Worlds Weirdest Events | Season 1 Episode 5

let's face it our world is downright weird crawling with creatures you've never heard of I can't believe that's a living thing full of the unexpected like freak weather exploding out of the blue I thought I was gonna die and rocks the spontaneously combust I thought it was dynamite going and feel explain an unborn twin discovered inside a brain there was multiple hair follicles born and teeth we scoured the globe to bring you the very weirdest stories I can feel this intense pain as if you are being stabbed by hundreds of syringes in this series we're going to examine the evidence test the science and unravel the mysteries we are going to discover what in the weird world is going on in this episode we'll explore some treatises our goings-on how can a stroll along the beach end in catastrophic injuries what's causing three Salmons to miraculously appear in our skies what's your date please go outside look up in the sky who is bringing gifts to a little girl they're my friends and some of them are like family and how can a person with perfectly good eyesight not recognize her own children now most people love a trip to the beach in summertime paddle along the shoreline take in the fresh sea air maybe build a few sound castles but I've got to tell you it can be quite a dangerous place and I'm not just talking about forgetting your sunscreen I'm talking about something far more sinister Orange County California on a beautiful summer's day in 2012 the hilar family headed out to take part in one of their favorite pastimes beachcombing the big prizes when you're down at the beach our sea glass and on that day we found a piece of blue sea glass we found a piece of green as we would find interesting things to let out everyone would stop and we'd kind of pick what it was our favorite rock or shell and I would I was the one with shorts and so I had them in my pocket we're all familiar with gathering trinkets along the shore Butlins collection was about to change her life forever we'd been down there for probably two or three hours I came home I was sitting at this counter and I was peeling an orange and all of a sudden this intense heat this intense pain was hitting my leg it felt like somebody had a magnifying glass outside the window and it was aimed at my leg so logically I felt like it must be a bug now the California coast is home to all manner of dangers from rip currents to sharks but the cause of Lynn's pain was far weirder had she brought back an unexpected guest in her pocket was a scorpion hiding in one of the shells or deadly cone snow with Barb's poised to paralyze I decide to smack my leg to kill whatever is on my leg and what ends up happening is I looked down and there are flames shooting off of my shorts we're both just kind of in this sort of panic of why isn't it going out my husband started yelling get get your shorts off get your shorts off and I'm trying to undo them with one burned hand and he was pulling them off the stones were coming out of the burnt hole and dropping on the ground and creating small fires each place they would land Lyn's carefree trip to the beach cost her ten days in hospital Oh in all she had to have six operations including a complex skin graft so what had caused her shorts to ignite what a call such terrible burns even the emergency surfaces were completely baffled outside the fire department was asking me what it could have been and I told them all I had in that pocket were rocks and there is no one could believe that that was what was causing it there was no obvious explanation so the smoldering rocks found at the scene were sent for analysis and one in particular stuck in Lin's mind one of the rocks actually looked like amber that one little rock I thought was what a find it was this beautiful clear had ribboning kind of going through it it wasn't very big it's very small but I thought wow I found a piece of amber but the little orange stone wasn't amber lynn had picked up something much more deadly there were many elements that can self ignite some like sodium are stable in air but we act violently in water one however does the complete opposite phosphorus in water it's stable but when taken out of water it spontaneously combusts with the oxygen present in this flask burning at around 1,300 degrees Celsius now you might have encountered phosphorus before perhaps in one of these a flare or even in matches it's a reactive chemical is certainly flammable but it's nothing compared to the type of phosphorus that Lynn inadvertently picked up on the beach now that was white phosphorus the most explosive kind whilst lynn shorts were still damp from paddling the pebble of phosphorus in her pocket was stable but when her shorts began to dry out that's when the rock ignited so are we talking about a new discovery in the world of geology and naturally-occurring phosphorus which mineral was sadly not the pebble that lynn happened upon was most likely the explosive remnants of an old artillery shell leftover from military exercises certainly not the usual type of shell you'd expect to find on the beach had the kids than the ones who carried the rocks very different scenario that I would not like to even consider wow what a sobering story makes me think that the next time I go beachcombing and find something a bit weird I probably won't put it in my pocket just have an ice-cream instead but then it also reminds me of another story an astonishing discovery made when someone was just out for a stroll something that we defined the world of sound forever okay what's the loudest animal on the planet no not quite nearly that's it the blue whale the largest and the loudest animal on earth with a call at over 188 decibels louder than a jet engine for decades this ocean giant has held the title that is until recently you see scientists have discovered a new contender that relative to its size can give the blue whale a run for its money so what is this cacophonous creature well I can tell you one thing it's a tad smaller than a blue whale the discovery was made by an inquisitive scientist experimenting with a new area of research some of the group were just walking along by a lake and they could suddenly hear very high-pitched chirping sounds as you'd expect to hear from an insect but they couldn't actually see any of the incense because then it dawned on them that there must be something actually in the water after much exploration of the riverbanks James and his team discovered the unlikely source of the sound it was the tiny water boatman I know what you're thinking what you're thinking is that that's just a little squeak but at just 2 millimeters long the water boatmen is producing a sound at 99 point 2 decibels that's the same as me revving up this engine and then imagine if the thing was the size of a while the movies would be deafening unable to believe their ears James and his colleagues collected a few water boatmen and took them back to the lab you could hear them singing in the tubs and of course that then told us that these must be very loud insects because sound doesn't transfer out of water and into air very well in fact 99% of the sound in water is lost when it transfers to the air so just imagine how powerful it would be out of the water but what's weirdest of all is how the boatman actually produced this sound you see they don't do it by rubbing their legs together they don't do it by rubbing their wings together they do it or using on an altogether different part of their Anatomy so this tiny insect makes a sound by rubbing one part are their hard exoskeleton against another in essence it's called stridulation so a similar thing to what grasshoppers and crickets do to produce these sort of rasping scratchy sounds what really sets this story apart is the fact that this lesser water boatman uses parvis penis to make the sound that's right you've heard it correctly the water boatman sings with its penis by rubbing the structure against a grooved section of their abdomen u2 boatman sing to attract females the fact that it's so loud is also very weird because the area that produces the same width is very small it's about the width of a human hair so water boatmen produce their massive sound with a microscopic instrument just goes to prove size isn't everything well it's an earth-shattering serenade that's for sure but from record-breaking sounds to record-breaking size our next story is an assault on the senses of a very different kind Samara home to some of the world's most rare and beautiful plants whilst most compete to attract pollinators with delicate blooms and sumptuous smells one species has taken a very different path a bizarre turn off of evolutionary highway and there just happens to be a specimen of this floor rebel lurking in the Cambridge Botanic Gardens meet the Titan alum reaching up to three meters in height this is the largest flowering structure in the world blooming just once every 10 years this is a true botanical oddity but it's not just its looks that are unusual it's also its smell this misfit you see is not interested in attracting bees or butterflies it aims to lure in a much more unconventional group of pollinators carrion beetles The Undertaker's of the natural world just as honeybees are attracted by the sweet smell of nectar these gruesome insects are attracted by the scent of decomposing carcasses which is why this bloom smells like a corpse the distinctive stench is made up of a host of chemical compounds one of the key components is dimethyl trisulfide it's one of the principal ingredients in the smell of human feces so you can only imagine the stench well you can imagine it but a group of scientists had to get to grips with it because they broke it down to analyze it and found a ripe a cocktail of ingredients yes instead of releasing just one awful smell this plant releases a succession of aromas beginning with Wotton fruit in flesh and finally rotten fish no the odor is only the start of the deception if you imagine a plant flowering in a dense jungle environment it's no good being brightly colored or easy to see because you're in very dense vegetation it's much better to attract pollinators by having a smell which disperses there were quite a big distance the titan arum is effectively mimicking a piece of dead animal it's got its colors if you look at the deep red it looks like blood there's the yellowy textures in there and then with that scent as well of rotting flesh it's really doing a good job tending to be a dead animal it's a convincing con a plant that looks and smells like what meat but the tricks don't end there using some clever chemical reactions that tighten our can turn the energy that it normally uses for growth into warmth it's a feat that requires so much energy the plant can only flower very rarely and disturbingly the temperature it reaches is 37 degrees C human body temperature but you know it can get even hotter so is this a plant pretending to be a mammal surely not the first night that is open the flower heats itself up to about 40 degrees centigrade and that heating up allows the chemical compounds that are made to be released so for every 10 degrees or so centigrade you increase temperature you increase tenfold the distance that central molecules will travel in the air so we're heating itself up like that is really increasing the chances of that scent getting out and being picked up by the pollinators so the heat spreads the rancid odor further into the jungle to entice insects from far and wide it's nothing sinister it's a genius act of mimicry lured by the smell and the promise of food the beetles wander around searching for their non-existent reward but in doing so they inadvertently pollinate the plant exactly what it wanted poor little insects feel quite sorry for them being led up the garden path but what a weird story this is a plant that generates enough heat to mimic a human body whatever next well not a day of the Triffids style take over I fear because you see the energy required to grow so big and to produce that central heating means that this plant can only ever flower for 48 hours and in fact the titan arum is incredibly rare probably because of this weird strategy so not much chance of a world takeover from explosive locks to tiny insects with something to shout about and flowers with stomach-churning fragrances this is only the beginning cream right then what next well we're going from a remarkable story about some surprisingly generous garden visitors via the typical circuit US route to an unusual marine motel we begin our journey in Seattle home to eat your old Gaby man and her family like many kids Gaby likes to collect things but her treasures aren't dolls or stickers metal plastic buttons screws rocks more glass bones a lot of things and it's not just the content of her collection that's unusual it's who gave it to her they're my friends and some of them are like family they're really nice at least also them I think Gaby's not referring to her friends at school but to the crows in her backyard over the past two and a half years these generous garden visitors have been regularly bringing her gifts her collection now contains over a hundred different objects some dropped right at her feet and her collection is still growing can I show you one right now have one right in my hair by a squid that I got a week ago the million dollar question is are these birds really Gabby's friends I mean could these crows really be leaving gifts specifically for her now don't get me wrong I'm a massive fan of the crow family the corvids but I've never really seen them as caring sharing gift-giving Birds so could this behavior be real or is it just a figment of a child's vivid imagination I'd heard about gifting before but this was the most extensive collection by far I'd ever seen a lot of animals use gifts of one sort of the other to convey either their status or their interest in another partner but as far as we know Corbin's are the only birds that do this with people crows give gifts to people really to help cement a bond an important relationship that they have with this person so how common are close companionship Slyke Gabi's there's probably 20 or 30 instances of this happening around the world and they all have some consistency in terms of a person that's been engaging quite actively with the birds feeding them a lot consistently maybe even rescuing them we've had cases where a crow was stuck in a fence and a woman took the crow out of the fence and then started getting gifts so the gift seemed to be a thank you for the food that Gabi leaves out for them pretty good manners but is there a motive behind their kindness crows are undoubtedly some of the smartest animals on our planet they have an extremely large brain for their body size and because they live a long life sometimes more than 20 years they can develop some cunning ways to find food in addition to befriend studies have shown that crows are capable of using a sequence of tools to find a tasty reward something that previously only humans and chimpanzees were thought to have the brain power to do back in Seattle Gabi has found that over the years the gift she's been receiving appear to have been getting more human so could these super smart clothes really be picking out gifts they know that she will like I would not put it past these birds to make the association between these strange objects in their environment and humans having produced those it may simply be that we notice human things more also as humans ourselves we don't pay attention to little bits of bark and rock as much as we would a rubber squid you would notice that whatever the motive Gavi certainly has a very special bond with the clothes in her back garden I think I'd like a crow as a friend although I did have a magpie when I was a kid gave it cat food in it we distributed it all over the bedroom so maybe not but whether this is an actual case of cross species kindness or the crows swapping a few odds and ends for food I don't suppose we'll ever know although the pragmatist in me leans towards the latter if there is an incredible and proven example of gift-giving which is happening on a truly global scale the Amazon one of the most biodiverse places on the planet boasting 10% of all the world's species and over 400 billion trees but you know it wouldn't be anywhere near as abundant if it weren't for one element our old friend phosphorus thankfully not in the explosive man-made form we saw earlier but in its naturally occurring form phosphate a vital nutrient for plant growth but the Amazon has a problem you see every year when the rains come they wince through the top layers of the soil and wash away almost all of the phosphorus and that's the disaster phosphorus is essential to life it's in the very DNA a key component of the DNA in the plants so with no phosphorus you've got no trunks you've got no leaves you've got no power sloths Jaguars without the phosphorus you've got no Amazon so with the phosphorus constantly getting washed away how is this biodiversity hotspot still standing there was some mechanism that was actually replenishing that phosphorus year-on-year and so we were looking at where that phosphorus may have come from potentially could have been drawn in locally on stronger winds from South America but actually research has shown that it's come vast distances scientists confirmed a sneaking suspicion that the Amazon is getting a little help and it's in the form of a very long distance relationship because the Amazon forest is getting help from the Sahara Desert a barren landscape where temperatures can reach 57 degrees Celsius and wind speeds top 55 miles an hour it's perhaps not the first place you think of helping solve a horticultural problem on a mammoth scale when we think of the Saharan desert we don't think of lush vegetation it's a very dry arid area but it's full of nutrients nutrients this place well yes it seems the Sahara also has a secret and that secret lies in the Bodell depression in Chad a region that was once a giant lake over millions of years aquatic animals lived died and decomposed in the lake depositing phosphorus into its sediment now the lake has long since dried up but it's dusty remains are still loaded with goodness and it's these particles that have been found in the Amazon but with 10,000 kilometres and an ocean between them how is the phosphorus getting there well NASA satellites have been able to shed some light so the satellite data showed us a three-dimensional structure of the atmosphere so we could clearly see that dust was being taken from the Saharan desert from the surface of the earth high into the atmosphere and then transported all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to be deposited in the Amazon basin what a remarkable journey although when dust is blown to the UK from the Sahara a much shorter distance it's often just a light sprinkling on cars and windows so how much dust actually reaches the Amazon every year 182 million tons of dust is lifted from central Africa most of that dust falls into the ocean but about 30 million tons falls into the Amazon basin and that provides twenty-two thousand tons of phosphorus to that region every year and if you're wondering just how much phosphorus that is it's almost two and a half thousand top loads that's quite an impressive aid package so there you go proof that a global love-in can actually help support one of the world's most complex beautiful impressive ecosystems although I'm not sure the Bodell depression gets too much out of it a bit one sided this relationship reminds me of another one which could frankly be described as a real pain in the backside the Great Barrier Reef thousands of species live here and space is tight it can make finding a home pretty tricky even out on the quieter reef edge the exposed seabed offers few hiding places if you're neither strong or well-armed like this tiny pearl fish you'll need to get creative when it comes to looking for shelter perhaps set your sights slightly stranger enter the sea cucumber known as the vacuum cleaners of the sea they move along the seabed sucking in sand at one end and then expelling it out of the other and is this bizarre creature that has the solution to the Pearl of fishes accommodation problem to find out more we need a marine biologist call fish their little fish they're quite vulnerable simply because coral reefs are full of hungry predators you mostly would only see them out and about at night time where they go out hunting for plankton the little creatures that live in the water column and then during the day they need to find somewhere to hide well all of that sounds fairly sensible but where just the sea cucumber come in so sea cucumbers have basically a hole at the front end and the back end the front end is where the food goes in and all sorts of things happen at that back end it's where they breathe it's where they will excrete the sand they've been eating any other kind of digestive material will come out and that's it's also where they reproduce so it's a kind of one hole does many things and therein lies the clue because the pearl fish makes its cozy home inside the sea cucumbers bottom it has to be one of nature's weirdest living arrangements but is this honestly the best real estate available to the pearl fish well if you can imagine those sandy areas next to a coral reef there's really nowhere to hide this just flats and they're not many rocks or any other holes or crevices to hide in but there are sea cucumbers maybe but whilst the pearl fish may have set its sights on a potential home entry isn't always guaranteed if a sea cucumber does have an idea that maybe as a pearl fish around it might close up its bottom and so for a little while it won't be open for four guests if I knew there was a pearl fish around I'd be closing my bottom too but the resourceful fish has a solution to this problem by sticking the tip of its tail into the sea cucumbers rear end the pearl fish cuts off its oxygen supply knowing that the sea cucumber will have to open up to breathe eventually and when it does it's home sweet home pearl fish really have to be the worst tenants but what's really weird although let's face it what isn't weird about this story is that the sea cucumber could evict the pearl fish if they really wanted to if other fish come up and disturb a sea cucumber it has a really great defense mechanism what they'll do as a defense is spew their guts out through their bottoms and this is to basically distract a predator that's coming along and then they can make their slow getaway but this doesn't happen with a pearl fish so somehow they they don't trigger this fear response in the sea cucumber so despite being armed with a gutsy defense the hospitable sea cucumber lets the pearl fish die which isn't understood yet but then there's just no accounting to some behavior crows that bring gifts deserts that feed forests and sea cucumbers that put up with the very war end of the deal nature it seems is most unremittingly generous but sometimes it's not a combination or sustenance that it provides it provides something altogether different inspiration our next story takes us to a very frozen Heathrow Airport the drop in temperature has led to grounded planes being frozen into their parking stands with the de-icer having little effect despite one runway being Claire there have been less than 10% of flights that Heathrow over the weekend leaving 350,000 passengers stranded ice on grounded planes might cause misery for passengers heading off to sunnier climes but ice forming mid-flight can be deadly it's caused over 600 aviation accidents and more than 800 deaths in the United States alone the danger occurs when ice forms on the wing distorting its precise aerodynamic shape and causing the aircraft to lose lift it's something that has troubled aviation engineers for years the problem is that ice comes in many different forms you can imagine freezing rain snow sleet freezing fog or frost what we wanted to make is a paint or a surface for the airplane that releases antifreeze when it's exposed to ice the current solution to ice buildup is for planes to take a shower in antifreeze before flight the wings also have a highly water repellant surface but there is a problem when the wings get really cold the nonstick surfaces simply don't work imagine this strip of cardboard is an aeroplane wing and just like the wing it's been treated with a hydrophobic coating so the water just runs off but as the surface temperature drops we've used liquid nitrogen for the same effect the water droplets act very differently they stick and clump together and the geometry of the wing is radically changed and this will affect its ability to generate lift so what else can be done to prevent this buildup this is where Conrad comes in in the past twenty or thirty years people started looking at nature to try to find inspiration for current technological problems and he found his inspiration in a very unexpected place my wife and I were on holiday in Panama when on the jungle tour as we're going through the jungle the guide lifted up a leaf on the palm tree and there was a little poison dart frog so I was very excited start coming up close and tried to take a picture he said don't come up these things are really dangerous so at that point got very interested why are they dangerous the reason is that their skin is covered in a potent neurotoxin but it wasn't the poison that Conrad was interested in it was how the folks release it that sparked his imagination they have little glands in their skin and when they're very scared when they see a predator or a tourist they start releasing or secreting this toxin from the inner part of their body onto the outside of their skin we made a surface that's a mimic the structure of the frog that releases in this case an antifreeze instead of a toxin thanks to the amphibians Conrad and his team are developing a porous cyst that mimics the frogs skin and releases antifreeze on demand you'd have thought the deadly frogs might one day save lives just goes to prove inspiration can be found in the weirdest places the natural world can be surprisingly charitable crows showing their appreciation with presents a barren desert providing a nutrient lifeline to a bountiful jungle and of course a marine animal offering shelter to the homeless and finally I'll walk on the weird side is going to take us from strange lights in the sky to blind people with perfectly good vision via a drunken octopus in a toilet and it all starts in Florida hey what's your emergency yeah oh it's a weird circle up in the sky um there's a round called Farkle and his dark in the middle please go outside look up in the sky this never happen in Tampa Florida never album despite the colas distress she wasn't witnessing a UFO what that caller was seeing was a son halo so what's producing these extraordinary light shows well it's actually something remarkably ordinary the halos are made by tiny ice crystals floating high up in the atmosphere like this hexagonal crystal here when the sunlight passes through them it refracts or bends to a very precise angle 22 degrees and it's this that produces these astonishing halos it takes millions of these microscopic crystals randomly floating high in the cirrus clouds each scattering the sun's rays and creating these perfect wings of light but if you think that strange things are only going to get more bizarre the Alps clear cold beautiful for skiers making their way onto the slopes their morning was about to take a turn for the weird because what was about to emerge from behind the peaks was farmed from a normal sunrise it was a thrilling spectacle for all of those who witnessed it so bold this is no trick of the lens either side of the Rising Sun were two smaller but unmistakable mirror sons and this isn't the only footage of such a spectacle strange sunrises and sunsets have been popping up all over the world now the footage of these triple Suns is absolutely startling stuff but don't worry are so the system is not morphing into a set from Star Wars you might also be forgiven for thinking that it could be camera flare cheap lenses or the like I can tell you that it's not but whilst ice crystals are causing sun halos what causes a triple Sun a spectacle inexplicably known as a sundog now to get to the bottom of its formation we need someone who's well-acquainted with the sky being a professional astronomer you end up with his ingrained habit where you is just keeping that weather eye in the sky is it going to be cloudy tonight are you going to be observing and just noticing many of these phenomena a Sun halo is formed from same ice crystals as sundogs but the difference is the orientation some halos you need just random orientations and all kinds of hexagonal ice crystals to get sundogs you need those ice crystals to be the flat tile like ones that are all perfectly aligned perhaps by currents that are shaping the clouds or the way that they're just drifting down in the sky because it's all in a level you get two little rainbow patches the sunlight is focused in two areas the same distance out as the halo but on a level with the Sun and these are much brighter and the colors are much more evidence because you've got much more sunlight concentrated into those areas so ice crystals are creating these spellbinding light shows - there's every chance you could have seen one but never looked up to glimpse it just think of what you're missing so it's tiny ice crystals floating high up there in the atmosphere which produce these beautiful illusions of halos and triple Suns they really are very impressive but you know when it comes to visual illusions nothing at all can compete with the power of our own lines it's slightly embarrassing story it was in a bathroom stall in a public place there was a little coat rack with the Toutle arms coming off of the coat rack and underneath it was written in magic marker drunk octopus wants to fight you once I looked up why I would recognize that that was an octopus and why that person expected that I would recognize it as an octopus that's how I ended up interested in the topic laura was not alone in her octopus encounter and it's not just code hooks we live our lives surrounded by expressions although some faces do seem to turn up more than others and in the most unexpected places in 1994 the Virgin Mary materialized in a grilled cheese sandwich the edible effigy was eventually sold by its maker Diane Doozer for a whopping fourteen thousand pounds that's one very expensive snack but this religious revelation was by no means a one-off Jesus has appeared in a baking tray a tortilla and even the lid of a Marmite jar it's not just deities in foodstuffs we see faces everywhere even everyday objects sometimes seem to have an expression and this phenomenon finding faces in objects and places even has a name it's called pareidolia and it's an area of serious scientific investigation you can probably see the faces in this series of objects but of course you don't actually believe they're genuine faces that's because of a region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus it's working slightly differently in each side of your brain the left side is suggesting that this object could be a face but the right side is making the final decision and in this case no it's just a plug socket so why is our first instinct to see a collection of shapes as a face the reason that we try to take something and make it into something meaningful has to do with survival in the very earliest stages of evolution let's assume that you're out in the woods hunting and you hear something or you see something out of the corner of your eye if there's not something there and you assume that there is you'll react to it but there's no harm done if there wasn't actually something there so conjuring out faces real or otherwise is about avoiding predators and staying alive but that doesn't explain why we see so many messiahs her brain is always interpreting the information that we get from the world to be things that it recognizes and can make sense of so the things that we're most familiar with are that we're expecting to see like religion like sex will be the sort of things that we tend to notice more often well that explains that cheesy conundrum but exactly how long does it take us to develop this remarkable ability to recognize faces a study at Stanford University produce some very surprising results babies cute well sometimes clever well perhaps not straight away you see when it comes to making out the world around them babies struggle to focus identify colors and even see beyond 30 centimeters during the first few months so all things considered you might not expect these little brains to be very good when it comes to picking out of face faces are critical for all of us but especially for babies faces are important for understanding emotion being able to recognize different forms of expression when your mom is happy maybe when your mom is mad all comes from a face for as his research has been looking into how soon babies can recognize a face using this harmless cap of sensors she can monitor the electrical impulses in baby Ava's brain to see how she responds to pictures of faces compared to inanimate objects we see but is that the team compared the babies responses to the same set of tests run in adults we recognize faces through a process beginning with the basic contrast of the face the lines of the face and we piece the information together until we arrive at the temporal lobe and the temporal lobe of the brain actually has specific cells that respond to faces given the immaturity of the baby's brains the team weren't expecting them to be capable of complex adult level processing but their results proved very surprising what we found was really interesting infants responded to faces the same way that adults respond to faces the area of the brain that lit up when we showed them the faces were very similar it was in the temporal region of the brain that we know processes faces so if babies have a maturity beyond their years when it comes to facial recognition has science got it wrong all this time our infants in fact very good at making out the world around them well no unfortunately not you see when it comes to making out objects babies still have an underdeveloped response it's only the region responsible for making out faces which is advanced faces are such an important part of our lives that we have become tuned to seeing them in the world around us most of us have no trouble at all picking out a familiar face in a crowd in fact you could say that facial recognition is perhaps our one and only true human superpower you see during our lifetime we have the staggering ability to remember no less than 10,000 different faces it's remarkable but it also begs the question what happens when the facial recognition areas of our brain don't work properly the answer can be found in Vermont I just thought I was bad at remembering people um sometimes I can't tell who's in the picture if there's just one of them I have to ask Scott which one is this if they're not wearing a piece of clothing that helps me or something else meet Karen McCulloh it's funny that we have so many pictures of them since I can't tell them apart she struggles to recognize her own children Max and Emmy now you might be thinking that Cowan is short-sighted when I'm looking at the pictures I can be really looking very carefully at everybody's nose and trying to find like the nose that's most like that person's nose and I can see all the noses and I can see some are wider and all those things despite her keen observation Cowan isn't obsessed with noses she is in fact face blind so it's not like there's a big blurry patch where your face is I can see your face and I can see that you have a nose and eyebrows and all those things but then if I look at another person I can see they also have a nose and eyebrows but they don't all come together to mean something to look like someone wondering what faces look like - Cowan will try identifying these two images you can see the facial features of each but it's not easy to piece them together to actually recognize the faces until you turn them the right way up curiously Cowan only discovered that she was face blind relatively recently I had not realized that other people perceive faces differently it was maybe like three years ago there was something on TV they showed some examples of like people who are face blind can't tell these two people apart and I was looking at them and saying that's the same person and my husband who was watching with me was saying no that's not even close to being the same person it was an image like this one that highlighted Cowens condition most of us can see that whilst the two images are similar they are of course different people for those with face blindness it proves almost impossible to distinguish between the two the condition is known medically as prosopagnosia and a surprising number of people are affected although most like Cowan never even know they have it often what happens is they have an incident that really sort of slaps them in the face so to speak about showing them that their face recognition really different from somebody else's prospective is X have told me things like they would say watch a movie where there's a lineup and the eyewitness is supposed to pick out the person who committed the crime and the president peg Nozick says that's absurd you know nobody could do that you'd have to have superpowers to do that sort of thing the best estimates out there suggest maybe 2% of the population so 1 out of 50 people has really significant difficulties with face recognition there are some people out there who I'm sure never realize that they have really significant face recognition problems just imagine a life where you couldn't instantly recognize actors in the latest blockbuster your work colleagues or even members of your own family and you didn't realize that life could be any different it's one of those sort of tectonic shifts in your brain where you think like I understand how I work and I understand how the world works and then you find out something new and it's very different than how you thought it was from ice crystals with the power to create history Oh survival by seeing faces in sandwiches and not seeing faces at all in a weird world what seems an illusion can often be explained by cold hard facts what a world of where do we we live in don't you know it's only gonna get weirder next time what caused a glass here to flow blood led I've never seen anything like it before and why did fog start growing too many limbs what could possibly create this weird work of art and what is lurking in this South American mark if that didn't exist and I said it could exist you would never believe me right

Channel: Kellye Carrere

Views: 362,727

Rating: 4.2363429 out of 5

Keywords: Worlds Weirdest Events, Season 1, Episode 5

Id: OwmDibJPR_E

Length: 64min 8sec (3848 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2015