36 Weird Facts People Know About That Make Folks Question How They Even Learned It

I wasn't just kidding when I said earlier that we have a drawer filled with useless facts, because that's actually pretty accurate. Your brain categorizes facts in a very different place from your personal experiences. This may sound a little weird because, well, it's all stored in the same brain, but it's organized differently.

Experts suggest that there are two conscious "buckets" that store information: episodic memory (your personal life experiences, like getting stuck at TSA) and semantic memory (your generalized vault of facts, like knowing what a rhino horn is made of). In fact, a lot of the time, you may remember the fact itself as if you're a walking encyclopedia, but not necessarily how you learned it in the first place.

Just because we hear a fact many times doesn't always mean it's true. Yeah, we may scroll through threads online and assume something is accurate because there's a human on the other side saying it, usually backed up by an "I have a degree in biology/history/whatever." But that doesn't automatically make it true, and we're sorry to break the news like this, but it also has to do with your brain.

Psychologists explain that there is a phenomenon called the "illusory truth effect," which essentially makes people more likely to believe a "fact" simply because they've been told it's true over and over again. They say that repetition creates cognitive fluency, making information easier for the brain to process, and therefore more likely to be perceived as true, even if it isn't.

This type of false information being spread is actually... the norm. It’s scary to think that we live in an age of disinformation, and with social media in everyone’s lives and daily habits, we’re more prone to watching and reading things that are actually false. We’re no longer living in an age of accurate information, scary.

Researchers have concluded that false stories travel faster than the truth on social media, specifically. This is due to a number of reasons, but a lot of it comes down to our own reactions. Because false stories often trigger stronger emotional responses, especially negative ones, it’s much easier for us to share them for the shock factor.

Not everything is bad, though. For a long time, information belonged to the elite. The studious and the wealthy paid for access to the best information available, but nowadays, it's far easier to access and share knowledge. Wikipedia may just be one of humanity's greatest tech triumphs and the perfect place to learn weird and fascinating little facts.

And while we may be the generation with the most accessible information ever, we're not necessarily the most informed. In fact, experts found out that the average person's attention span on a screen has plummeted from 150 seconds in 2004 to just 47 seconds today. This constant bombardment of information has made us very good at skimming through words, but not necessarily at absorbing them.

But if you truly look deep inside your little gray mass, you'll probably find plenty of useless information stored away that, in the right conversation, can come out as a party trick. A little "Did you know that...?" never really hurt anyone, and more often than not, it's an incredible conversation starter.

And speaking of which, did you know that you're not supposed to snip or cut your cuticles? That's because the little strip of skin at the base of your nail isn't actually the cuticle. The cuticle is the dry skin attached to the nail plate, while the bit most people cut is the living tissue known as the eponychium. Now that's my fun fact. What weird bit of information do you have to add to this list? Let us know!