black specks inside your banana, those aren’t functioning seeds you could plant and grow yourself a banana tree.

    Commercial Cavendish bananas are propagated vegetatively.

    Basically, growers take part of an existing banana plant and use it to grow another one.

    And another one.

    And another one.

    Which means they’re genetically nearly identical.

    Clones.

    So apparently the entire banana section at the grocery store is just one giant family reunion where everybody looks suspiciously alike.

    Cool.

    But then I found out this isn’t just a fun little banana fact.

    It’s actually a problem.

    Because when you have huge populations of genetically similar plants, a disease that can successfully attack one of them has a pretty good chance of attacking the others.

    And bananas have already been through this shit before.

    Before the Cavendish became the banana most of us know, another variety dominated the international banana trade:

    Gros Michel.

    Then a fungal disease commonly called Panama disease devastated Gros Michel plantations during the first half of the 20th century.

    So the banana industry needed another banana.

    Enter:

    The Cavendish.

    It was resistant to the strain causing all that destruction, so growers switched varieties and the Cavendish eventually became the supermarket banana we’re familiar with today.

    Problem solved.

    Except…

    not really.

    Because another strain of the fungus—known as Tropical Race 4, or TR4—can infect Cavendish bananas.

    So we essentially replaced one vulnerable banana monoculture with another banana monoculture that is now facing its own fungal enemy.

    Apparently bananas have sequels.

    And the villain came back. 🍌☠️

    At this point I should have stopped researching bananas.

    I did not.

    Because then I learned that a group of bananas growing together is called a hand.

    And an individual banana?

    A finger.

    Yes.

    You can eat a finger from a hand of bananas.

    I don’t like that sentence either.

    And THEN—

    because apparently bananas hadn’t caused enough problems for me yet—

    bananas are berries.

    Botanically speaking, a banana qualifies as a berry because of the way the fruit develops from the flower.

    Which immediately raises an obvious question:

    If bananas are berries…

    what about strawberries?

    No.

    Strawberries aren’t true botanical berries.

    Of course they’re not.

    That would make too much fucking sense.

    Strawberries are considered aggregate accessory fruits.

    So somewhere along the evolutionary timeline, humanity looked at a strawberry, put berry directly in its name, and botany eventually showed up like:

    Actually…

    Meanwhile, banana is standing in the corner quietly being a berry without telling anybody.

    And this entire rabbit hole started because I learned my grocery-store banana was a clone.

    Now I know that bananas have been involved in an ongoing fungal war, their family units have hands and fingers, bananas are berries, and strawberries have apparently been lying to us this entire time.

    I was happier before I researched bananas.

    But now you know too.

    You’re welcome. 😂🍌

    Until next time,

    —Destiny

    P.S. What completely random question should I fall down the rabbit hole with next?

  • 🧠 Brain Static #8

    You can actually die from laughing.

    Yes.

    Literally die laughing.

    It’s extremely rare, but intense laughter can sometimes trigger serious problems with your heart or breathing—particularly if there’s already an underlying medical condition.

    So apparently when something is really funny and you say,

    “I CAN’T BREATHE. I’M FUCKING DYING.”

    you’re being dramatic…

    but not entirely medically inaccurate. ☠️😂

    I don’t know what to do with this information.

    Except maybe stop telling funny people they’re killing me.

    Until next time,

    —Destiny

    P.S. What’s the hardest you’ve ever laughed at something?

  • 🧠 Brain Static #7

    Water might not actually be wet.

    Hear me out.

    “Wet” generally describes what happens when a liquid sticks to the surface of something.

    So when water touches your shirt?

    Your shirt is wet.

    When water touches your skin?

    Your skin is wet.

    But water itself?

    Depending on how you define wet…

    it might not be.

    Because water doesn’t necessarily get wet.

    It makes other things wet.

    Anyway…

    Have fun arguing about that for the rest of the day. 😂

    Until next time,

    — Destiny

    P.S. Is water wet? Yes or no? Defend your answer.

  • 🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole #1

    Why Does Time Feel Faster the Older We Get?

    I have a question.

    Actually, I had a question.

    Now I have approximately seventeen questions, several theories, and a mild existential crisis.

    So naturally, I’m bringing all of you with me.

    Welcome to Down the Rabbit Hole—the place where I wonder about something completely normal, look it up, and somehow resurface several hours later knowing entirely too much about it.

    For our first rabbit hole, I wanted to start with something I think almost everyone has said at some point:

    Where the hell did the time go?

    My niece just turned four.

    FOUR.

    And I swear she was born approximately six months ago.

    She was three months premature and so tiny when she was born that she was barely bigger than the palm of my hand.

    Now?

    She’s more than half my height.

    And apparently four years have passed while I wasn’t paying attention.

    Rude.

    So that got me thinking.

    When I was a kid, a year felt like an eternity.

    Summer vacation might as well have lasted seventeen years.

    Waiting for Christmas?

    Absolute torture.

    Thirty minutes until we left the house?

    Might as well tell me we’re never leaving.

    Now I blink and somehow another month has passed.

    I swear I was just writing July on things.

    It’s August.

    Soon it’ll be Halloween.

    Then Christmas.

    Then somebody will say, “Can you believe it’s 2027?”

    And I will become violent.

    So…

    Why does time seem to move faster the older we get?

    Down the rabbit hole I went.

    🕳️ First of all: apparently, we’re not imagining it.

    Which was comforting for approximately three seconds.

    Researchers have actually asked people of different ages how quickly time seems to pass.

    One study surveyed nearly 500 people between the ages of 14 and 94. When people thought about shorter stretches—a week, a month, even a year—age didn’t make as much difference as you might expect.

    But when they looked back across decades, something changed.

    Older adults were more likely to describe time as having sped up, particularly compared with childhood. 

    So the clock isn’t secretly getting faster.

    Obviously.

    But our experience of our lives can make it feel that way.

    And one explanation involves something incredibly boring:

    Routine.

    🕳️ Your brain apparently hates reruns.

    Think about being a kid.

    Everything was new.

    Your first day of school.

    Your first sleepover.

    Learning to ride a bike.

    Your first best friend.

    Your first roller coaster.

    The first time you stayed up until midnight.

    The first time you went somewhere without your parents.

    Even ordinary things were discoveries because you hadn’t done them a thousand times yet.

    Now think about an average adult Tuesday.

    Wake up.

    Get ready.

    Go to work.

    Come home.

    Make dinner.

    Watch something.

    Scroll your phone.

    Go to bed.

    Repeat.

    When days contain similar events, our memories can essentially compress them together. Research has found that routine periods tend to be remembered as having passed more quickly than periods containing less-routine experiences. 

    Which explains something weird about time:

    A boring day can feel incredibly long while you’re living it…and incredibly short when you look back on it.

    Meanwhile, a vacation can fly by while you’re actually there but feel surprisingly large in your memory afterward because there are so many distinct moments attached to it. Researchers sometimes describe this kind of mismatch between experienced time and remembered time as the holiday paradox. 

    Basically:

    Your brain doesn’t remember your life like a clock.

    It remembers events.

    And apparently that distinction matters a lot. 

    🕳️ Which means childhood cheated.

    This is where my existential crisis really started.

    As children, we are constantly creating memories because we’re constantly encountering things we haven’t experienced before.

    As adults?

    We’ve seen some shit.

    😂

    The hundredth drive to work isn’t particularly noteworthy.

    Neither is the 900th load of laundry.

    Your brain doesn’t need a beautifully detailed autobiographical memory of every Tuesday afternoon you spent folding towels.

    So similar experiences get bundled together.

    Looking backward, there are fewer distinctive memory markers separating one stretch of time from another.

    And suddenly:

    Where the fuck did August go?

    Psychologists have been thinking about this idea for a very long time. Modern research still considers routine and memory important possibilities for why parts of life seem compressed in hindsight—although newer reviews point out that there probably isn’t one neat explanation for the whole phenomenon. Our judgments about how quickly life passed can also involve attention, emotion, expectations, nostalgia, satisfaction, and what a period of our life meant to us. 

    So unfortunately I cannot tell you:

    “Scientists solved time. It’s this one thing.”

    They did not.

    Rude again.

    🕳️ Wait. What about the whole “a year is a smaller percentage of your life” thing?

    You’ve probably heard this explanation.

    When you’re four years old, one year is one-fourth of your entire life.

    When you’re 20, it’s one-twentieth.

    When you’re 50, it’s one-fiftieth.

    Therefore, each year feels shorter because it represents a progressively smaller percentage of everything you’ve experienced.

    It sounds wonderfully logical.

    And it may be an intuitive way to describe what aging feels like.

    But psychology’s actual explanation of long-term time perception is much messier than that simple fraction.

    There isn’t currently one universally accepted formula that explains why life seems to accelerate. A recent review of the research basically concludes that multiple mechanisms may contribute, and the evidence for some popular explanations is still incomplete. 

    Which I actually find more interesting.

    Because apparently our brains don’t measure our lives with a ruler.

    They measure them with memory.

    Meaning.

    Emotion.

    Change.

    Expectation.

    And probably several other things we’re still figuring out.

    🕳️ So…can we slow it back down?

    Not the clock.

    Unfortunately, I have not discovered immortality during Rabbit Hole #1.

    Give me time.

    😂

    But if routine contributes to that feeling of years collapsing into one another, then adding novelty and distinct experiences to our lives may give memory more landmarks to hold onto.

    That doesn’t mean you need to travel the world or jump out of an airplane every Thursday.

    It can be tiny.

    Take a different route somewhere.

    Try a restaurant you’ve never been to.

    Learn something.

    Cook something you’ve never made.

    Go somewhere you’ve never been in your own town.

    Listen to a different kind of music.

    Take pictures.

    😂

    Actually pay attention to something you normally walk past.

    Do something that makes your brain go:

    Oh. This is new.

    Research on unique experiences suggests they can create richer episodic memories and change how a period of time is remembered. 

    And suddenly this rabbit hole has accidentally collided with something I’ve already been trying to do:

    look closer.

    Notice things.

    Remember them.

    Maybe we can’t make time move slower.

    But perhaps we can give ourselves more reasons to remember where it went.

    And now I’m sitting here thinking about my niece again.

    Four years.

    I remember when she was impossibly tiny.

    And now she talks constantly, has opinions about everything, makes me cupcakes, cuddles with me, runs around my house, and occasionally calls inanimate objects “mother fuckers.”

    🥲😂

    Maybe those four years didn’t disappear.

    Maybe they’re just stored differently than they felt while I was living them.

    And maybe that’s why watching children grow is such a strange way of measuring time.

    You don’t notice it happening every day.

    Then one day you look at them and realize an entire version of them is already gone.

    The baby became a toddler.

    The toddler became a little kid.

    And somehow, while you were busy living your ordinary Tuesdays, years happened.

    Well.

    This was supposed to be a fun little question.

    Now I’m staring into the void.

    Excellent.

    I came here wondering why childhood summers seemed to last forever.

    I am leaving with an existential crisis and the sudden urge to make my life slightly less repetitive.

    Rabbit hole successfully entered. 🐇🕳️

    Until next time,

    — Destiny

    P.S. What completely random question should I fall down the rabbit hole with next?

    Sources & Further Reading

    For this one, I’d put a small sources section at the bottom—not nearly as elaborate as History After Dark, but enough that readers can follow the research if they want. The strongest ones are the peer-reviewed study on routine and remembered duration, the recent Frontiers in Psychology review of “life tempo” judgments, and the Scientific American explainer on why time seems to speed up with age. 

  • 🧠 Brain Static #6

    Sharks are older than trees.

    Not a tree.

    Trees.

    Sharks were swimming around before forests existed.

    I don’t know why, but this makes trees feel significantly less impressive.

    Until next time,

    —Destiny

    P.S. What’s something you assumed had existed basically forever?

  • 🧠 Brain Static #5

    My boyfriend has a tongue tie and can’t stick his tongue out.

    I think it’s cute.

    Anyway…

    Crocodiles can’t stick their tongues out either.

    Their tongues are held in place by a membrane.

    So apparently my boyfriend and crocodiles have something in common.

    I’m sure he’ll love that.

    Until next time,

    — Destiny

    P.S. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever compared your significant other to?