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TIL That in the 1980s, a man with severe OCD shot himself in the head in an attempt to commit suicide. Instead of killing him, the bullet destroyed the part of his brain responsible for his OCD, and he went on to become a straight-A college student five years later.

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KOO7Q Imagine yourself at a concert hall looking at a symphonic orchestra on stage. Have you ever noticed that high-pitched strings sit left of low-pitched strings? Going from left to right, one usually sees violins, violas, cellos and double basses. That is, one moves from high pitches on the left to low pitches on the right. Why? The orchestra’s arrangement is not a cultural oddity, like driving on the right side of the road. Rather, it is due to our own biological makeup. Higher pitches tend to be better processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, while lower pitches tend to be better processed by a similar region in the right hemisphere. This organisation is thought to have repercussions far beyond music, perhaps even helping to explain why language is mostly processed in the left hemisphere. So the part of my brain that better processes high sounds sits where the higher-pitched instruments sit: on the left. But that’s not the end of the story.
aKG9 TIL the German word, waldeinsamkeit, has no equivalent in English, and means “the feeling of being alone in the woods”.
pYPbZ TIL of the Arthurian Knight Feirefiz, brother of Parzival. His mother was a Moorish Queen and his skin is described as being like a Magpie, both black and white.
D1NXJ TILL during the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazis accidentally killed a music critic called Willi Schmid, when their intended target had been someone with a similar surname. A few days after his death, Rudolf Hess visited Willi’s widow and apologised for the mistake, and offered her a pension.
ZoKa TIL Charlie Sheen once spent over $6,500 for 2,615 seats in left field of Anaheim Stadium, determined to catch a home run with 3 of his friends. No home runs were hit that day.