1. People Can Learn to See With Their Tongues

Your brain will recognize that feeling this two-dimensional surface of tactile stimulations on your tongue seems an awful lot like seeing a two-dimensional image of something with your eyeballs. So it will feed that tactile information into the visual regions of your brain, which are otherwise not currently occupied. The result is that you will have the sense of “seeing” those images, though I suspect the images will be pretty crude.2

2. The Cortical Homunculus is a Thing

Here’s the three-dimensional version:

3. It’s Honestly a Miracle You Can Read This

We never see the world as our retina sees it. In fact, it would be a pretty horrible sight: a highly distorted set of light and dark pixels, blown up toward the center of the retina, masked by blood vessels, with a massive hole at the location of the “blind spot” where cables leave for the brain; the image would constantly blur and change as our gaze moved around. What we see, instead, is a three-dimensional scene, corrected for retinal defects, mended at the blind spot, stabilized for our eye and head movements, and massively reinterpreted based on our previous experience of similar visual scenes. All these operations unfold unconsciously—although many of them are so complicated that they resist computer modeling. For instance, our visual system detects the presence of shadows in the image and removes them. At a glance, our brain unconsciously infers the sources of lights and deduces the shape, opacity, reflectance, and luminance of the objects.

Your brain is basically doing what you do with Instagram filters: taking a pale, out of focus, and meh scene and turning it into something straight out of National Geographic. #unfiltered #sike #itsallfiltered

4. It’s All Just Electricity

5. I Can’t Taste A Damn Thing When I Have a Bad Cold

Nearly 80 percent of taste is actually due to smelling the food. I can vouch for this fact because when I get a bad cold I cannot taste a damn thing. Not. A. Damn. Thing. And it infuriates me. Especially when I’m on my honeymoon in Mexico and excited to eat tasty food with my new wife. I mean, I couldn’t even taste the half a bottle of Tapatío that I drank to prove to my wife how bad things were.