Are you sitting down? We’ve got some bad news for you. We’ve done a little digging, and it turns out that you’re pretty disgusting. As in utterly, freakishly gross. Not to mention creepy. In fact, you’re probably one of the most all-round awful creatures on the entire planet.
But not to worry, you’re not alone. Our research has shown that everyone reading this, the editors who commissioned it, and especially the guy writing it are super-gross, creep-tastic weirdos. You may be disgusting, but trust us: Everyone else is just as bad.
10 You Keep On Farting On Planes
Your body is a farting machine. Seriously, it’s like you just can’t stop tooting. Studies have shown that most of us expel gas at least 10 times in every 24 hours, adding up to 1 liter (35 oz) of the smelly stuff every day. But there’s one place where you’re guaranteed to break even this odor-rific record. The moment you step on a plane, it’s like your body goes into gas-producing overdrive.
If you’re a frequent flier, you’re probably aware of this already. As a plane climbs ever higher, the air pressure changes. That’s why your plastic water bottle swells up and then crumples slightly as you come in for landing. Same deal with your belly. The gas in your abdomen expands, leading to a severely bloated feeling. A feeling that most of us deal with by sneakily letting one rip and hoping that other passengers don’t notice.
Excessive farting while flying has gotten so bad that airlines now use super smell-absorbent charcoal filters in the air conditioning and are considering placing charcoal in the seats themselves. Back in the 1960s, it was even suggested that all these farts could result in an aircraft accidentally igniting and exploding in the sky. Bear that in mind next time you order the five-bean chili before hopping a plane across the continent.
9 You’re Almost Certainly A Nose Picker
Farting every time you get on a plane is pretty gross, but it’s not exactly your fault. And it’d be pretty unfair of us to call you disgusting for something beyond your control, right? In that case, let’s turn our attention to something that you could easily quit but are just too darn lazy to do. According to science, you’re almost certainly a nose picker.
This isn’t something to be proud of. Yanking great big boogers out of your face is the perfect way to spread germs and doesn’t exactly look pleasant, either. Yet most of us are kidding ourselves if we think that we’re above such behavior.
In 1995, two US researchers decided to study nose picking in Wisconsin. Out of 1,000 adult participants, they found that an insane 91 percent of them picked their nostrils at least a few times a day. Two were even such dedicated pickers that they felt the habit was ruining their lives.
In case you’re wondering if this can be applied elsewhere, other studies have yielded similar results. One that targeted 200 teenagers from five schools in Bangalore found that essentially 100 percent of them were pickers. If you’re reading this right now with a finger up your nostril, you should know you’re not alone.
8 You Want To Have Sex With Yourself
In Greek legend, Narcissus was a handsome dude who famously fell in love with his own reflection, leading to his death. At least, Narcissus’s love was strictly based on his aesthetic qualities. You, on the other hand, want nothing more than to hold yourself down and have wild, crazy, passionate sex with yourself.
Scientists have long known that we tend to be attracted to people who look like us. There’s even a phenomenon in the lesbian community known as “twinning,” which is when a similar-looking couple starts dressing and styling themselves so alike that people mistake them for sisters or twins.
In 1999, a team of scientists decided to see how far this attraction to similar people went. They asked heterosexual males and females to quickly rate the attractiveness of several faces that were flashed at them on a screen. Unknown to the participants, one of the faces was their own, digitally altered to look like a member of the opposite sex. Want to guess what happened next?
Nearly all the participants rated their own gender-swapped face as the most attractive they’d been shown. In other words, most people’s ideal one-night fling would be themselves sporting a peroxide wig or a stick-on mustache.
7 You Keep Sniffing Your Friends’ Sweat
The term “panty sniffer” is a rightfully insulting one, suggesting that the subject is a creepy pervert who can’t control his olfactory urges. While admittedly not quite at that terrible level, most of us are not much better. For example, you spend all your time sniffing your friends and colleagues for traces of sweat.
Don’t panic. We all do it. And this one is completely unconscious. See, our sweat carries a whole host of chemicals that change combination depending on what’s causing us to sweat. We may be perspiring because we’re scared, stressed, in pain, or just had incredible sex with our gender-swapped double.
The point is, our sweat changes its composition and odor due to what we’re feeling. And scientists are convinced that these different smells are a vital part of nonverbal human communication.
Plenty of studies have found that we can subconsciously tell what caused someone to sweat. Our own bodies then emotionally respond to this stimulus. So when we smell fear sweat, we become more alert to danger. When we smell sweat caused by someone feeling disgust, our faces mimic that disgust. It’s now thought that sweat is simply one of the many nonverbal cues that we humans use to communicate—meaning we’re effectively sniffing each other all the time.
6 You Happily Drink Cupfuls Of Snot
Bodily fluids are nearly all disgusting. That’s why movies like Ghostbusters and Evil Dead feature protagonists getting covered in snot-like goo, blood, and pus. It’s the most effective way of making audiences go “eww.”
Yet this instinctive revulsion apparently doesn’t apply to our own lives. Even if you squirm in disgust every time you watch Peter Venkman get slimed, you’re doing something far grosser. Every single day, you’re happily drinking the equivalent of about 1 liter (35 oz) of pure snot.
Our bodies are constantly manufacturing mucus. The average respiratory tract is responsible for pumping out over 1 liter (35 oz) of it every single day. And all that nose gunk has to go somewhere. So your body has evolved a bunch of little nasal hairs called cilia. Their job is to constantly shift the mucus up your nasal passages and then down the back of your throat. From there, you swallow it.
5 You Have Some Weird Sexual Fantasies
Even if we consider ourselves the best writers of Brony erotica on the Internet, most of us don’t like to talk openly about our sexual fantasies. If we ever do, we tend to keep it strictly vanilla. (“I like blondes with big boobs,” “I like billionaires that look like Jamie Dornan.”) Yet science says that your fantasies are less vanilla than you want us to believe. In fact, it says that your tastes are downright weird.
In 2014, researchers in Canada surveyed over 1,500 adults to find out what their fantasy lives involved. From there, the researchers broke down the fantasies into common themes and assigned them a number for how statistically likely they were to show up among either men or women. The results make for some interesting reading.
For example, over 80 percent of both genders daydream about having sex in “an unusual place.” Over half of women and over two-thirds of men fantasize about having sex in front of members of the public while over half of both genders dream of being dominated. Nearly two-thirds of all men got off on the idea of watching a stranger undress without them knowing. Over half of all women felt turned on by the idea of having sex with more than three people at once.
We’re still not on the weirdest stuff yet. About 45 percent of men imagined having sex with two men, even though only 3.6 percent of study respondents identified as homosexual. Nearly one-quarter were attracted to the idea of flashing their genitals in a public place.
Meanwhile, around one-third of women liked the idea of being forced to have sex, and 41 percent were into tying someone up to gain sexual pleasure. In short, science says that you’ve probably got some incredibly strange stuff going on in your head. But then again, so does everyone else you know.
4 You Probably Hate Your Friends
Friends are meant to be the plus points of our existence, the high-score bonus we get as a reward for putting up with family. There’s even scientific evidence that friends are awesome: Studies have shown that having strong social ties can be even better for your health than quitting smoking.
However, most of us aren’t content to merely have good friends. We want to have bad friends as well. The likelihood is that most of you reading this have friends whom you basically love to hate.
Known as “frenemies,” the friend-nemesis is a growing phenomenon that’s getting new scientific attention. In most cases, these are people who stress us out—the guy who calls every single story we tell boring, the girl who looks down her nose at our every accomplishment. Yet we’re stuck with them due to loyalty or the fact that they’re good friends with the rest of our group. Although we’d probably call them “friends,” the reality is that they’re slowly killing us.
Spending time with frenemies has been linked to high blood pressure, insane stress levels, and even an increased risk of cancer. It may seem a bit weird, but trust us: You’re probably right to hate these particular “friends.”
3 You’re Probably A Nail-Biter
Like nose picking, nail-biting is one of those vaguely disgusting habits that nobody likes to admit to. Although your habit probably won’t spread a horrific disease and kill everyone and everything that you’ve ever loved, it’s still unpleasant. Yet just like nose picking, most of us have done it at one point or another in our lives. According to science, there’s a nearly 50-50 chance that you were a nail-biter during your teenage years.
In general, kids and teenagers are more prone to compulsive behaviors than adults. And nail-biting might be one of the most compulsive of them all. A Canadian study from the 1990s put the number of kids who bite at 33 percent and the number of teenagers at 45 percent.
It’s speculated that there might even be a hereditary element. If you see an older family member biting, you’re more likely to bite, too. Other suggestions are that it’s a transference behavior that starts when kids realize that they’re too old to be sucking their thumbs but don’t want to give up the comfort of having something to stick in their mouths.
2 You Finish Too Fast In Bed
What’s the ideal amount of time to have sex for? While the obvious answer might be “all the time,” the reality is that most of us have jobs and flabby bodies that get tired easily. So how long do you reckon that you can go for? Forty-five minutes? An hour?
We hate to break it to you, but you’re probably aiming a little high there, champ. The average person manages to keep the magic going in the sack for only a paltry 15 minutes.
This is true for both heterosexual couples and gay male couples—with the upper limit being around 30 minutes. Of approximately 800 individuals studied by researchers, barely any broke the hour-long barrier and most managed to flop around for only one-quarter of that time.
Impressively, this is actually longer than other studies have claimed. For men, the average amount of time between penetration and orgasm is often said to be as little as two minutes. No wonder your girlfriend always looks unhappy.
There is one exception to this rule. The first study found that lesbian couples on average last between 30 and 45 minutes, with a large number breaking the magic one-hour barrier.
1 You Might Be Under Control Of An Evil Parasite
How would it feel if you suddenly discovered that your life was not your own? That something else was affecting your daily decisions, altering your moods, and generally running your existence for its own benefit? Pretty freaky, huh? Well, prepare yourself for some bad news. There’s a scarily good chance that this is exactly what’s happening to you.
We’ve known for years that there are certain parasites that can control animals. The hairworm, for example, infects grasshoppers and forces them to commit suicide by jumping into water—where the hairworm reproduces.
It’s only recently, though, that we’ve begun to realize that such organisms could affect humans, too. The leading candidate is Toxoplasma gondii. Found in soil, spoiled meat, and cat feces, this single-celled brain parasite is thought to have infected up to one-third of all humans. And studies are suggesting that it changes their personalities.
In 2006, one study suggested that Toxoplasma gondii could screw up your mind in a way that we normally associate with brain injury. Guilt, intelligence, and even affection—potentially significant areas in determining your personality—were all found to be changed by the creature.
It’s even thought that Toxoplasma gondii could have inadvertently helped to shape human culture over the centuries. If that’s true, then it’s entirely possible that we owe the modern world less to human ingenuity and more to the nightmare worm monsters living in our skulls.