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TIL 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 that was responsible for his OCD, and he went on to become a straight-A college student five years later.

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drKB TIL that a 51 year old man spent 30 years completely alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Richard Proenneke built a cabin entirely by himself featuring a fireplace, cache, and working door locks.
9wPEX TIL Edwin Land set out to invent the Polaroid instant camera in 1943 after his young daughter told him it was stupid that he had to go home first, develop the film at a lab and make prints before she could see a photo of herself
R7mQ TIL the first science-fiction work was written in the 2nd Century AD by a Greek named Lucian. It has aliens, inter-planetary warfare, and cloud-centaurs.
78VAX TIL that when the inventor of the shipping container died ships around the world blew their whistles simultaneously in tribute
QJ1jk TIL that mammoths were known to indigenous Ugric peoples before Europeans, but they conceived of it as a water spirit or a giant burrowing rodent. The word mammoth even comes from an Ugric term meaning "earth horn"