From locking lips with fellow homo-sapiens to adrenalin-fuelled chicken skin, we count
9 weird things we do that can't be explained.
9 - Kissing • The age-old tradition for two homo-sapiens
pushing their lips together in a sweet embrace is considered the ultimate romantic gesture.
But why?
• There is no logical function behind kissing.
It’s not necessary for survival, though it is common in the ritual of seduction.
The best guess by science so far is that we lock lips in order to get our faces close
to potential mates, and then sniff the quality of their pheromones.
• If the partner’s pheromones are enticing, then chances are they will provide good offspring.
If they stink like garbage, then they might not be worth calling again.
8 - Laughter • Whether it’s fart jokes, impersonations
or some good old fashioned schadenfreude, there’s always something that makes people
chuckle.
• No one really understands why we have a physical reaction to things we find funny.
Some people giggle, and some people bellow, some people rock back and forth in a silent
laughing fever.
It has more than a social function, because some of us laugh when we’re alone or when
we’re not supposed to.
• What’s even weirder is that sometimes laughing is combined with crying, two opposite
and unexplainable human activities.
7 - Dreams • What possible reason could there be for
dreaming about your grandma riding a go-kart in a snow-storm or teeth falling out of your
mouth?
• Sigmund Freud’s theory is that dreams are desires that we don’t consciously acknowledge
while we’re awake.
Other people believe that dreams and nightmares are designed to keep us humans on our toes
in case of predators attacking in the night.
• Dreams can feel extremely unsettling, particularly if you suddenly realise you’re
in a dream – a phenomenon known as lucid dreaming.
6 - Pareidolia • The sensation of seeing faces in everyday
objects – like seeing the face of Christ on a burnt piece of toast - is called pareidolia.
• When early humans looked up at the moon, some of them could swear they see a face.
A burnt grilled cheese sandwich once sold for almost $30,000 in an online auction because
it appeared to look like the virgin Mary.
Scientists think we see faces in things as a way to help quickly recognise faces in dark
or threatening environments.
• Sometimes once you see a face; it feels almost impossible to unsee it.
5 – Picking Your Nose • The grotty and common habit of clearing
the nostrils with one’s own digits is an activity most people find too embarrassing
to admit.
• Picking your nose is a habit formed in childhood, and is a phenomenon that almost
every person has tried once or twice, though most of us will still frequently do it as
adults.
There’s mostly no reason we do it apart from a craving to clear out the slightly itchy
muck, and because it’s slightly easier than fetching a tissue.
• Kids don’t tend to care about social etiquette, which is why they will pick their
nose and happily stare you in the face while they do it.
4 - Shaving • For almost a hundred years, men and women
have shaved and waxed the hair from particular areas of their body for no logical reason.
• It can be an agonizing process ripping the follicles from your legs, pits and upper
lips, so why do we insist on looking this way?
The most commonly agreed function of body hair removal is to appear more youthful and
thereby more fertile to potential mates.
It is a mystery why shaving certain areas such as legs and chins are more popular than
shaving arms or even heads.
• Some people might argue we do it for hygiene, but it is a phenomenon specific to us peculiar
human beings.
3 - Yawning • There isn’t any one consistent reason
that explains the peculiar and oddly satisfying sensation that is yawning.
• Babies in the womb do it, and so do dogs, cats and even snakes.
It is generally thought that while the body is sitting idle like when you’re tired or
bored, that we yawn to replenish our bloodstream by an intake of fresh delicious oxygen.
But new research suggests we yawn to cool down the temperature of the brain.
So why is it that when we see other people doing it, we tend to automatically copy them?
• Yawns are what some people call ‘a silent scream for more coffee’.
2 - Hiccups • The pesky little spasms that sometimes
come from your diaphragm are hiccups, and they don’t really have any purpose.
• The causes of hiccups vary – sometimes you get them from eating too fast or too heavily,
you can get them after an operation from the anaesthesia, or maybe you drank a lot of carbonated
liquid.
Hiccups don’t have any function, and some people are convinced they can be stopped by
holding your breath, drinking from the opposite side of a glass or by receiving a scare.
• The most common place to witness your fellow Homo sapiens getting hiccups is probably
at a kebab shop on a Saturday night around 3am.
1 – Goosebumps • There are many reasons our hairs stand
on edge, but no one really understands why humans still experience goosebumps.
• The medical term for these goose pimples is ‘horripilation’, which is what happens
to your follicles when a person is cold, scared, pleased or aroused – or possibly all of
those things at the same time.
Back when we were a bit hairier as a species, goosebumps would provide a furry layer to
protect from the cold.
When animals such as porcupines get goosebumps, their spines puff out, making them look tough
to scare off predators • Maybe our ancestors had a reason for their
skin to look like plucked chickens, but it’s not clear why it happens to us today.