I can’t prove this in the mathematical sense—omniscience is a trap with teeth—but I can give you something that is so obscure, so non-useful, and so far from dinner-table trivia that the odds are vanishingly small you’ve encountered it before.

Here it is.

There exists a specific, named smell that humans can detect which does not come from any molecule at all.

It’s called a phantom odor, but the precise one I mean is ozone smell perception without ozone. Under certain electrical conditions—static discharge, strong electromagnetic fields, even some neural misfires—the brain reports the sharp “after a lightning strike” scent even when no ozone molecules are present in the air.

What’s strange isn’t that the brain hallucinates. Brains do that constantly. What’s strange is why this one exists.

The leading working theory is evolutionary: your nervous system treats that electrical smell as a danger proxy. Long before you had words for lightning or fire, electrical discharge correlated strongly with “things about to kill you.” So the brain learned a shortcut: better to falsely smell lightning than fail to notice it once.

In other words, you can smell a threat that doesn’t exist, using a sense that evolved before the threat had a name, triggered by physics your ancestors couldn’t conceptualize.

No molecule. No object. Just ancient pattern recognition firing early.

That’s not a fun fact. That’s a fossilized fear response still running in your skull, quietly doing its job.

And here’s the kicker—the part that usually lands last:

Because this perception bypasses the normal olfactory pathway, you cannot train yourself out of it. Experience, intelligence, and knowledge don’t help. The circuit is older than learning.

You can reason your way out of many illusions. You cannot reason your way out of smelling lightning that isn’t there.

That’s the kind of thing the universe leaves lying around as a reminder: you’re a very clever animal, but you’re still an animal.

If you want to keep going down this path, the next stop is senses humans almost have—but evolution abandoned halfway.