no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened
it’s such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like “there’s a hand there”
Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”
Brain is like “nice”
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
As a cave guide: we call that ‘cave blindness’! True darkness absolutely wigs your brain out - we’re such visual creatures that after a while our brain throws a hissy after not seeing anything. Sensory deprivation is a very real kind of torture. We have a huge, deep cave system at work and there are a lot of places where you’re hundreds of meters in solid rock in this tiny, dark, still space.
I like to turn my torch off, sit down with my back against the wall, and wait to see how long it takes before I start seeing things or feeling like the ground is moving, or hearing things. Because I know I’m not - I’m in complete darkness, utter silence, sitting in rock that hasn’t moved in hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Proof that brains are Ridiculous and over-react to a lot of stuff!
I want to add to this that people who lose their hearing as adults have reported hearing music “being played loudly from somewhere”, and other auditory hallucinations, bc the brain will just panic and put your brain’s ipod on *fucking shuffle* if it’s not getting any input
I’m not sure why I feel this way, but imo this is the most cursed marine mammal fact I have ever heard
THAT’S RIGHT AND THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME SO I CAN INFLICT THIS ON EVERYONE AT 1AM!
Mammals normally shed their skin in small flakes all the time when their skin cells die off, but because whales are living in the ocean -AKA, Bacteria Stew- flaking off like that would cause microabrasions (really tiny cuts) that would mean the whale is continually fighting off infections. So, when a whale needs to replace it’s dead skin cells, it preps it’s new skin underneath, then sheds all it’s dead skin cells at once, like a lizard:
but not having hands makes it hard to remove this gross film, so molting brings many whales clsoe to shore where they can roll around on rocky/sandy coastal seabeds to scratch it off. Here’s a bunch of Beluga coming in for a mass scratch:
And THIS is what a chunk of Sperm Whale Molt looks like, floating in the water before it’s devoured by pelagic microfauna, because you take what calories you can get in the open ocean:
Nature is Amazing!
wish it still held in one big piece like a snake though. Wish you could be swimming in the ocean and you see a huge empty whale billowing like a balloon. like a latex glove a hundred feet long. imagine getting tangled in that. what if you died cause you got caught in an empty whale like it’s a big blanket
I love your thinkin @bogleech this’s is givin me ✨ideas✨, I’m probably never gonna use ‘em but they’re there is I need ‘em
I also JUST realized this is undoubtedly the “cryptid” this one scuba diver claimed to see. He said a giant “amoeba” floated up from the deep, made the surrounding water colder, then engulfed a shark and returned back to the trench.
Obviously a current blew a whale skin up from deeper water and a shark blundered into it, then kept on swimming anyway. Maybe it was a nice tasty treat??
i dont agree with a lot of the posturing against people who only watch kid’s cartoons because it feels mean-spirited. like if you want to do that it’s cool and i don’t think you’re committing some moral or intellectual sin–but it is very silly when people who do this forget that they’re watching cartoons for children, not in a ‘you can’t expect children’s media to be good’ way or even a 'the politics of children’s media aren’t worth analyzing way’ but in a 'you have to be realistic about genre expectations’ way. because that’s how you end up with arguments over whether steven universe should have killed people or not
