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Mankind's favourite topic has always been mankind. You could say that's why we invented science in the first place - to find out more about ourselves, the world, and how it relates to us.
We've found out a lot of useful stuff, like how you turn bagels into energy and poop and how to kill nasty bugs before they kill us, but along the way we've also found some strange, surprising and even straight up creepy things about human nature that no one was expecting.
Turns out that we're a complex bunch and, just when you think you've got it all figured out with your theory about the nature of the soul or the structure of the brain, the universe throws you a curveball and leaves you back at square one.
One of the most complex and intriguing areas of study is the brain. We're still working out the final details of how this squashy mass of cells functions - you know, small stuff like how in god's name does it work?
Tackling the big question like "Who am I?", "How did we get here?" and "What is life anyway?" was never going to be easy, but some of the theories that have been put forwards in response range from the outlandish to the thought provoking to the downright bizarre.
7. You Are Two Brains In The Same Head
So your brain is split into two hemispheres. Whilst the idea that one side is devoted to creativity and one side to analytical thinking is a load of foisty hogwash, those hemispheres are less like two halves of one whole, and more like two totally separate brains.
The hemispheres of your brain are linked by a bridge of nerves that allows them to cooperate and act as a single unit, but when the bridge is cut (which it used to be as a cure for epilepsy), things start to go wrong. People who have had this procedure found that their seizures stopped but that the sides of their brain began to behave independently and even sometime disagree with each other.
The right side might pick out a shirt to wear, whereas the left side might try to dress you in a dress.
Even creepier, only your left brain has the ability to talk, as that is where the speech centres are located. This means that you can show the right brain a word or object, but when asked what you saw, you will reply "nothing" because left brain didn't see it. The right brain, however, can still respond to commands, so it is clearly thinking, just mute.
This all rather leads us to the question of which, if any, is "you"?
6. You’re A Symbiote
We all know that you've got a little ecosystem of bacteria living on your body, in your gut and even on your freaking eyelashes. We have a symbiotic relationship with these colonic colonies as we provide them with a steady supply of food and they help us to absorb nutrients and even produce nutrients of their own such as Vitamin K.
If you got rid of these, you be in pretty serious trouble, but there is another organism living much deeper within you - within your very cells.
The mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. They're also not human.
Mitochondria, which make multicellular life possible in the first place, have different DNA to the rest of the cell, which must mean that they started out on a different evolutionary path. At some point in the history of life on earth, a symbiotic relationship sprang up between two single celled organisms, which merged together to form a completely new entity in a process called symbiogenesis.
Mitochondrial DNA is passed down through generations just like our "human" DNA, in a sort of parallel family tree.
5. You're An Alien
Well, not just you. If you listen to a guy call Ellis Silver, everyone else is an alien too.
Panspermia is the theory that amino acids and other organic building blocks to life (perhaps even single cells) might have been delivered to the Earth and other planets via meteor, but Ellis Silver goes even further to suggest that we arrived, human shaped, on this planet as aliens that got kinda stuck.
Silver thinks that the human species is so maladapted to life on planet Earth that we must have come from somewhere else. He cites everything from the fact that we get bad backs (as we're not used to this planet's gravity) and sunburn (because we're not used to the sun), to our rapid population, which points to us being an invasive species.
Silver's arguments should be taken with a supersized pinch of salt, considering that we can trace our DNA way back through the evolutionary tree. He himself says that they are supposed to provoke debate rather than be taken as gospel, but it makes you think...
4. There’s No Good Reason Why Sleeping Should Give You Energy
We generally think that there's nothing better than a good night's sleep to help you feel refreshed, alert and energised. We intuit tiredness as a lack of energy and sleep stops you from feeling tired, ergo, sleep must give you energy, right?
Wrong.
In terms of actually fuelling our bodies, we convert food and oxygen into energy to keep our cells working. That process is a pretty well-understood fuel in → energy + waste out equation. Sleep, on the other hand, plays no part in replenishing your fuel stocks and, in fact, you continue to burn energy in your sleep. What's more, you can't simply "eat your way out" of feeling tired.
We know that sleep is important, but we don't know exactly what it is for. There are a huge variety of theories, including sleep as a memory and learning tool or even a way of giving the brain a chance to "clean" itself.
In general, the answer to "Why do we sleep?" is "Because we get tired.", but we're still figuring out why we get tired at all.
3. You're Older Than You Think
You might well be in the throes of a quarter-life crisis, but it might already be too late for that.
If you're 25, for example, you could be glib and say that you're 25 years and 9 months old, including the time you spent in the womb. At that point you were just a bunch of cells but, if we take the point even further, one of those cells was much older than the rest.
Your mother was born with all of the eggs she'll ever have, including the one that eventually became you and contains half of your DNA, this could arguably be when you first existed. So, if your mum was 25 when she had you, this might well bump you up to a nice round 50 years in existence. Better make that a mid-life crisis then.
If you want to get really existential, there is a part of you that is even older than that. Your DNA can be traced back to the very first organisms on the planet, meaning that there is a little string of stuff in your body that has been around in one way or another, for over 3 billion years.
2. You Have Hobbies Because You Fear Death
One of the defining features of humanity is that culture is so pervasive throughout the species, but seemingly nowhere else.
Whilst some think that this is just a symptom of a hyper-evolved social structure, those who subscribe to Terror Management Theory reckon that this is because we're one of the only species that is consciously aware of our own mortality and, therefore, are simply coming up with ways to either ignore or overcome it.
Most animals are happy with eating, sleeping, shagging and dodging predators, but humans fill their days and lives with a vast array of of activities that are not so useful for keeping them alive, but rather to help us survive death.
On the large scale, this translates into religion, many of which expressly promise that you will survive your own death, and on the smaller scale we throw ourselves into "impactful" activities and things that give our lives "value".
Psychologists who subscribe to TMT think that it is one of the major drivers behind many human behaviours that still baffle many scientists, including self esteem, religion, culture and even love.
1. You’re Alive, But Made Of Dead Stuff
Speaking of death, scientists are still struggling with defining death, and therefore life, anyway.
One of the major reasons why scientists find the concept of "life" so difficult to define is that, on a fundamental level, there isn't much difference between "living" and "dead" things.
You are made up of cells, which we think of as living, but they essentially work like tiny robots and are incapable of any thought, decision making or "experience". The cells themselves, however, are made of completely non-living material and no part of it is alive until makes up a whole.
We know that you can't sew together dead body parts and get a living monster, so how do you put together a blob of dead material and get a living cell? What's more, how do you put these Frankenstein cells together and get a living, breathing, thinking being?
As our technology advances, we're even finding that many computer programmes, viruses for example, actually fulfill most of our criteria for what constitutes life, yet we instinctively feel that this is somehow different.
We're just not sure how.
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