Sometimes all it takes is one shocked look from a friend to cause you to reevaluate what you’ve always thought was normal your whole life.
Visual snow
Blurry lines of glowing pixels constantly flashing behind everything you look at can feel entirely normal when it fills your field of vision like an ever-present TV static. A lot of people believe seeing pixels when in dark environments is just how our eyes make sense of low lighting.
You probably wouldn’t realize most people see perfectly smooth darkness until someone you don’t know very well decides to casually mention their night vision.
Washing rice
Rinsing raw rice till the water runs clear is second nature (and non-negotiable) to many households; others automatically dump rice directly from the bag into a pot of boiling water.
Those who learned to cook rice without rinsing are often confused by the need for the extra step. Rice rinsers, on the other hand, cannot imagine how anyone would make rice without rinsing it first.
Inner monologue
Most of us just assume that everyone has a running internal voice, articulating thoughts in complete sentences. When you learn as an adult that some humans actually think in pure concepts, pictures, or unspoken feelings without hearing a voice in your head, it is mind-blowing.
Understanding that the people next to you may not be literally speaking to themselves in their head makes you wonder how strange the human mind is.
Eating an entire apple
Some people learn from a young age that the whole apple is edible, including the seeds and stem. They eat it bottom up and leave nothing behind.
Seeing someone bite through the core unperturbed in public will completely confuse onlookers. Discovering that the majority of the world sees the core as garbage makes eating a whole apple weird.
Photic sneeze reflex
Walking outside into bright sunlight from a dark movie theater and sneezing suddenly seems perfectly normal to most people. You don’t discover until speaking “the sun tickles my nose” around others that only 25% of the human population has this genetic quirk called the photic sneeze reflex.
Most people who aren’t affected by it assume light-induced sneezing is a totally fictitious syndrome.
Auras around objects
Nighttime glare from long, wispy beams of light shooting off streetlights and automobile headlights can seem like just another physical property of light. When you try to explain how much the “light halos” mess with your driving at night, your passenger will probably just softly suggest you book an eye exam.
Discovering that people with normal vision see crisp edges rather than a glowing laser-light spectacle results in a rapid self-analysis of your vision.
Toe-climbing the stairs
Growing up, sprinting upstairs on all fours can seem like a completely natural form of locomotion. When you keep that childhood stair-climbing method into your adult years, you typically assume other adults are doing it too, but in secret.
Saying it out loud in conversation and receiving confused silence clearly signals some habits aren’t as common as we believe.
Aphantasia
When you ask someone with aphantasia to “visualize an apple in your mind’s eye”, they believe you’re speaking metaphorically, and they’re thinking about the concept of an apple.
Learning that other people can create vibrant, multicolored images inside their heads is like learning everyone else is a superhero. Knowing you are blind in your mind’s eye changes everything you thought you knew about memory, imagination, and thought.
Family seats
Growing up in a house where each seat at the table is assigned can give you an unspoken expectation that every chair has an owner. It can be quite unsettling to dine in a house where everyone just pulls up a seat at random.
Learning that other people don’t follow these age-old seating customs can be a revelation for visitors who grew up with their own designated chairs.
Soap-flavored cilantro
Adding freshly minced cilantro to a dish seems like one of the most common flavoring options to most of humanity. It’s only when someone tells you they think you just made something that tastes like squirted-on dish soap or pulverized bugs that you realize there’s a weird genetic rift in our species.
There is an olfactory receptor gene that makes cilantro taste like soap to roughly 10% of the population.
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