Consciousness Facts

The organ that processes all your pain sensations has no pain receptors itself. Surgeons can operate on a conscious patient's brain while they chat about the weather. The brain literally cannot feel itself being touched or cut.

Forests have their own "Wood Wide Web"—a network of fungal threads connecting trees underground. Mother trees recognize their offspring and send them extra nutrients. Dying trees dump their resources into the network as a final gift to the forest.

Electrons do not exist in any specific place until measured. Before observation, they exist as probability clouds. Reality requires witnesses.

Octopuses have three hearts—two pump blood to the gills, one pumps it to the body. Their blood is blue because it uses copper-based hemocyanin instead of iron. Each of their 8 arms has its own mini-brain that can act independently—an arm can "decide" to open a jar while the central brain focuses on something else.

Your brain runs on an 80-millisecond delay. Everything you experience has already happened. You have never perceived the present moment.

You are literally not the same person you were a decade ago—physically. Your skeleton is replaced every 10 years, your liver every 5 months, your skin every 2-4 weeks. The atoms that made you as a child are now scattered across the planet.