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[–] 93 points 5 months ago (27 children)

Fun semi-related fact:

Have you ever walked outside on a bright day and it's so bright it hurts? Turns out there's a max pain limit from brightness per eye, and your brain adds them together.

By closing one eye, you cut the total possible pain in half.

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  • [–] 25 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    Absolutely unfun semi-related fact:

    Sometimes when one eye is injured, the injured eye has to be removed or your body will decide the uninjured eye is bad and your immune system will destroy it.

    Sympathetic Ophthalmia

    If the injured eye has no chance of recovery, they scoop it out.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (7 children)

    Your body can also just decide it doesn't like a finger or limb and kill it.

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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Yeah, the immune system can be moronic. Intelligent design my ass.

    However, there's something extra special about getting poked in one eye and having your own immune system decide that an eye for an eye means your good eye has to die.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I think the immune system can't see the eye, so it's never trained to avoid it. If the eye is damaged, the immune system can become aware of it and start reacting. Once it starts, pulling it back is not easy.

    The immune response system is simultaneously amazing and insane.

    It basically deliberately scrambles part of the DNA in the immune cells that create antibodies. The rest of the body then sheds cells into the blood to move to the lymph nodes. Any immune cells that react then self destruct.

    It's the equivalent of firing a paint blunderbuss at a wall, and creating a silhouette by standing in the way!

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    My immune system pisses me off constantly.

    It let COVID through three times despite me rigorously keeping up to date with the vaccines as much as possible, and at the same time it has destroyed my thyroid gland and it has declared cherries and peaches as terrorist infiltrators.

    I feel like if my immune system is so bored it needs to attack harmless things, I should never have to deal with any actually harmful thing.

    It's like a cop that beats up an unarmed teenager, but hides when someone is shooting up a school.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    I definitely think there are grounds to the cleanliness hypothesis. Basically the immune system expects a certain amount of activity. If it's underperforming, the body systems assume it's a problem with the immune system, not a lack of bugs, because we are too clean. It then racks up activity levels, causing problematic autoimmune or allergy reactions.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    That is fun, I’ve wondered why that is. I also think sometimes when it’s super bright out it makes me sneeze.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    That's definitely a known thing.

    My brain is weird, because if I'm super nauseous it makes me sneeze then I feel better

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Is this that odd? We experience less pain if one of two arms has a knife in it instead of both.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    It is a bit odd. Your eyes feel pain to tell you whatever you are seeing might damage them if you look too long. But if you close one eye the pain can disappear entirely, even though that single eyes experience is the exact same.

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