Unsettled
"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality" - Edgar Allen Poe
Today we’re going to cover some things that aren’t quite life or death terrifying, but are unsettling nonetheless.
The Daily Rabbit Hole: Your own microplastic consumption at this point could be up to a credit card’s word a week.
“The single largest source of plastic ingestion is through water, both bottled and tap, all over the world.”
Yikes.
I don’t know what your recurring dreams are, but according to this map most of you are dealing with your teeth falling out in the middle of the night.
The ‘Wait, What?’ Vortex: An all female shark tank suddenly had an offspring recently.
“The zoo says this is the second known case of apparent asexual reproduction producing an epaulette shark pup in an accredited zoo or aquarium.”
Parthenogenesis is to blame here, but doesn’t make it any less odd.
It’s unsettling …
I’m warning you now, you’re about to cringe.
You know the sound of nails on a chalkboard? Metal scraping metal? Do you want to know why you’re tensing up just thinking about that noise or why those noises can give you a physiological reaction?
Your ear is designed to capture sounds around it. If you stare at yours long enough you can kinda see how the structure of an ear only makes sense for that one job. When you capture a sound like that with your ear, it funnels down the ear canal, through the middle and inner ear, and hitting your auditory nerve to send to the brain for processing.
When your brain doesn’t like a sound’s frequency, it gets sent to the amygdala to process. You may be thinking, “great, what does that mean?” (I mean that was my reaction at least). It turns out, I forgot a bit of middle school biology. The amygdala is responsible for your fight or flight response. Your brain assigns bad frequencies to the amygdala to handle and therefore we cringe, get goosebumps, etc.
Helpful when you’re on edge at night and hearing noises of an intruder crashing through a window. Not helpful at all when you accidentally set your glass down in an odd way and the noise causes you to shiver.