MYTHS, DEMYSTIFIED
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Just like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (but minus the genius), in search of the answers to life’s big questions our journey begins with evolution and winds up in space. Do microwave ovens cause cancer? Is the Great Wall of China visible from space? And, should you ever really wake a sleepwalker? Thanks to classic old movies like One Million Years BC and The Land that Time Forgot, there is the common misconception that cavemen and dinosaurs at some point shared the Earth, but a not-too-shabby 65 millionyear gap separates T-rex and his ilk from primitive man. In fact, we can partly thank the death of the dinosaurs to have enabled the evolution of us. While we’re on the subject of evolution, creationists will be thrilled to hear that we did not, in fact, even evolve from chimpanzees. We did, however, come from a common ancestor that, millions of years ago divided into separate lineages that eventually evolved into the jungle-dwelling apes like chimps, orangutans and gorillas, and hominoids that resulted in humble us. We have also developed far more than the five most cited senses of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. How else would we sense time, pain, thirst, hunger, or that irritating itch? Even today, scientists can’t quite agree on the exact amount, but most accept we possess somewhere between nine and 20 senses. And as for our brains, think again if you’re under the illusion that we’re only capable of accessing around 10% of its potential as hightech imaging has proved that just about every nook is nurtured—though it is highly localised with different areas firing up depending on the function at hand. That artistic and scientific types tap more into one side of their brain than the other is further cranial codswallop thought to come from early surgeries on seizure patients where it was discovered that visuospatial information is better processed in the right hemisphere, while the left side is more attuned to verbal cues. “But brain scans of healthy people have found that both creative and logical activities cause widespread activation of neural networks on the left and right hemispheres of the brain,” neurosurgeon Abhisheik Sharma tells the Independent. Another musing misrepresentation is that blokes think about sex every seven seconds, which is a ridiculous 514 times per hour, or more than 7,000 times for each day awake. While it’s impossible to accurately count individual thoughts, an interesting Ohio
State University study gave 283 participants a clicker to press each time they thought of sex, food or sleep. The average man had 19 sexual thoughts per day, while the women averaged out at 10. Implying an inherent impulsivity, the guys also dwelled more on food and sleep than the gals, too. If you’re one of those people who try to catch up on your week’s lost sleep on Saturday or Sunday, then you may actually be doing yourself more harm as it throws your body’s sleeping rhythm out of sync and winds up becoming a vicious circle of slumbering suicide. “The result is that you have a harder time to get to sleep on Sunday evening, which sets you up for a terrible Monday,” sleep expert Chris Branter tells IFL Science, “not to mention for a totally messed up sleep schedule during the week.” And everyone knows you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker, right? Wrong. Though, they will likely be highly confused and disoriented as you gently shake them awake, so it’s probably best you first turn on a light which we can thank Thomas Edison for inventing except that we can’t because though Edison patented his electric light bulb in 1880, chemists had actually been using electricity to create light for a good half-century already. Edison was the first to figure out how to make a bulb burn long enough to be practical, and, with his team, created the first domestic electric power system with fuses and lights and switches to turn everything on and off. And without that power system we’d never have that most convenient of gastronomic gadgets, the microwave oven. Of course, we must be careful though because everyone knows that their electromagnetic radiation causes cancer, however, everyone is incorrect because they don’t, and that’s according to the Cancer Council of Australia—a country known also for its proliferation of sharks. You’ve probably heard how scientists have long waxed lyrical about the potential of shark cartilage as a treatment for cancer, but you’d have heard wrong as well, for Cancer Research UK states that “there is no evidence that it works”. The confusion probably arises from the fact that everyone knows that sharks can’t actually get cancer, yet Douglas Main writes for Live Science that scientists “have known for more than 150 years that sharks get cancer” in an article titled ‘Sharks Do Get Cancer: Tumor Found in Great White’. >>
