The human body is an impressive thing. Without any external cues, it knows how to shiver, sweat, breathe, chew, swallow, digest, heal, rest, circulate blood, formulate thoughts, and, well, roughly a million other things. The human body, to put another way, is a collection of minute calculations, accumulated over 50,000 years and honed into the biological supercomputer it is today.
But sometimes the human body is too advanced for its own good. Sometimes, that internal code will force it to do things without you even realizing it. And other times still, it’ll go so far to do the precise opposite of what you want it to. (Have you ever felt physically ill when you were sad? Tried to focus and inadvertently became even more distracted? Tasted color? Yeah, that sort of thing.)
Herein, to alleviate any concern you might feel when these events go down, are the 30 most common ways your body tricks you and works against you—each and every day. And for more anatomy anomalies, check out the 50 Secret Messages Your Body Is Trying to Tell You.
1 Your eyes can make you hear things.
Your senses interact in surprising ways, sometimes enhancing your experiences of the world. But other times, they can also mislead you. That’s the case of the McGurk effect, in which seeing something can lead you to hear the same audio differently. For example, in a study where people were played audio of the phrase, “he’s got your boot,” they were more likely to hear “he’s gonna shoot” when shown a video of a man pursuing a woman at the same time.
