Show HN: Bodily Oddities | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bodily Oddities

vester.si

341 pointsvesterde216 comments

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!

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Brilliant website. And Bodily Oddity is a great name.

I wish I had kept a notebook of this stuff as a kid, I remember having a lot of odd experiences and sharing them with my friends, but it was so long ago now.

I think most of them were visual oddities.

I remember seeing floaters for the first time, and asking my mother about them.

"Oh, that's just [neighbor] throwing trash out the window."

The delights of growing up in Eastern Europe!

I also get these "worms", bright glowing white. I heard they might be white blood cells moving through capillaries, but why would they be glowing? I usually see them after cardio.

Another fun thing to do is to stare at one point until your entire visual field goes grey (the afterimage cancels out the image... "neurons get tired" or something), then slightly move back/forward or slightly rotate your head, producing very interesting patterns from the interference...

I should write a book...

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

I think I just learned that I have this! I usually sneeze when walking out of the house into the morning sun. And regardless of what makes me sneeze, it's rarely just one or two at a time.

I have this as well, and all my kids seem to as well.

Never knew that it was part of fighter pilot screening, that is interesting.

I'm the only one with the reflex in my family including parents and children.

They all think I am insane blaming the sun for my sneezes.

Do you like to eat? Or do it out of a sense of duty?

Yeah-- no kidding. When I was anosmic with COVID I couldn't eat much of anything. Food was just terrible. I still remember the soulless paste that was peanut butter. (Ugh. It was so bad...)

I def have taste preferences e.g. I like grapefruit better than orange juice. Another example is Sriracha tastes great to me as it's spicy but not too spicy. Too spicy and I just can't taste anything.

In other words, I have the same 5 basic tongue tastes that you do e.g. salt, sweet, bitter, sour and "umami". Flavor is usually taste + smell and that's the part I'm missing.

If you are more interested, I wrote a Twitter thread about all of this here: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1559865770515087360

Neat, thanks for the reply

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

I think that is unrelated to the sun-sneeze reflex though, some people that don't have that reflex can sneeze multiple times in a row, and vice-versa too.

Monday is a light brownish, Tuesday black, Wednesday blue, Thursday ochre, Friday dark blue, Saturday white/silver, Sunday black.

January blue, February brownish, March is black and white, April green, May black, June yellow, July darker yellow, August dark green, September ochre, October blue, November brown, December black.

Thanks for coming to my synesthesia TED talk.

“Prime numbers are bright orange” - Sheldon Cooper

Having read plenty of Dr. Oliver Sacks (e.g: Man Who Mistook Wife for Hat), there has almost-certainly been a savant ("idiot," or not) with this actual ability – and nobody knew how it worked (it just did), similarly to the documents Sacks-patient that immediately knew how many toothpicks were on any table (in the hundreds-to-thousands)... but could otherwise not talk.

----

To explain this with a DCC metaphor:

NEW ACHIEVEMENT: All prime numbers now glow bright orange, including entire mobs (if they contain prime number of living members). This includes those cute little toes of yours, Carl. Don't question this, it just is.

----

My favorite Sacks patients were the non-verbal aphasics laughing at Nixon's public TV appearances (because they were experts at telling if people were lying [by laughing at non-verbal cues]), otherwise disconnected from society.

What does that mean?

Like if it's Monday, do you see light brownish everywhere throughout the day? Or is it when you see the word "Monday" written out that the color comes to your mind? And/or if someone says the word "Monday"? If it's Monday and I tell you "want to grab lunch tomorrow", do you see black?

If I tell you that Monday in Japanese is pronounced "nichiyoubi", do you see light brownish when seeing "nichiyoubi" now?

Actually I lied that was Sunday, Monday is pronounced "getsuyoubi" - do you see light brownish when I write "getsuyoubi" now? If not for Japanese and you've learned a foreign language, how long until Monday in that language was light brownish?

Questions coming from legitimate curiosity! I really want to understand what you mean by "Monday is a light brownish". If someone asks me to come up with a color for say March, light green comes to my mind instantly - probably because of the association with spring (same with eg Christmas and red, or January and white) but I don't think I would say that "March is light green", so you're probably talking about something else.

> Like if it's Monday, do you see light brownish everywhere throughout the day?

No. If I think of Monday, for example when planning the week, there's a color association. It's also not very bright, but more "a feeling of the color". However, the color has been extremely consistent over the years. If I think of October, like "this person's birthday is in October", there's an association with blue. It's not like the word is colored. It's a mixture of the color and an abstract concept of a month. Hard to explain.

> Monday is pronounced "getsuyoubi" - do you see light brownish when I write "getsuyoubi" now?

If I think of the concept of Monday, the language doesn't matter. I'm native German and "Wednesday" and "Mittwoch" have the same color, even though the first letter is different and letters have their own colors. If I see "getsuyoubi", I focus mostly on the first letter "g" and that gives me a sense of a color. But the first letter and the month names or weekday names don't match necessarily.

> If someone asks me to come up with a color for say March, light green comes to my mind instantly - probably because of the association with spring

Maybe the way how that color comes to your mind instantly is comparable, but it's not as straight forward as "summer = bright, winter = dark". Interestingly, the 4 seasons don't have a very strong color association for me, months have a way stronger association. I don't even know where that color association comes from. Since the color palette seems to be limited and rather mute, I don't think it's because of a specific calendar or something I had as a child. I can only say that the colors in my mind are instant and stay stable over years.

Edit: Thinking about it: numbers don't have a strong association either, but ranges do have. Sometimes not very clearly. 0..10 nothing, 10..20 something blackish, 20..30 bright, like my color for March, 30..40 black or dark blue, 40..50 some kind of brownish orange, 50..60 more red, 60..70 white/grey, 70..80 blueish, 80..90 black, 90..100 grey etc.

Color palette is rather limited for all associations. Mostly black, white/silver, dark blue, dark green, yellowish-beige, orange-brownish with some slight variations.

I used to feel mildly synaesthetic about day colours.

Saturday red, Sunday blue, Monday orange, Tuesday purple, Wednesday green, Thursday pink, Friday cyan.

Then I realised that was just the colour scheme used by the Radio Times.

I'm pretty certain that mine don't come from a calendar, because the colors are a bit odd and Tuesday and Sunday both being black is quite unusual for any calendar.

Thanks for the word synesthesia. It led me to Lexical-Gustatory. I always felt some words have flavors. Like sweet/spicy/savory etc so for me January sweet, February coffee like taste, March spicy, April custard, May light sweet, June sweet, July sweet, August/September/October/November/December- no specific taste. certain words have a very specific taste. For example word Christmas reminds me of Eclairs pastry(i don’t remember having eclairs on Christmas, so don’t know where that connection came from). Now I know the name for this condition.

Interesting, I think that is a rarer form of synesthesia. There's also /r/Synesthesia/ on Reddit, which has some interesting links.

I read about a study a while back in which researchers brought in a person who had synesthesia and asked him to identify the exact colors associated with 500 different random numbers drawn from a range of up to a million. (He did not know what numbers they were going to ask for). A year later, they brought him back, and he repeated the associations almost word for word.

I guess he still could have done it with eidetic memory or a PAO-style system, but it was still pretty impressive.

Science folder is green; mathemathics folder is red; langauge class is yellow; social studies is blue.

Thanks for coming to this school assembly.

The geometric nightmares! I had those as a kid whenever I was very tired or had a fever, and kept having them until my late teens. Never seen them described and didn't know it was a thing.

I also had something like this. Again as a kid, with fever. Very unsettling. But I don't remember having it as an adult. Strange.

Same here. I also recall them when I had fevers in my childhood.

I attribute them to the fact that, while trying to sleep with a fever, my eyes are half-open, and any sharp object becomes a visible geometric shape that my brain attempts to comprehend but almost fails to. I still experience them in adulthood. I’ve never had sleep paralysis, but whenever I think of people who have it, I imagine it feels as debilitating as these half-sleep experiences where you’re unable to move while your brain processes distressing memories.

“Geometric Nightmares” is not a scientific name. It is simply the name given to this phenomenon in forums [1][2] where people discuss and share their experiences.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dreams/comments/7ofu86/x/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/geometricnightmares/

Interesting. I recently discovered that my sister and I have identical geometric nightmares, down to every detail, while everyone else I mention this to thinks it's insane. I wonder whether there's a genetic aspect?

Last time I stopped smoking cannabis I got these for a couple days. They are intense. The most recent was kind of like taking a slow rollercoaster ride through three black hole sized perfect spheres orbiting nothing. Another one was less geometric but was basically me getting sucked into a black hole. Both had this almost lucid dreaming feel where my entire sense of self became condensed into a single point... but I was still there, aware of what was happening... it was incredibly memorable.

I had a recurring abstract nightmare as a small kid (don't think it was related to fever but I guess those were pretty common) which was basically about a line, gradually becoming messier and messier until it was all just a big jumble. I could never explain it to anyone else, but it terrified me for a time.

I'm wondering if "geometric nightmares" is a reoccurring dream I've had since I was a kid too, basically two cog-wheels linked with each other, but one is extremely huge and the other unbelievable tiny. I'd never describe this as a "geometric nightmares" though, but it does kind of sound similar.

Maybe there is something about "contrasts" as they all seem to be vaguely related to "big difference" basically.

I've heard these fever dreams referred to as big-small as well. I believe it's the same phenomenon. For me it was pillars from high up above, where they're all the same width, but one is also much bigger at the same time. Hard to explain... Just an odd feeling.

And, anecdotally, I have gotten a similar feeling reaching deep enough meditation.

Crazy, I used to have the exact same (well, as best as I could describe them they were the same) dreams. I can still vividly remember the feeling of them, of the perfection of the line, and the growing pressure of some external force trying to mess it up, until eventually it always did.

Had them as a kid. A canvas in beige that spanned my whole view and was the entire world. There was an invisible opponent and we played a game. You filled half of the seemingly infinite canvas with black or a dark blue. Then the other person until no beige remained. I always lost.

I used to have something like this as an adolescent/teenager, but while I was awake. It’d feel like my whole body became enormous and numb, and if I closed my eyes I’d see cascading geometric shapes collapsing in on themselves, and it would feel like I was falling constantly.

So I’d just slowly put my head on the desk and ride it out until I was returned to my body

Interesting site.

I get the occasional Hypnopompic auditory illusion ( https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/hypnagogic-halluc... ). This is when you think you hear a sound as you wake up. For me it is normally an illusory door bell. It is very convincing. You rush down to the door and there is no-one there and my wife heard nothing. Maybe happens 2 or 3 times a year.

I also get the occasional weird nerve shock. It feels like an electric shock down through my collar bone. It lasts less than a second, is always completely unexpected and is quite unpleasant, enough to make me flinch. It doesn't seem related to what I am doing. Maybe happens 6 times a year. Didn't see it mentioned. Does anyone else get this, or am I just weird?

I get the someone pounding on the door at night thing, wakes me out of a heavy sleep. Never anyone actually knocking.

Hypnogogic and hypnopompic auditory hallucinations occur when you are falling asleep or waking up, so it might be something different if it is happening if you are in deep sleep. (not an expert on this)

Well, I wake up lol, so ??? But I definitely feel like I was awakened from deep sleep. Wieerd stuff.

Funny, that happened to me just this morning, I awoke from some kind of alarm signal, very close by. But I could not find any possible source for it, so I am sure it was part of a dream. In fact I forgot about it until now.

About the second thing, I have felt something similar. Especially the part about it originating around the collar bone and neck. It's probably something like a nerve misfiring. I sometimes think it's weird that the body doesn't misbehave more often than it does, it's an enormously complex system after all.

>About the second thing, I have felt something similar. Especially the part about it originating around the collar bone and neck. It's probably something like a nerve misfiring.

Possibly. Or a pinched nerve.

I don't think it is a cosmic ray, or it wouldn't always occur in the same part of the body. ;0)

>I sometimes think it's weird that the body doesn't misbehave more often than it does

Indeed.

I get the doorbell too, super weird.

Headcanon: Cortisol spike right before you wake up. Brain goes, "something must have alarmed me", and cooks up phenomena: loud noise, feeling of falling/tripping, etc.

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

To either my credit or against it, wikipedia provides a lot of the raw data. However that makes you feel.

I've been making this list for years as markdown files with a few sentences and links to wikipedia (or xkcd for his visual field comic), but the site is indeed made with the help of AI.

The artifacts from some of the AI-generated images are a pretty significant detraction. For a site with so many pictures of hands, so many of them being malformed or having the wrong number of fingers (hithhiker's thumb, palmaris longus) is really off-putting.

Generating those has been its own little project inside the project. Many iterations to go.

Most of them are pretty good. He just has to hunt down the bad ones and fix them.

Interesting project.

One small suggestion though: try to always make the first sentence show fully in the card. Several times I was a bit miffed I had to actually click to find out what a card was about, when it would have been better for me to get the gist in advance to know if it was something I wanted to read about.

That makes sense, thanks!

I can move my ears. But it's not ears alone, whole scalp skin seems to move and ears get pulled from behind as a result. I learned it from my uncle as kid though by trying to do the same as him.

I can do each ear independently.

I was unable to do this, and was promptly angered by my own incompetence, and overcame it through sheer force of will.

(Made funny faces in the mirror for an hour.)

So you can move the entire ear rather than just wiggle the tip?

I can wiggle one ear, very slightly, and it looks like im having an aneurysm when I do it.

There are two motions you can do.

One is the "smile". When you smile, your ears (mostly the lower part, the lobule) go up. You can isolate the muscles that pull the skin/ear and donit without smiling.

The other one is the "surprise". Extreme surprise pulls the skin towards the back of the skull. The upper part (the lobe) goes back. You can isolate those muscles, too. John Hamm has this often in Mad Men

No. It's like the skin behind ears is pulled moving ear slightly back. Can't move tips.

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

Ah great! I'll put it on my list to read up on. Thanks

Another one I'm not sure how to fully explain: closing the nose without touching it.

I can fully block smells or breathing by doing something that feels like inflating a zone between the top of the mouth and the nose. When speaking it will sound as if I am pinching my nose without hands. Comes in handy when having to face horrible smells.

I assume everybody can do it but many don't know how.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/ysd5o2/is_i...

Everybody who can speak can do it because that's what you do when you say [k] or [g].

Oh great point this will go on the oddity once I add it!

I belive that this is closing your soft pallate to the back of your throat. It should also happen when you swallow.

If I understand correctly this is the same as BPPV which is on there :)

You're right! I brought BPPV was just all benign cases of vertigo regardless of origin but the article does mention tiny crystals, good catch!

I knew those as otoliths, and the vertigo they cause is so intense and annoying I never forgot the name: benign paroxysmal positional vertigo

Fortunately, the Epley maneuver is very effective, if done correctly. Unfortunately, if done incorrectly it can worsen the symptoms. It's all about identifying in which semicircular canal are the otoliths before moving them.

I know the issue as meniere's disease.

There's Apparently a whole family of these.

It's trivial but absolutely terrifying.

Very cool website. I'm not sure if this is worthy of adding, but sometimes if I eat something extremely salty I get a pain in what feels like my saliva glands for 3-5 seconds or so after the first taste (it then goes away).

I think it's the same as in this reddit post where others describe it: https://www.reddit.com/r/DAE/comments/1hw4xx3/dae_ever_get_a...

I share this (in hindsight, hasn't happened in a while).

I always assumed it was the saliva glands going into overdrive.

I didn't think/realize it was limited to salty things, to me it was connected to things I really 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.

Lovely! I mean odd… I will look into it, thanks!

Is this not something everybody feels?

I keep being surprised at both which feelings are universal, as well as which aren't. I think I know the one your'e talking about but from being kicked in the balls... For jumping I might have experienced it playing video games and falling further than I expected.

I experience the falling feeling in my legs and feet as well.

I definitely do not know the feeling you’re describing.

My favorite quirk of mine is aphantasia but kids are more entertained by ear wiggling.

I thought this was universal. It's pretty easy to trigger for me, even quite abstract geometric shapes that look a bit like something falling from a height can trigger it.

I do not have this, but at this point I couldn't say if it's you folks or me who are "odd".

Random chest pains like you describe cause so much anxiety for me. And yet every time it turns out to be nothing.

I would get that as well - I ended up at the urgent care a few times just because it was so painful and unsettling.

It was never diagnosed but I'm pretty sure it was costochondritis - something in my sternum area was inflamed and would give off this awful shooting chest pain.

Since you have deja vu, you could add Jamais vu, the opposite.

Also prosopagnosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamais_vu

The feeling that you haven't experienced something before, which should by all accounts feel familiar to you.

>A study by Chris Moulin of Leeds University asked 92 volunteers to write out "door" 30 times in 60 seconds. He reported that 68 percent of volunteers showed symptoms of jamais vu, such as beginning to doubt that "door" was a real word.

I also like this poster:

https://files.catbox.moe/ejj1jl.jpg

Thats an interesting poster. Is it real? Im just trying to understand what an MTA employee would do with that information. This seems very portal-y.

On the jamais-vu front, I once had to write "school" a few hundred times in detention and it stopped having meaning because I began to just see it as the jumble of letters id been writing for the previous hour, perhaps as a coping mechanism, rather than doubting it was a real world. Thats interesting though.

Definitely a gag.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation , which is a closer match to both your experience and the "door" description above.

My wife swears that I have prosopognosia because whenever she shows me a celebrity face I'm like who's that? And shes like "Brad Pitt!"

I dont think I actually have it, because there's enough times where I'm at a social gathering and I know i recognize a lot of people but I may not remember their names, but it's funny nonetheless.

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.

I've experienced it once or twice, and mine was the classic "can't move, malevolent presence just barely in the corner of your vision". Once, I think I was actually still half-asleep-ish, and trying to yell and my wife woke me up.

Definitely not pleasant, even when I'm rationally aware of what's going on.

I had it happen twice that I can remember. Once I hallucinated that I had a third arm that snaked around to my desk lamp, and just last night that someone whispered "hello" into my ear. Apparently that last one's pretty common.

I've never seen the shadow man or anything.

I've never seen someone miss sleep paralysis before. I get it, but the hallucinations that people describe never happen to me. I just become aware that I'm about to wake up, but I can't yet control my body or even breathing. I always know not to panic, yet I always panic and try desperately to start moving. I can always see the room, but it's a dream version because my eyes aren't really open and it looks different once I'm truly awake.

I don't have much sleep weirdness, but when I'm about to fall asleep, I frequently imagine 3D object spinning and rapidly changing size. Kinda like the 3D TempleOS sprites [1], but 5x faster and increasing/decreasing size at the same rate.

1. https://youtu.be/LtlyeDAJR7A?t=451

Mine was always accompanied by the sensation of being watched. I could 'see' where the watching was happening, but not the actual thing watching me.

Also always accompanied by fear.

I believe sensation of a presence in the room is very common in sleep paralysis.

Interestingly the belief of what the presence is has changed with culture. It used to be demons, now it is more likely to be aliens.

Sleep paralysis is when you're having an intervention in the monitoring realm but your matrix being becomes aware while so. Sources can't agree if it's done on purpose or just the analgesic dosage that was too short. Next time you have one pay attention to hear if there's sound of steps as if moving away from where you are.

Why do you miss it? It is usually described as being terrifying.

BTW sleep paralysis is likely the cause of many 'alien abduction' reports: wake up, can't move, presence in the room, sexual element (e.g. probing!).

No, it's not always terrifying. I think the terror is because some people feel they're being pressed down. Once you know what it is, it's a lot less scary. It's to stop you acting out your dreams.

I was prescribed Xanax for a bit and it gave me the absolute worst sleep paralysis imaginable, with nested false awakenings.

Nested false awakenings are the worst. Now I have a phrase to use for when that happened to me.

I dreamt that I was attacked and killed by a monster. Getting killed in a dream makes one wake up immediately, lol. I was hanging out with a friend of mine and telling him about the dream and as soon as I told him what happened he turned into a monster and killed me.

I was driving down the road with my friend Lloyd who was a passenger beside me in the car and telling him about this crazy dream. As soon as I mentioned the monster killing me, he turned into a monster and killed me - while I was driving my stinking car! Then I woke up and I was like "am I fucking really awake now?" I was.

ugh, I would get those as a kid. I've never heard the term 'nested false awakening' applied to them, but I like that. I'm glad I don't get them anymore.. the feeling of wondering if it is a dream or not and feeling like you are locked onto a roller coaster you can't get off of. Luckily in my experience once I actually woke up I would know for sure that it was real. I think it would mess with your psyche if you couldn't tell or convince yourself you weren't in another nested dream.

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

Interesting! I’ve definitely seen and noticed this but never looked into it further. The Wikipedia page has an example image that aligns with my experience pretty well.

I get migraines and weird visual auras with them sometimes. I assumed that this phenomenon was related. Didn’t realize I was actually seeing light polarization. These things are often hard to describe and look up. Good to hear that this is likely benign.

I clicked on Supernumerary nipples. Interesting. In the Sources section, there’s a link to Mark Wahlberg’s Wikipedia page. There’s nothing about nipples on Mark Wahlberg’s Wikipedia page.

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.

Weird. A spike in blood pressure maybe? Can you do reproduce it consistently on purpose with an alarm or by holding something as you fall asleep that will make a loud noise when it falls?

Yes, I have never tried to reproduce it on purpose, but it happens consistently enough that I would be surprised if it does not happen at this point.

It happens simultaneously with the sound, so I would guess it is purely a weird form of synesthetic hallucination.

Exploding head syndrome?

The sounds are real, for example someone will ring the doorbell while I’m about to fall asleep, I'll both hear and “see” the sound.

I do get explosion head syndrome as well, but that is rare in my case.

>if I’m about to fall asleep and I happen to hear a loud noise nearby,

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

>I also see a flash of light with my closed eyelids.

You might want to talk to a optician about that. It can be a sign of issues with your retina.

I see flashes in a dark room when I wake up, because I have PVDs (posterior vitreous detachment) in both eyes.

Edit: I just re-read your post. If they both happen together, I think it is something different.

Could it be that both noise _and_ flash are in your head, and like me you have Exploding Head Syndrome? https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/exploding-head-sy...

The sounds are real, for example someone will ring the doorbell while I’m about to fall asleep, I'll both hear and “see” the sound.

I do get explosion head syndrome as well, but that is rare in my case.

I've had this many times before too.

Interesting, so it seems there is at least two of us. I assumed this was more common for some reason.

I get those brain zaps from anti depressants.

Bzzzzzzt!

I also get floaters in my eyes sometimes which is weird because they appear outside your primary point of focus, which you move to get a better look, but because the floater is in your eye then it moves away as you shift your direction of focus. A strange experience.

I also get hypnic jerks in my legs when I am tired - the leg twitches - it's a sign I'm at absolute peak need for sleep.

I once revealed to friends that I get Pee Shivers, assuming everyone does - they do not and I was laughed at. :-)

Oh. and I am a voluntary burper.

Now you know more than you ever wanted to.

I've had closed-eye hallucinations my entire life. When I was a little kid, I used to be able to see geometric patterns or just sparkles. If I pressed my palm gently over my eyes, I'd be able to change those patterns or make them pulsate. I would spend a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly I was seeing, and then end up falling asleep.

Nowadays I still have them, but they're less vivid and mostly appear as colorful specks or just as lights. It's kind of hard to put into words.

It's very common for people to get the pressure on eye thing by the way there's a wiki page somewhere.

Were your geometric figures Form Constants? I learned about those from the novel Blindsight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant

Kinda? They sometimes do sort of look like cobweb or tunnel patterns but not always. They're different every time.

Proctalgia fugax (https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/proctalgia-fugax/), also known as "shooty arse":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USB90D7ywiE

The video is oddly comforting. "Everyone gets it!"

I remember reading about the phenomenon, that it was colitis (inflammation of the arse, presumably due to gut flora imbalance).

When I slowly shake my shoulders I feel and hear air going from one lung into the other. But not 100% sure if that is what it is.

The geometric patterns and checkerboards you see when pressing gently on your closed eyes as a kid (phosphenes).

As a child, I used to treat it like a built-in screensaver or kaleidoscope before sleep, completely unaware that it was just mechanical stimulation of the retinal cells producing false electrical signals.

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?

Please point out the claudeisms, I want to clear them all.

V1 looked like complete Opus slop, but since I make many little sites all the time I can get it to undo a lot of them, one at a time. I just explicitly tell it the aesthetic to avoid per-element (like the famous left border), and eventually it looks okish.

Edit: Ah and for text, Standard Technical English is a good instruction to give it, but I also told it to be dry and technical, and no embelish or do storytelling. And some manual editing out of cringe stuff still after that.

I don't think you can fix the Claude tells without rewriting everything on your own - but I do read/write a lot for work, so I think about voice a lot. Here's a handful of sentences that I feel a human would not have used but which are common Claude constructions:

"the alarming ones that are harmless" - We don't put dependent clauses at the end of sentences like this except for unusual emphasis

'quietly' - overused by Claude

the entries here are the moments where the guesswork shows - same as first example

"none of this needs damage or disease" - Also would be written differently as a human. Just try saying some of these things aloud and you'll feel odd

'unknown. nobody has counted it'

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

> One hypothesis joins the two.

I'm not going to help people make their AI outputs harder to detect.

People downvote me when I say we're back in the "Geocities era" / "indie web" of the 90's and 00's, but LLMs have enabled us to build cool side projects to completion and give them love.

This is 100% a good thing.

I love this website. It's fantastic. I don't care if it's AI. The world is better for it existing.

People were already building cool side projects to completion and giving them love before AI.

You get downvoted for being weirdly ecstatic about AI "enabling" things that were already possible, while not caring about the human element that AI lacks.

People that say "things [...] were already possible" don't dream enough.

Maybe you were born a few decades too late. I feel I was born (a few decades?) too early.

I want the world with cures for cancer, holodecks, brain uploads, immortality, jet packs, surfing on Titan, etc.

I legitimately enjoy the future we're hurtling towards. It's the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species. I hated the world where "Apple iPhones" were the pinnacle of human achievement.

We might be able to vibe engineer our own iPhones in a few years. That'll be fun.

But building a website like the one posted here was already possible. you compared it to the early "indie" web.

There is literally nothing about generating websites with AI that merits being called "the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species."

FFS we've stood on the moon.

> was already possible.

The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.

And for those of us who can engineer, we're making 10x, 20x what we were before. I'm filling my life with all kinds of fun side projects, toys, games, utility software, automations. I don't look at libraries and software packages anymore - I just build what I need.

This is like 3D printing for software.

I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.

I am so excited about everything I'm going to be building. Time was a limit before. There is no limit now.

> FFS we've stood on the moon.

And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.

>The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.

Learning to program has never been easier or more accessible. Being able to build a website has been accessible to non-techies for years. I'll admit using an AI is convenient but "beyond remarkable" is pushing it. If anything it's a bit of a tragedy. In exchange for that convenience people are buying into a closed, third party mass surveillance infrastructure generating code they can't understand, can't repair, can't edit or redistribute. From a FOSS point of view AI is objectively worse than what we had. And that's not even getting into the flood of slop and disinformation destroying the web.

>I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.

I can't imagine you needed all of this done within a month and couldn't find existing solutions for most of it. It seems more like you're addicted than being productive.

And I still don't see the line between you vibe-coding a productivity app something something holograms and brain uploads and surfing on Titan.

>And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.

No, we aren't. We're no closer to than than we were 60 years ago. If you think Elon Musk is actually going to accomplish anything of the sort I think you're bound for disappointment.

> And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.

We're really, really not.

I agree that this is an example of interesting and good AI usage. The person who made it obviously put thought into it. Unfortunately a lot of vibe coded sites do not have that same level of care

What world are you living in where you’re okay with this?

Phoned in websites / AI slop is not a good thing.

Code something yourself on neocities.

This is not slop. It took effort. This is not a one shot fire and forget project.

Value != Effort:

Infinite randomly generated slop + The Algorithm = Extremely personalized value delivered

A lot of effortful things deliver value, yet we call them slop. The Jurassic Park sequels, for instance.

One of the common tropes anti-AI people fall into is calling all AI-enabled works low effort. I'm refuting that point here, but you're right in that there's a broader discussion to be had as to what constitutes value to different demographics, individual tastes, and subjectivities.

There are highly discerning craftspeople with good taste who are both using and consuming AI works. This should not be disregarded.

I'll often run into one of those automatically generated YouTube videos, where the whole thing was done by ChatGPT (probably including the video idea itself).

Very often I will find it valuable or entertaining and continue listening.

Conversely, when listening to a high production YouTube video, I'll often (about half the time these days?) spot a ChatGPTism and instantly lose respect for the person. (Even if the video was valuable!)

So I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. "Fully automated AI generated content pipeline" doesn't disgust me as much as it probably should, whereas "guy left cringe ChatGPT language in his script" my neurology registers as an unforgivable crime.

---

Anyway the question of slop and effort is an interesting one. I've just spent several years working on a game and it's still shit. (Should have "iterated" more, apparently.)

Conversely, I often have the experience that I see some art that leaves me cold or that I actively dislike, but then I will discover that a heroic amount of effort went into making it (e.g. it's constructed out of a million individual toothpicks or something like that) and will suddenly think it's amazing.

My favourite story here is... a man in India spent 20 years carving a passage through a mountain by hand. By all accounts, it would have been much better if it were 20 minutes and a bit of TNT. But then he wouldn't be a legend, right?

Similarly I discovered an art page I enjoyed was fully AI generated. (Well, I don't know about the human involvement. Taste, maybe?) The art was still good, to my eye, but I noticed that I had been idolizing the artist — "how much toil it must have taken, to etch every stroke!" — and of course that part popped like a balloon.

I'll have to make due with the actual result, stripped of the glorious suffering!

What enabled people to build cool side projects in the actual 90's and 00's and what stopped them from doing it in the period afterwards but before LLMs?

Such a great idea and implementation! I found out I had Alice in Wonderland syndrome as a child, after being sick with a 107+ fever - https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/alice-in-wonderla.... It lasted for a few years, occasionally recurring. I guess this was teleopsia, although my experience was that I could not tell what the distance was to an object. Very odd feeling, and pretty scary. Nobody I told about it had any idea what I was talking about.

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

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

My friend who does free diving would kill to be able to do it! She can't learn it.

I'm not a diver but I suspect it can be learned. I have allergy issues that cause my ears to not equalize when allergies are hitting and I think I just learned how to do this. its just sort of muscle that can sort of be lightly controlled. Controlling one side vs the other I can't really manage.

Ye ye, she is frustrated it's taking so long to learn it. It's so valuable for divers.

My mum taught me the ear popping thing, while we were traveling by air, to relieve the ear pressure.

I can do it on command but never paid attention to how before.

It's basically "yawning manually". There's a couple different muscles activating at the same time, most irrelevant to the popping, I can't control them individually yet. (Probably learnable, if I practiced I could probably get the pop more efficiently.)

But yeah, just yawn real wide, that should do it.

A lot of stuff is learnable, like I couldn't move my ears but taught myself how to do it because I was bored.

For me I describe it more as trying to open your jaw with the muscles near your ear, while holding the jaw in place with the main jaw muscles. Like an isometric hold.

I actually didn't know I could do it until now, I could always get the click and it's how I clear ear popping sensations but I didn't realize it I push it harder I get the hollow voice thing and apparently it's useful for diving. Cool.

My jaw also moves in the process but it seems like I can pop my ear without moving my jaw. So it might be a different muscle, I'm not sure.

Ooh! I also have this (but didn't know the name)!

For me, I'm pretty sure it's related to having just awful seasonal allergies as a child - I'd quite often get stuffed up and have an unfortunate amount of pressure in my sinuses and ears. So then I'd pinch my nose and try to adjust it, eventually realizing I didn't need to pinch my nose.

My story is similar!

I scrolled the whole list looking to see if there was anything about being able to stop hiccups by conscious effort alone. Suspect that there would be some overlap between voluntary tube openers and hiccup stoppers, as the internal sensations are kind of similar.

Dude I wish. If there is some hicup trick I would love to learn it.

There was a popular (then, anyway) notion that drinking a large glass of water would kill hiccups, and it sometimes seemed to work, but other times it didn't. Long story short, it works when you swallow at just the right time relative to the hiccup cycle. An ordinary swallow starts as a voluntary action but switches over to an automatic involuntary completion. Try to get that start of the involuntary part to happen in the last quarter of the hiccup cycle, a bit before the hiccup arrives. You don't even need to use water, just time a swallow just right and it cancels out the hiccup cycle from retriggering.

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

You're right, I moved it

You've been great with clicking yes/no on the oddities, and providing more examples! I've already added some more, and refined some texts. I'll give it some more attention after I'm home again later today.

Thanks to everyone!

There's a nice booklet called "experimenting with babies" which covers a lot of these in, well, babies and small children.

The book is not as good as the title, but it may contain some oddities you're not aware of.

Interesting, something that wasnt covered on your site, although the inverse is. I sometimes get the opposite of the troxler effect, the center of my vision goes "black" while the edges stay visible. The black center gets "worse" if my eyes stay still, and is usually accompanied by a halo of various colors. It goes away after a few minutes. Ive never found a consistent trigger for it, sometimes light changes will do it (going from outside to inside) but not consistently, it can also just seemingly randomly happen

Sounds like a migraine.

No migraine associated with it when this happens, just "inverted tunnel vision", goes away after 5-10 minutes

Migraines don't have to be painful, and 'inverted tunnel vision' is one of the effects I've experienced.

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

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.

In this case, I'd prefer Wikipedia links that have sources. To be honest, this is also what students do when they can't cite WP directly, they cite or follow the sources.

The geometric nightmare thread is wild. Getting the same shifting shapes across unrelated people suggests it's wired into how the visual system fails, not learned.

You should add "exploding head syndrome" which sounds crazy but is mostly "phantom loud noise especially as you're falling asleep"

It's there! :)

Is voluntary piloerection really that unusual? I thought everyone could give themselves goosebumps?

I certainly can't, and until now I'd never heard of it either (I'm over 40).

It's not uncommon to assume that other people's experiences are like one's own until told otherwise. For me, it took until at least age 10 before I realized that other people aren't near-deaf on the left side.

I can't do it either... Needs a good song or scene or situation to trigger it...

Here I am clicking on everything to see if I have it :D

Love this. Thank you for making something fun and educational.

I can't read stuff like this, and I can't self diagnose anything online. Once I realized that everything is a symptom of cancer in some form, all symptoms will lead to cancer if researched thoroughly enough.

That said, really good job here for those that can enjoy it without inducing panic attacks!

Only 30-40% of people encounter brain freeze?

Fabulous site.

So it seems, it just happens to include everyone I've ever talked to about it

I have to be so careful eating cold things, it's like freeze++, brain glaciation.

I'm surprised it's so few! I'm in the 60-70% here -- I've never gotten it (despite many deliberate efforts), but I've never known anyone else who seems to be immune.

I experienced mild brain freeze as a child but it went away in adolescence. It doesn't seem pleasant so I don't envy those of you who get intense versions of it.

I immediately looked up whether it had "piss shiver" and it did. It was disappointing when Cecil (Straight Dope) refused to investigate it.

(Don't suppose you'd include orgasmic quiver?)

Synesthesia is multifaceted. When I was a kid I used to feel a shape in my hand whenever I felt a certain emotion. That went away in my 20's. Later as an adult I guessed it was a kind of synesthesia.

Ooh this is the closest description I've heard to one odd thing I had which was a satisfying feeling associated with two specific thicknesses (one around the thickness of a school copy book, the other around the thickness of a school maths book). At some points it could be activated by thinking about the thickness but long gone now.

Also had 3 more complex emotions/feelings/states that were a blend of certain particular things, not always that connected. For example one was mostly a combination of memories of my grandad's past (he died before I was born), and the Ratchet and Clank level "Metropolis". Similarly, the actual feeling of these is now gone. Anyone else have something similar?

The closest I've heard to that was Brian Eno in his film talking about something similar he seemed to have growing up with the colour purple.

I started off having an nsfw tag, but it wasn't too populated, and decided for now to not include it. Might revisit.

>orgasmic quiver

very interesting google results for this one lol

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.

I remember choosing to not buy NVIDIA stock because Ethereum moved to proof of stake. Oops.

I remember waiting for that to buy a GPU.

Still waiting...

But just think of how many many things you could have bought with the same knowledge which would have been mediocre or failed entirely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_SwD7RveNE

Imagine you heard about bitcoin when someone bought 20 000 of them for a pizza...

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 agree, the images will need iteration.

What a great idea recording & collating these remarkable instances. It tells us so much about actual and, who knows, potential human capabilities. Rather exciting!

Really liked your "toys", Demjan. I am on a similar quest, it's so good to be able to prototype fast with AI those silly ideas

This is delightful! What a nice and wholesome resource.

I had this exact same thing happen as a kid and thought it was asthma related. Never knew what it was until now!

Aw, a vibe coded site. Give Claude a cookie.

It should be illegal to publish AI horrors like this: https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/gleeking/

Life in prison (at least)

But more on topic, this site is a cool idea but with the lamest execution ever. Whatever effort you might have put into collecting these phenomenon is overshadowed by the lazy AI slop. It doesn't seem like you're earning anything from this, so you just donated money to Anthropic/OpenAI/whatever in order to underwhelm/revolt/possibly-mislead some people. You could've done that with a simple goatse link for free.

I know someone who can literally vibrate their eyes sideways. It is very odd to see. You can see his eyes rapidly moving left/right but only a centimeter or less.

Don't know if this has a name.

Haha I can do it, it was a fun trick in school days to freak people out.

Nystagmus, I'm guessing.

Nah, it's cool.

Huh, call of the void is common and it has a name!

Great site

Do we have a theory yet why people hiccup? Wait, I just see you have a page on it :)

Not that I know of. But some people so far visiting the site have voted that they do no get hiccups, which is very odd.

I used to have them as a kid, even long stretches that prevented me from sleeping. I don’t remember having hiccups in the last 15 years. It just stopped happening at some point.

I once met a guy who said the same thing and was convinced that this was the usual case, whereas me still getting them as an adult was very unusual (this came up when I got them, apparently his first time seeing an adult do so).

Have a friend who has never had a headache!

That is insane to me, as someone who suffers from chronic headaches every single day.

I learned diaphragmatic breathing pretty early in childhood. Later, I noticed that whenever I got the hiccups, taking a deep belly breath early on, usually within the first two or three hiccups, would make them stop. Over time, I learned to do this unconsciously, so nowadays it's basically a reflex as soon as a hiccup starts. Since then, I haven't really had any hiccups longer than one contraction.

I used to get hiccups often, but acquired the ability to will them to stop in my teen years. Since then it's become an automatic reflex that when something triggers that first hiccup, I "do the thing", and there's never even hiccup #2 ever since.

Amazing webpage. Now do commonly occurring dreams!

Ahhhhhh! Thank you for mentioning Precordial catch syndrome. I read about it some time ago, and experienced it several times, and then forgot what it was called. Even with the help of LLMs I was unable to re-discover the name of it.

This should be taught in school.

That everyone is different of special in their own way? That has no place in a classroom!!

Just because LLMs can write copy for webpages doesn't mean they should. A landing page should not warrant a tl;dr.

If you're going to mock me by repeating my own words on a different HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665394), at least make it make sense because this is not analogous other than the Claude-esque design (which to be fair could be better). There is human intentionality in terms of how the information is presented (e.g. using Astro.js) and wit and it is not verbose or the output of just telling Claude to output as much detail as possible, and per the comments from the author, fixing any Claudisms instead of embracing them.

How bizarre. He's attempting to troll you by leaving a negative comment on a different person's post?

The logic is supposed be that "someone else did the same thing as I did, so what I did was correct and your criticism is therefore wrong".

It's on me for randomly checking comments to see if people are acting in bad faith. Sometimes, they are.

Alright since you’re going to express moral indignation, allow me to say what I really think.

I think it is incredibly rude to go on a SHOW HN where a person may have (as in this case) spent months on an actual project and finally shows it, only to completely ignore everything about the actual project and snarkily announcs to everyone that it was “TL;DR” or these days “it smelled like LLM wrote the front page, so I didnt read anything! Haha nyeh nyeh.”

Imagine someone raised a child to play the piano, they ask you to listen to their performance and you leave a comment “didn’t bother watching — the thumbnail sucks, and this child is wearing unappealing clothing”.

In real life, you’d never do that. You know it’s wrong. You would probably get ostracized and rightly considered a jerk or in any case the parents would really take it badly.

You can just privately ignore the post. But to announce it as the first comment and make sure everyone else sees it — I would never shit on people’s projects like that.

In frustration, I left your exact comment on another SHOW HN that happened to have a nice AI-generated page, but the difference was … it was already trending and had many comments, so my comment barely registered.

So I did what you did — which was wrong and uncouth — but on something where it was the 20th comment, all the way on the bottom.

But here’s the best part. Then you show up, and explain, in your self-righteous way, that, you see, actually, what you did was right, but the exact same comment on another AI-generated website is totally wrong, because of ad-hoc nuance analysis you just made up. And everyone should be aware of this exact nuance, which you are now handwaving, because you are morally right and the other person than you shit on is morally wrong.

Suffice it to say that I think your whole analysis is backwards. What you did was rude, and what I did was a milder version of that. The bad faith is you then trying to further invent nuance as to why what you did is great and I’m in bad faith. Sorry buddy. Totally backwards.

He may have been "rude," but he was leaving his honest feedback. You, on the other hand, publicly posted what appeared to be criticism on a third party's project, with no disclosure that your comment was actually part of some unrelated personal feud. You are in no position to accuse anybody else of acting in "bad faith."

Sorry, AI slop

Disappointingly, no results for penis or vagina.

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.

Or maybe you could start focusing on the content instead of how it's made.

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