Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother

Fascinating facts about Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí wasn’t just a famous surrealist painter, he was a master of spectacle. Known for leaving restaurant sketches as payment and believing he was his late brother’s reincarnation, Dalí blurred the line between art and persona. He even collaborated with Walt Disney on an experimental short, shelved for decades before its 2003 release.

Salvador Dalí’s remains were exhumed for a paternity test

Years after Dalí’s death in 1989, fortune teller Pilar Abel filed a suit claiming she was the child of an affair Dalí had with her mother. In 2017, Dalí’s body was exhumed for testing. Dalí was not the father, but the artist’s mustache remained intact decades after his passing.

An obituary of Salvador Dalí that captures his complicated reputation

Dalí left a complicated legacy, including controversies around his reported sympathy for fascists, abuse, and even necrophilia. Further, Dalí lost respect from people within the art world for being a sellout. His 1989 obituary captures the public ambivalence felt toward the surrealist superstar.

Salvador Dalí idolized Freud but was disappointed after they met

Sigmund Freud's writings on dreams and the unconscious profoundly influenced Dalí and his work, and the artist came to idolize the Austrian psychoanalyst. When they met, Freud viewed Dalí as an odd curiosity, and the artist came away disappointed, significantly lowering his opinion of the psychoanalyst.

Salvador Dalí once conned Yoko Ono

A quirky story often told about Salvador Dalí claims that in 1969, Yoko Ono offered him $10,000 for one of his famous mustache hairs. Allegedly wary of occult intentions, Dalí instead sent her a blade of grass. While the tale is debated, it fits neatly into Dalí's eccentric public image and his later-life reputation for turning playful stunts into profitable moments.

In 1945, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and legendary animator Walt Disney began collaborating on a short film that was not completed until 2003, years after both men had died.

'Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.'

- Artist Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

Read Ray Dalio's reflection on his son's death

One of Dalio's sons, Devon Dalio, died in a car crash in December 2020. In a LinkedIn post, Dalio said Devon's death triggered an enormous amount of pain and reflection.

The widespread violence of World War I birthed surrealism

Following World War I, artists used unconventional forms of expression to make sense of the death and destruction they'd witnessed for years. Life as they knew it had ended, and movements like Surrealism, founded by André Breton, rebelled against tradition.

Picasso's Blue Period was inspired by loss

Picasso's friend Casagemas, a poet he met in Barcelona, died by suicide in 1901. The event shook the young Picasso, leading to what would later be called his Blue Period. The work from this time reflected the loss of Casagemas and others, as well as broader themes of suffering and marginalization in society, portraying their faces and other outcasts of society in elegiac hues of blue and other cold colors. The era is one of the artist’s most famous bodies of work, including several iconic paintings, such as "The Death of Casagemas," pictured below.

Twain claimed to possess 'mental telegraphy'

In an 1891 essay, the writer claimed to possess psychic powers. It’s something that seemingly supported by his mother and his own death: Twain predicted he would die the day after Halley’s Comet returned in 1910, which did indeed happen.

A mescaline-induced hallucination stayed with Jean-Paul Sartre throughout his life

In 1935, Sartre was injected with mescaline, a psychedelic drug that was then used to treat alcoholism and depression, by his friend at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris. It was not a good trip: Sartre saw nightmarish crabs for days and suffered a mental breakdown. For the rest of his life, crustaceans like the ones he saw during the hallucination appeared in his works.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes published a book claiming fairies were real

In 1917, two young girls took photos of one another appearing to interact with fairies and a gnome. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes books and a fervent believer in spiritualism, published the photos in a magazine and asked the girls to recreate them, which they did. Conan Doyle went on to write a book about the fairies. In 1983, decades after his death, the girls admitted the photos had been faked.

The ghost of Bobby Dunbar

In 1912, a four-year-old Louisiana boy went missing for eight months. Contemporary accounts differed in his mother's reaction upon seeing him; some claimed she was overjoyed, others that she didn't recognize him. Shortly after, a second woman claimed the child was hers, though he remained with the first woman. In 2004, DNA analysis determined the child had not been related to the family, suggesting the kidnapping was never solved.

In China, deepfaking a dead loved one has become a growing industry

Digital replicas of the deceased provide individuals with another way to process grief in a culture with long-standing traditions of communicating with ancestors. The emotional and ethical implications of "digital immortality" are complicated further by cases of actors impersonating deceased relatives during deepfake video calls to hide their deaths.

The concept of phantom limbs, the perception that amputated limbs are still present, dates back to a French military surgeon in the 16th century.

Aztec mythology informs the Day of the Dead

The ancient people believed the dead journeyed to Mictlán, the Land of the Dead. To get there, they had to travel for four years through nine underworld levels, with the final being occupied by Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of death, and his wife Mictecacíhuatl.

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman

The name change was just one facet of his self-created myth. From the moment he arrived in Greenwich Village’s folk scene, he was crafting tall tales about his life, including a claim that he'd spent the previous six years working for a carnival.

The Lazarus Effect is when a heart begins beating on its own after declared death

Formally called autoresuscitation, this rare phenomenon occurs when someone is declared dead following a cardiac arrest but their heart beats again without help—making it seem like the person came back to life. Doctors don't know the exact cause.

Despite the rules, a Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded posthumously

Ralph Steinman, whose work revealed how dendritic cells activate immune responses, passed away just days before being named a Nobel laureate. Although Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously, the committee made an exception because they believed he was alive at the time of the decision.

Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

Some people believe Paul McCartney died in 1966

The "Paul is dead" theory proposes the famous Beatle died in a car crash and was replaced by a McCartney look-alike. The idea gained traction after a student's article exploring the topic was published in 1969. Some fans believe The Beatles left clues of McCartney's passing in their songs.

The dreaming brain, as understood by scientists

Technology has advanced to where the seemingly separate fields of psychology and neuroscience are asking the same questions about dreams, such as whether they're more closely related to perception or visualization. Some field-intersecting findings include research that shows people with impaired face perception don't dream of faces, those with brain legion-related cognition difficulties deal with similar issues in dreams, and children's dreams change in parallel to their cognitive development.

The Dracula character, now seen as the vampire archetype, was inspired by a seafood-induced nightmare its creator experienced.

The grandfather paradox of time travel

If you went back in time and killed your grandfather when he was a child, what would happen to you? One of your parents would never be born, so you wouldn’t be born either. But, if you’re never born, how could you kill your grandfather in the first place? This so-called grandfather paradox is something physicists, philosophers and sci-fi writers constantly ponder. Read the piece to learn how they’ve been trying to reconcile it.

The universe may have been reborn from a state of emptiness

Some physicists propose the universe might be the latest in an eternal cycle of universes, each emerging from the empty remains of the one before. This model is inspired partly by Norse and Egyptian myth, suggesting the universe is a cosmic ouroboros—a self-consuming serpent representing an eternal return.

The sibling of someone with autism has a 20% chance of developing ASD

The disorder is strongly linked with inheritance, and research suggests that if one child has ASD, there's a one in 5 chance the next child will develop autism, which is seven times more likely than the general population.

Norman Rockwell was sometimes confused with another Rockwell, who was a notorious Nazi

George Lincoln Rockwell was the founder of the American Nazi Party and had no relation to Norman Rockwell, the beloved American painter. But that didn’t stop people from confusing the two or suggesting that they were family members. It was something that Norman Rockwell’s granddaughter said had greatly disturbed the painter.

Identical twin brothers marry twin sisters in double wedding—and honeymoon together

The couples exchanged vows back-to-back, allowing the brothers to serve as each other's best men, and the sisters to jump in as the maids of honor for one another. The pairs all met in a church youth group while students.Following their wedding, the couples planned to live in neighboring apartments.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

After her fellow cult members tried to kill her with an LSD-infused hamburger, one member of the Manson Family, the murderous cult led by Charles Manson, decided to testify against the group's leader.

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.

El Niño, Spanish for 'the boy,' was named after Jesus Christ because the phenomenon resembled the weather changes observed around Christmastime.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Some Pokémon have been named after real and fictional organisms, while some real-world species have been named after Pokémon, such as Chilicola charizard and Binburrum zapdos.

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

The Great Salt Lake's distinct dual coloration results from high-salinity organisms that only live in the northern portion and produce a purple protein.

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

Dirty lightning is a thunderstorm created from friction between rising and falling flows of ash and smoke during volcanic eruptions.

Bone marrow (soft tissue found inside certain bones) generates roughly 500 billion new blood cells each day

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