Bodily Oddities (bodilyoddities.com) is a curated catalog of 161 things the human body sometimes does that surprise people. The site organizes entries by 12 body regions — brain, eyes, ears, nose, mouth and throat, skin and hair, muscle, bones and joints, internal organs, heart and blood, nerves, and whole body — and by 8 kinds: trick, involuntary, perception, sound, variation, reflex, rare ability, and "icky."
Each entry states what happens, how common it is where data exists, and what is known about the mechanism. Many include a "try it" prompt. Examples from the catalog: about 99 of 100 people in one test saw tiny bright dots darting along wiggly paths when looking at a clear blue sky — their own white blood cells moving through retinal capillaries. About 1 in 5 people can move their outer ears on purpose using three small muscles that dogs and cats use to pivot their ears. Jaw clicking, heard in about 1 in 3 young adults in one Finnish study, usually comes from a small disc of cartilage slipping back into place and needs no treatment without pain.
The article describes how 99 of 100 people in one test saw tiny bright dots darting along wiggly paths when looking at a clear blue sky, identifying them as their own white blood cells moving through retinal capillaries.
The article notes that about 1 in 5 people can move their outer ears on purpose using three small muscles that dogs and cats use to pivot their ears, illustrating the ear region's surprising capabilities.
The catalog includes various perception-type phenomena affecting vision; blue arcs of the retina are a related entoptic effect that the site documents alongside the blue field entoptic phenomenon discussed in the same section.
The site also links to deeper articles. One recent piece on hypnagogic hallucinations — vivid sensory experiences at sleep onset — cites two large telephone surveys (4,972 and 13,057 participants) finding 25–37% of people experience them. The article notes the DSM-5 classifies these as normal, flags when to see a doctor (daytime hallucinations, sudden weakness when laughing, irresistible sleep attacks), and describes a 2021 Paris study in which people who reached at least 15 seconds of stage-1 sleep were three times as likely to solve a hidden math rule.
For readers, the site's value is making sense of experiences people often keep private — the itch that jumps to a distant spot, the smell of asparagus in urine that only some can detect, the 4% who see no mental images at all. The prevalence figures come from surveys and clinic tests of varying size; the site is honest about where counts are rough or missing.