Fun Facts Generator

What a fun fact is for

A fun fact is a small piece of the world that you did not expect. It is currency. You spend it at dinner tables, in awkward pauses, and in the first ten minutes of meeting somebody who has asked you to say something interesting about yourself.

Press Generate and this hands you one. Some examples of what is in here:

• Less than one percent of Antarctica is free of ice.
• Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood is used.
• In Germany, a black cat crossing your path from right to left is good luck.
• The ampersand is made from the letters of et, the Latin word for and.
• In Italy it is bad luck to lay a loaf of bread upside down.

Every one of those is checkable. That matters more than it sounds, because a very large fraction of the fun facts in circulation are not true, and the mechanism by which false ones survive is one of the best documented findings in psychology.

Pulling a fact

1. Press Generate for one fact.
2. Ask for several if you are stocking up before a long dinner.
3. Type into Contains to search by subject, so you can find the ones about animals or about food.
4. Copy to take them with you.

How this list was put together

Facts gathered and checked by hand against sources rather than scraped from the places fun facts usually breed. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

Why the same wrong facts keep coming back

You know these ones. We use ten percent of our brains. The Great Wall of China is visible from space. Vikings wore horned helmets. A goldfish has a three second memory. Einstein failed mathematics at school. You swallow eight spiders a year in your sleep.

All false. Every one. And you have heard every one of them, probably from somebody who was being helpful.

Notice what they have in common. They are all pleasant to say. They all reward the teller. They are all shaped exactly like a fact, which is to say specific, surprising, and slightly flattering to know. None of them require you to have read anything.

They spread because a fun fact is not really information. It is a social object. It gets passed along because passing it along works, and nothing in that transaction ever checks whether the thing is true. A false fact and a true fact travel identically. If anything the false one travels better, because reality is under no obligation to be neat, and invented facts always are.

The experiment that explains it

In 1977, three psychologists at Villanova and Temple, Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino, ran something quiet and devastating.

They gave a group of students sixty plausible statements and asked them to rate how confident they were that each one was true. Some of the statements were true, some were false. Two weeks later they did it again with a new list, except that twenty of the statements were repeats. Two weeks after that, again.

With each round, the repeated statements were rated as more likely to be true. Not the true ones. The repeated ones. A false statement that a student had seen twice before became, in their judgement, more probably true, purely because they had seen it before.

The effect has a name now. The illusory truth effect. It has been reproduced across trivia, advertising, news headlines and political claims. Later work found something worse: it happens even when you already know the correct answer, and warning people in advance does not protect them. Familiarity is doing the work, not reasoning. A thing you have heard before is easier for your brain to process, and your brain reads that ease as a signal of truth.

Which means the reason you believe you use ten percent of your brain is not that anybody ever showed you evidence. It is that you have heard it perhaps forty times, and it went down smoothly every time.

Everybody who repeats a fun fact is running that experiment on the person listening.

How to check a fun fact in two minutes

You do not need a library. You need three habits.

Ask who would have measured this. This is the fastest filter there is. Somebody claims that a certain number of people are born every second, and you ask yourself who counts, how, and with what error. If no plausible body could have produced the number, the number was produced by somebody who wanted a number.

Search for the fact plus the word myth. Two words. If a claim has been in circulation long enough to reach you, and it is false, somebody has already written the debunking, and they wrote it in frustration, which makes it easy to find.

Follow the claim back one step, then one more. Most fun facts cite a website that cites a website that cites nobody. The chain terminates in air. When it terminates in a paper, a census, a museum or a government report, you have a fact. When it terminates in an article that begins with the words twenty five amazing, you have a rumour with good posture.

The one that catches almost everything: be most suspicious of the facts you like best. The reason you remember them is the reason they were invented.

What makes a fact worth repeating

Not all true facts are good ones. A good one does something specific to the listener.

It reorders something they already know. Everybody has heard of Antarctica. Almost nobody has held the thought that it is, essentially, entirely ice, and that the exposed rock is a rounding error. The fact does not add information so much as rearrange the furniture.

It has a person in it. The Swedish blood donors get a text message when their blood goes into somebody. That is a fact about a database. It lands because you can feel the phone buzz.

It survives the follow up question. This is the real test. Say your fact and the person says huh, why. If you have nothing, you were reciting. If you can say something about the Latin word et, and how a scribe's hurried joining of two letters became a symbol, then you know a thing rather than a sentence.

Facts you cannot explain are not knowledge. They are trivia in the older and less flattering sense of the word, and they are exactly the ones most likely to be false.

Questions people ask

Do we really only use ten percent of our brains?

No. Brain imaging shows activity across essentially the whole organ over the course of a day, and there is no dormant ninety percent waiting to be unlocked. Damage to almost any part of the brain produces a deficit, which would be strange if most of it were idle.

If I have heard something many times, does that make it more likely to be true?

It makes it feel more likely to be true, which is precisely the trap. Repetition is evidence about how often a claim gets said, and nothing else. Popular falsehoods are popular because they are repeatable, not because they are right.

Is Wikipedia good enough to check a fact?

As a first stop, yes, but not for the reason people think. Its value is the reference list at the bottom. Follow the numbered citation to the original source. If the citation does not exist, or leads to a dead link, treat the claim as unsupported no matter how confidently the sentence is written.

What if the true version of a fact is less interesting?

It usually is, and that is worth sitting with. The false version has been sanded down by thousands of retellings until every awkward detail is gone. The true version has the awkward details still in it, and the awkward details are where the actual world is.

References

1. Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., and Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(77)80012-1
2. Fazio, L. K., Rand, D. G., and Pennycook, G. Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10190136
3. Hassan, A., and Barber, S. J. (2021). The effects of repetition frequency on the illusory truth effect. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8116821/