Involves a world record or an extreme documented case.
Showing 7 oddities.
This tag marks entries involving a world record or an extreme documented case, the far edge of what a human body has been measured doing. The longest recorded case of hiccups, and the deepest recorded breath-hold, both carry this tag.
The tag exists to separate the typical case, described in the rest of the entry, from the extreme case that gets attention. A reader here is usually curious how far a given trait can be pushed, not what is normal.
This list will tell you the documented record and roughly how it was achieved or verified. It will not suggest the record is safe to attempt, or typical of what training or genetics can achieve for anyone else. A record is, by definition, an outlier.
Results narrow the list below as you type.
Untrained adults usually stop within a minute or two. The best freedivers manage over 11 minutes, and over 29 minutes after breathing pure oxygen. One group of sea nomads has evolved larger spleens for diving.
A hiccup is a sudden jerk of the diaphragm followed by the voice box snapping shut. Everyone gets them, even before birth. The record case lasted 68 years.
Fewer than a hundred people worldwide have been confirmed to recall what happened on almost any date since about age 10, in detail and without effort. Their memory for other things, such as lists or numbers, is ordinary.
Pulling or bending a finger joint until it pops. Between 25% and 54% of people do it out of habit. The pop comes from a gas bubble in the joint fluid, and it does not cause arthritis.
In a room that absorbs almost all sound, many people hear their heartbeat, their blood, their breath, or a high ringing. True silence is not possible for a living person.
Swallowing air on purpose and letting it back up as a belch. Nobody has counted how many people can do it. The loudest recorded burp reached 112.4 decibels.
Changing the size of your pupils by will alone, without imagining a light or doing sums. One case has been studied with modern methods. Older reports exist, but most describe indirect tricks. Indirect control by thinking hard is possible for almost everyone.