20 Scientific Facts That Keep People Up at Night

Remember in Inside Out 2 when the little anthropomorphic feelings explain that the difference between fear and anxiety is that one protects you from things you can see and the other protects you from things you can’t? Well, not to disparage the brilliant neurologists at Pixar, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Anxiety does protect you from real concerns, but it also tends to give you false beliefs. Like, it’s a bad thing to fail to find a social group, but you probably won’t be ostracized if you say one dumb thing. To its credit, the movie acknowledges that. God, it’s so good.

But there’s a flip side to that kind of anxiety, too: Dangers that you can’t see but know for a fact are real. For example, it is not irrational to worry that any or all of your memories are false narratives implanted in your brain, accidentally or otherwise. That is just how memory works. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it, and you’ll never know which memories are lies until you happen to tell a story at Thanksgiving and your brother looks at you like you’re crazy because he was the one who ended up with a twisted testicle when you played Jackass as children, not you.

That’s just one scientific fact about the world that should make you feel like you’re living in a sci-fi thriller. For some ungodly reason, user bck83 wanted more when they asked r/AskReddit, “What scientific fact or theory scares you to your bones?”