When I was about 11 years old, my best friend and I were playing during recess at school, and I was carrying him around on my back, presumably pretending to be a multipart attack robot. All of a sudden, my heart started hurting, and I collapsed to my knees, and the robot was no more. Every time I inhaled, it would feel like a spike was being driven into my heart, and my breathing got completely shallow. I was sure I was done for, when all of a sudden, after an exhale, it disappeared.
It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I learned this was called Precordial catch syndrome and it happens to most everyone. Every friend I've told about it was surprised, and also most knew the feeling.
I collected a growing list of strange things bodies do ever since. And now finally I made it into a little page for others to see:
I immediately looked up whether it had "piss shiver" and it did. It was disappointing when Cecil (Straight Dope) refused to investigate it.
(Don't suppose you'd include orgasmic quiver?)
Synesthesia is multifaceted. When I was a kid I used to feel a shape in my hand whenever I felt a certain emotion. That went away in my 20's. Later as an adult I guessed it was a kind of synesthesia.
Ooh this is the closest description I've heard to one odd thing I had which was a satisfying feeling associated with two specific thicknesses (one around the thickness of a school copy book, the other around the thickness of a school maths book). At some points it could be activated by thinking about the thickness but long gone now.
Also had 3 more complex emotions/feelings/states that were a blend of certain particular things, not always that connected. For example one was mostly a combination of memories of my grandad's past (he died before I was born), and the Ratchet and Clank level "Metropolis". Similarly, the actual feeling of these is now gone. Anyone else have something similar?
The closest I've heard to that was Brian Eno in his film talking about something similar he seemed to have growing up with the colour purple.
When I see someone else jump or fall from a height, I sense the fall in the bottoms of my feet and my lower legs. I feel both the drop and the landing. It also happens if I approach a ledge or dropoff.
I thought this was universal. It's pretty easy to trigger for me, even quite abstract geometric shapes that look a bit like something falling from a height can trigger it.
I'm surprised it's so few! I'm in the 60-70% here -- I've never gotten it (despite many deliberate efforts), but I've never known anyone else who seems to be immune.
I experienced mild brain freeze as a child but it went away in adolescence. It doesn't seem pleasant so I don't envy those of you who get intense versions of it.
I wonder about these sites that appear to be vibe coded from a simple prompt. Has the author even looked at the data or just did a little sample and figured that looks about right and hit publish
They left out "autoheadslap", the sharp pain you get whenever anyone mentions Nvidia and you smack your forehead as you remember cancelling your massive buy order back when it was $110 and had not split yet!! It is often accompanied by uncontrolled twitching and repeatedly saying "fuuuuuuuuu" as you bite your tongue.
Very cool site! It's got some Claude-isms but they're not overwhelming which leads me to wonder: how did the author get the overall aesthetic to be so un-Claude-like?
People downvote me when I say we're back in the "Geocities era" / "indie web" of the 90's and 00's, but LLMs have enabled us to build cool side projects to completion and give them love.
This is 100% a good thing.
I love this website. It's fantastic. I don't care if it's AI. The world is better for it existing.
People were already building cool side projects to completion and giving them love before AI.
You get downvoted for being weirdly ecstatic about AI "enabling" things that were already possible, while not caring about the human element that AI lacks.
People that say "things [...] were already possible" don't dream enough.
Maybe you were born a few decades too late. I feel I was born (a few decades?) too early.
I want the world with cures for cancer, holodecks, brain uploads, immortality, jet packs, surfing on Titan, etc.
I legitimately enjoy the future we're hurtling towards. It's the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species. I hated the world where "Apple iPhones" were the pinnacle of human achievement.
We might be able to vibe engineer our own iPhones in a few years. That'll be fun.
The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.
And for those of us who can engineer, we're making 10x, 20x what we were before. I'm filling my life with all kinds of fun side projects, toys, games, utility software, automations. I don't look at libraries and software packages anymore - I just build what I need.
This is like 3D printing for software.
I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I am so excited about everything I'm going to be building. Time was a limit before. There is no limit now.
> FFS we've stood on the moon.
And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
>The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.
Learning to program has never been easier or more accessible. Being able to build a website has been accessible to non-techies for years. I'll admit using an AI is convenient but "beyond remarkable" is pushing it. If anything it's a bit of a tragedy. In exchange for that convenience people are buying into a closed, third party mass surveillance infrastructure generating code they can't understand, can't repair, can't edit or redistribute. From a FOSS point of view AI is objectively worse than what we had. And that's not even getting into the flood of slop and disinformation destroying the web.
>I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I can't imagine you needed all of this done within a month and couldn't find existing solutions for most of it. It seems more like you're addicted than being productive.
And I still don't see the line between you vibe-coding a productivity app something something holograms and brain uploads and surfing on Titan.
>And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
No, we aren't. We're no closer to than than we were 60 years ago. If you think Elon Musk is actually going to accomplish anything of the sort I think you're bound for disappointment.
I agree that this is an example of interesting and good AI usage. The person who made it obviously put thought into it. Unfortunately a lot of vibe coded sites do not have that same level of care
A lot of effortful things deliver value, yet we call them slop. The Jurassic Park sequels, for instance.
One of the common tropes anti-AI people fall into is calling all AI-enabled works low effort. I'm refuting that point here, but you're right in that there's a broader discussion to be had as to what constitutes value to different demographics, individual tastes, and subjectivities.
There are highly discerning craftspeople with good taste who are both using and consuming AI works. This should not be disregarded.
What "enabled" people to build cool side projects in the actual 90's and 00's and what stopped them from doing it in the period afterwards but before LLMs?
Awesome site! I didn't find canaliths on it so I might submit it to you eventually: roughly every winter I get vertigo when lying down, and apparently there is no "fix" except to "reposition my canaliths"[1].
I knew those as otoliths, and the vertigo they cause is so intense and annoying I never forgot the name: benign paroxysmal positional vertigo
Fortunately, the Epley maneuver is very effective, if done correctly. Unfortunately, if done incorrectly it can worsen the symptoms. It's all about identifying in which semicircular canal are the otoliths before moving them.
Interesting! I’ve definitely seen and noticed this but never looked into it further. The Wikipedia page has an example image that aligns with my experience pretty well.
I get migraines and weird visual auras with them sometimes. I assumed that this phenomenon was related. Didn’t realize I was actually seeing light polarization. These things are often hard to describe and look up. Good to hear that this is likely benign.
I'm not a diver but I suspect it can be learned. I have allergy issues that cause my ears to not equalize when allergies are hitting and I think I just learned how to do this. its just sort of muscle that can sort of be lightly controlled. Controlling one side vs the other I can't really manage.
My mum taught me the ear popping thing, while we were traveling by air, to relieve the ear pressure.
I can do it on command but never paid attention to how before.
It's basically "yawning manually". There's a couple different muscles activating at the same time, most irrelevant to the popping, I can't control them individually yet. (Probably learnable, if I practiced I could probably get the pop more efficiently.)
But yeah, just yawn real wide, that should do it.
A lot of stuff is learnable, like I couldn't move my ears but taught myself how to do it because I was bored.
For me I describe it more as trying to open your jaw with the muscles near your ear, while holding the jaw in place with the main jaw muscles. Like an isometric hold.
I actually didn't know I could do it until now, I could always get the click and it's how I clear ear popping sensations but I didn't realize it I push it harder I get the hollow voice thing and apparently it's useful for diving. Cool.
For me, I'm pretty sure it's related to having just awful seasonal allergies as a child - I'd quite often get stuffed up and have an unfortunate amount of pressure in my sinuses and ears. So then I'd pinch my nose and try to adjust it, eventually realizing I didn't need to pinch my nose.
I scrolled the whole list looking to see if there was anything about being able to stop hiccups by conscious effort alone. Suspect that there would be some overlap between voluntary tube openers and hiccup stoppers, as the internal sensations are kind of similar.
Sleep Paralysis is for sure my favorite oddity. I've not experienced it in 20 years and I miss it. It happened about once a year when I was young and into my early 20s. Mine often had weird noises and hallucinations and creatures floating around. The first few times it was rather scary but then I realized it was pretty neat. The trick I learned is to tell myself I just have to move my toe.
I've experienced it once or twice, and mine was the classic "can't move, malevolent presence just barely in the corner of your vision". Once, I think I was actually still half-asleep-ish, and trying to yell and my wife woke me up.
Definitely not pleasant, even when I'm rationally aware of what's going on.
I've never seen someone miss sleep paralysis before. I get it, but the hallucinations that people describe never happen to me. I just become aware that I'm about to wake up, but I can't yet control my body or even breathing. I always know not to panic, yet I always panic and try desperately to start moving. I can always see the room, but it's a dream version because my eyes aren't really open and it looks different once I'm truly awake.
I don't have much sleep weirdness, but when I'm about to fall asleep, I frequently imagine 3D object spinning and rapidly changing size. Kinda like the 3D TempleOS sprites [1], but 5x faster and increasing/decreasing size at the same rate.
Sleep paralysis is when you're having an intervention in the monitoring realm but your matrix being becomes aware while so. Sources can't agree if it's done on purpose or just the analgesic dosage that was too short.
Next time you have one pay attention to hear if there's sound of steps as if moving away from where you are.
No, it's not always terrifying. I think the terror is because some people feel they're being pressed down. Once you know what it is, it's a lot less scary. It's to stop you acting out your dreams.
Nested false awakenings are the worst. Now I have a phrase to use for when that happened to me.
I dreamt that I was attacked and killed by a monster. Getting killed in a dream makes one wake up immediately, lol. I was hanging out with a friend of mine and telling him about the dream and as soon as I told him what happened he turned into a monster and killed me.
I was driving down the road with my friend Lloyd who was a passenger beside me in the car and telling him about this crazy dream. As soon as I mentioned the monster killing me, he turned into a monster and killed me - while I was driving my stinking car! Then I woke up and I was like "am I fucking really awake now?" I was.
An interesting story about the Photic Sneeze Reflex [0]:
it's one of the things that fighter pilots are screened for. The reasoning is that they can't have a pilot looking down and dark ground, look up to scan for enemy fighters and start sneezing.
Some people with the reflex can also have multiple sneezes in a row.
I think I just learned that I have this! I usually sneeze when walking out of the house into the morning sun. And regardless of what makes me sneeze, it's rarely just one or two at a time.
Yeah-- no kidding. When I was anosmic with COVID I couldn't eat much if anything. Food was just terrible. I still remember the soulless paste that was peanut butter. (Ugh. It was so bad...)
I def have taste preferences e.g. I like grapefruit better than orange juice. Another example is Sriracha tastes great to me as it's spicy but not too spicy. Too spicy and I just can't taste anything.
In other words, I have the same 5 basic tongue tastes that you do e.g. salt, sweet, bitter, sour and "umami". Flavor is usually taste + smell and that's the part I'm missing.
> Some people with the reflex can also have multiple sneezes in a row.
I think that is unrelated to the sun-sneeze reflex though, some people that don't have that reflex can sneeze multiple times in a row, and vice-versa too.
edit: and apparently AI-generated site layout too. Either it doesn't bother me as much as the writing, or I haven't seen enough examples, but I didn't notice that.
Something not mentioned that I’m curious about, if I’m about to fall asleep and I happen to hear a loud noise nearby, I also see a flash of light with my closed eyelids.
Weird. A spike in blood pressure maybe? Can you do reproduce it consistently on purpose with an alarm or by holding something as you fall asleep that will make a loud noise when it falls?
This is a really cool collection! I feel like it needs a manual once-over though, particularly in regard to the images. Having even a handful obviously wrong images makes the rest of the site feel less trustworthy.
This AI website has very weak sources for many pages.
As they said in school (and is still valid here) - Wikipedia is never to be your primary citation. This website commits the sins of citing Wikipedia and ONLY Wikipedia.
In this case, I'd prefer Wikipedia links that have sources. To be honest, this is also what students do when they can't cite WP directly, they cite or follow the sources.
You've been great with clicking yes/no on the oddities, and providing more examples! I've already added some more, and refined some texts. I'll give it some more attention after I'm home again later today.
I would get that as well - I ended up at the urgent care a few times just because it was so painful and unsettling.
It was never diagnosed but I'm pretty sure it was costochondritis - something in my sternum area was inflamed and would give off this awful shooting chest pain.
I clicked on Supernumerary nipples. Interesting. In the Sources section, there’s a link to Mark Wahlberg’s Wikipedia page. There’s nothing about nipples on Mark Wahlberg’s Wikipedia page.
The geometric nightmares! I had those as a kid whenever I was very tired or had a fever, and kept having them until my late teens. Never seen them described and didn't know it was a thing.
Same here. I also recall them when I had fevers in my childhood.
I attribute them to the fact that, while trying to sleep with a fever, my eyes are half-open, and any sharp object becomes a visible geometric shape that my brain attempts to comprehend but almost fails to. I still experience them in adulthood. I’ve never had sleep paralysis, but whenever I think of people who have it, I imagine it feels as debilitating as these half-sleep experiences where you’re unable to move while your brain processes distressing memories.
According to the website “Geometric Nightmares,” it is not a scientific name. It is simply the name given to this phenomenon in forums where people discuss and share their experiences.
Interesting. I recently discovered that my sister and I have identical geometric nightmares, down to every detail, while everyone else I mention this to thinks it's insane. I wonder whether there's a genetic aspect?
Last time I stopped smoking cannabis I got these for a couple days. They are intense. The most recent was kind of like taking a slow rollercoaster ride through three black hole sized perfect spheres orbiting nothing. Another one was less geometric but was basically me getting sucked into a black hole. Both had this almost lucid dreaming feel where my entire sense of self became condensed into a single point... but I was still there, aware of what was happening... it was incredibly memorable.
I had a recurring abstract nightmare as a small kid (don't think it was related to fever but I guess those were pretty common) which was basically about a line, gradually becoming messier and messier until it was all just a big jumble. I could never explain it to anyone else, but it terrified me for a time.
I've heard these fever dreams referred to as big-small as well. I believe it's the same phenomenon. For me it was pillars from high up above, where they're all the same width, but one is also much bigger at the same time. Hard to explain... Just an odd feeling.
And, anecdotally, I have gotten a similar feeling reaching deep enough meditation.
Crazy, I used to have the exact same (well, as best as I could describe them they were the same) dreams. I can still vividly remember the feeling of them, of the perfection of the line, and the growing pressure of some external force trying to mess it up, until eventually it always did.
Had them as a kid. A canvas in beige that spanned my whole view and was the entire world. There was an invisible opponent and we played a game. You filled half of the seemingly infinite canvas with black or a dark blue. Then the other person until no beige remained. I always lost.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 14.0 ms ] threadIt wasn't until I was in my twenties that I learned this was called Precordial catch syndrome and it happens to most everyone. Every friend I've told about it was surprised, and also most knew the feeling.
I collected a growing list of strange things bodies do ever since. And now finally I made it into a little page for others to see:
https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/
It includes a form to tell me about new things, if you think they belong on the page. Feedback welcome!
(Don't suppose you'd include orgasmic quiver?)
Synesthesia is multifaceted. When I was a kid I used to feel a shape in my hand whenever I felt a certain emotion. That went away in my 20's. Later as an adult I guessed it was a kind of synesthesia.
Also had 3 more complex emotions/feelings/states that were a blend of certain particular things, not always that connected. For example one was mostly a combination of memories of my grandad's past (he died before I was born), and the Ratchet and Clank level "Metropolis". Similarly, the actual feeling of these is now gone. Anyone else have something similar?
The closest I've heard to that was Brian Eno in his film talking about something similar he seemed to have growing up with the colour purple.
very interesting google results for this one lol
Fabulous site.
Yes, a rare but real human affliction.
Still waiting...
This is 100% a good thing.
I love this website. It's fantastic. I don't care if it's AI. The world is better for it existing.
You get downvoted for being weirdly ecstatic about AI "enabling" things that were already possible, while not caring about the human element that AI lacks.
Maybe you were born a few decades too late. I feel I was born (a few decades?) too early.
I want the world with cures for cancer, holodecks, brain uploads, immortality, jet packs, surfing on Titan, etc.
I legitimately enjoy the future we're hurtling towards. It's the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species. I hated the world where "Apple iPhones" were the pinnacle of human achievement.
We might be able to vibe engineer our own iPhones in a few years. That'll be fun.
There is literally nothing about generating websites with AI that merits being called "the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species."
FFS we've stood on the moon.
The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.
And for those of us who can engineer, we're making 10x, 20x what we were before. I'm filling my life with all kinds of fun side projects, toys, games, utility software, automations. I don't look at libraries and software packages anymore - I just build what I need.
This is like 3D printing for software.
I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I am so excited about everything I'm going to be building. Time was a limit before. There is no limit now.
> FFS we've stood on the moon.
And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
Learning to program has never been easier or more accessible. Being able to build a website has been accessible to non-techies for years. I'll admit using an AI is convenient but "beyond remarkable" is pushing it. If anything it's a bit of a tragedy. In exchange for that convenience people are buying into a closed, third party mass surveillance infrastructure generating code they can't understand, can't repair, can't edit or redistribute. From a FOSS point of view AI is objectively worse than what we had. And that's not even getting into the flood of slop and disinformation destroying the web.
>I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I can't imagine you needed all of this done within a month and couldn't find existing solutions for most of it. It seems more like you're addicted than being productive.
And I still don't see the line between you vibe-coding a productivity app something something holograms and brain uploads and surfing on Titan.
>And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
No, we aren't. We're no closer to than than we were 60 years ago. If you think Elon Musk is actually going to accomplish anything of the sort I think you're bound for disappointment.
We're really, really not.
Phoned in websites / AI slop is not a good thing.
Code something yourself on neocities.
Infinite randomly generated slop + The Algorithm = Extremely personalized value delivered
One of the common tropes anti-AI people fall into is calling all AI-enabled works low effort. I'm refuting that point here, but you're right in that there's a broader discussion to be had as to what constitutes value to different demographics, individual tastes, and subjectivities.
There are highly discerning craftspeople with good taste who are both using and consuming AI works. This should not be disregarded.
It all goes away during the summer somehow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver
Fortunately, the Epley maneuver is very effective, if done correctly. Unfortunately, if done incorrectly it can worsen the symptoms. It's all about identifying in which semicircular canal are the otoliths before moving them.
I get migraines and weird visual auras with them sometimes. I assumed that this phenomenon was related. Didn’t realize I was actually seeing light polarization. These things are often hard to describe and look up. Good to hear that this is likely benign.
https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/voluntary-eustach...
I can do it on command but never paid attention to how before.
It's basically "yawning manually". There's a couple different muscles activating at the same time, most irrelevant to the popping, I can't control them individually yet. (Probably learnable, if I practiced I could probably get the pop more efficiently.)
But yeah, just yawn real wide, that should do it.
A lot of stuff is learnable, like I couldn't move my ears but taught myself how to do it because I was bored.
I actually didn't know I could do it until now, I could always get the click and it's how I clear ear popping sensations but I didn't realize it I push it harder I get the hollow voice thing and apparently it's useful for diving. Cool.
For me, I'm pretty sure it's related to having just awful seasonal allergies as a child - I'd quite often get stuffed up and have an unfortunate amount of pressure in my sinuses and ears. So then I'd pinch my nose and try to adjust it, eventually realizing I didn't need to pinch my nose.
Definitely not pleasant, even when I'm rationally aware of what's going on.
I don't have much sleep weirdness, but when I'm about to fall asleep, I frequently imagine 3D object spinning and rapidly changing size. Kinda like the 3D TempleOS sprites [1], but 5x faster and increasing/decreasing size at the same rate.
1. https://youtu.be/LtlyeDAJR7A?t=451
Also always accompanied by fear.
Interestingly the belief of what the presence is has changed with culture. It used to be demons, now it is more likely to be aliens.
BTW sleep paralysis is likely the cause of many 'alien abduction' reports: wake up, can't move, presence in the room, sexual element (e.g. probing!).
I dreamt that I was attacked and killed by a monster. Getting killed in a dream makes one wake up immediately, lol. I was hanging out with a friend of mine and telling him about the dream and as soon as I told him what happened he turned into a monster and killed me.
I was driving down the road with my friend Lloyd who was a passenger beside me in the car and telling him about this crazy dream. As soon as I mentioned the monster killing me, he turned into a monster and killed me - while I was driving my stinking car! Then I woke up and I was like "am I fucking really awake now?" I was.
it's one of the things that fighter pilots are screened for. The reasoning is that they can't have a pilot looking down and dark ground, look up to scan for enemy fighters and start sneezing.
Some people with the reflex can also have multiple sneezes in a row.
I find this all fascinating as:
- I have this
- I was also born with no sense of smell
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex
Fascinating. No smell at all? If someone rips a nasty one next to you, do you know?
Never knew that it was part of fighter pilot screening, that is interesting.
They all think I am insane blaming the sun for my sneezes.
In other words, I have the same 5 basic tongue tastes that you do e.g. salt, sweet, bitter, sour and "umami". Flavor is usually taste + smell and that's the part I'm missing.
If you are more interested, I wrote a Twitter thread about all of this here: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1559865770515087360
I think that is unrelated to the sun-sneeze reflex though, some people that don't have that reflex can sneeze multiple times in a row, and vice-versa too.
edit: and apparently AI-generated site layout too. Either it doesn't bother me as much as the writing, or I haven't seen enough examples, but I didn't notice that.
It happens simultaneously with the sound, so I would guess it is purely a weird form of synesthetic hallucination.
I do get explosion head syndrome as well, but that is rare in my case.
https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/hypnagogic-halluc...
>I also see a flash of light with my closed eyelids.
You might want to talk to a optician about that. It can be a sign of issues with your retina.
I see flashes in a dark room when I wake up, because I have PVDs (posterior vitreous detachment) in both eyes.
Edit: I just re-read your post. If they both happen together, I think it is something different.
I do get explosion head syndrome as well, but that is rare in my case.
As they said in school (and is still valid here) - Wikipedia is never to be your primary citation. This website commits the sins of citing Wikipedia and ONLY Wikipedia.
Thanks to everyone!
It was never diagnosed but I'm pretty sure it was costochondritis - something in my sternum area was inflamed and would give off this awful shooting chest pain.
I attribute them to the fact that, while trying to sleep with a fever, my eyes are half-open, and any sharp object becomes a visible geometric shape that my brain attempts to comprehend but almost fails to. I still experience them in adulthood. I’ve never had sleep paralysis, but whenever I think of people who have it, I imagine it feels as debilitating as these half-sleep experiences where you’re unable to move while your brain processes distressing memories.
According to the website “Geometric Nightmares,” it is not a scientific name. It is simply the name given to this phenomenon in forums where people discuss and share their experiences.
And, anecdotally, I have gotten a similar feeling reaching deep enough meditation.