Throughout my education, I have studied many major fields and learned many important things. Ranging from the fundamentals of math that branched into the calculus we all know and (don’t) love to philosophical debates on what it means to know anything at all.

This is not an article about any of those revelations. For your reading entertainment, I present to you a list of weird things I have thought about throughout my academic career.

1. Your brain's great taste.

When you taste something for the first time, your brain is deciding – almost arbitrarily – whether or not to like it. Without any previous experience with a particular food, the only thing we really have to go on is how we feel when we try it for the first time. Yes, there are external factors that matter such as having seen other people enjoying / disliking a particular food or its smell. However, I have seen my brother eat blueberries numerous times but when I try them, they still make my brain sad.

2. Koalas would not make good dinner dates.

Koalas, the true superior mammals of this Earth, won’t eat eucalyptus leaves off a plate because they can’t identify them as food without the leaves growing on a tree. Cute animal, but not something you’d want to take to a sit-down restaurant.

3. Your emotions are not yours to control.

As you sit there (hopefully at least mildly entertained by this article thus far) your current mood may seem like a result of the day you’ve had or a recent action you’ve performed. In some ways, it is. We tend to think of emotions as a very

personal matter. Mostly, however, emotions are just the result of the chemical status of your brain – what neurotransmitters are in the highest abundance and are successfully binding to nerve cells. Your mood can be changed by simply taking a pill that, for example, stops the uptake of happiness (dopamine). Our feelings and perspectives on certain topics are a result of chemicals causing emotions, not events.

4. In another universe, multiple universes exist.

I’ve always been fascinated by multiple and parallel universes. There is, theoretically, another version of me that decided to write an article on a different topic or thought of 7 other weird things to write about. Think about a universe where we evolved from an animal other than monkeys an

d how different we would all look. Or maybe there’s a universe where dolphins are at the top of the intellectual food chain and they go to zoos to see the lesser humans trapped behind glass walls or watch us on TV in our natural habitats.

5. Sloths only come down from trees to poop.

At first, this sounds like an odd thing to fixate on. However, imagine a world where you could just lay around and do almost nothing, exerting almost no energy except for the occasions when you have to get out of your tree (or off your couch) to relieve yourself. Sounds pretty good to me.

The unfortunate part, however, is that it typically takes the sloth a day or so to get to the ground and by the time they make it back up into the tree, they probably have to poop again. Also, most of their predators await them on the ground so pooping is a life-or-death journey. Why don't they just poop in the trees you ask? I don't know. Perhaps they need a few more million years of evolution.

6. Our brains understand very little about themselves.

Some of the research I am involved with in school is working to model the blood-brain barrier in order to further understand medications and cancers. There is a surprising amount that we don’t know about our own bodies. But in particular, I find it a bit amusing when I am pondering issues that regard the brain and stop to think that my brain is actually just trying to figure itself out and can’t.

7. We are all just tubes with arms and legs.

In the early stages of development, before we all begin as female, we all actually begin as little butt holes. It’s true. The first thing to form is the indent that will eventually be our butts. That indent will deepen and reach the other side of the hollow cell, form a hole, and become our mouth. The rest – our organs and limbs – are just accessories to this tube. If you think about it, our existence isn’t much more than remembering to put food/water into this tube in hopes that it will distribute the nutrients and keep us alive.