Myths, Demystified

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’.

Statistically, you’re far more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a shark, but should you be unfortunate enough to be zapped, the best way to reduce your odds of being hit again would be to go stand in the same place as lightning never strikes the same spot twice. But it does. All of the time. The tops of tall buildings are especially prone, as was United States National Park Service Ranger Roy Sullivan who was hit an astonishing seven times. He finally died in 1983 from a selfinflicted gunshot wound.

The spiritual question of what happens after death will likely trouble us for infinity, but we tend to not dwell too much on the practicalities that are far less complex to observe. The notion that our hair and nails continue to grow after we pass is nothing but an optical illusion. As our skin dehydrates and shrinks it gives the appearance of hair and nail growth. Appearances sure can be deceptive.

The master of such deception is undoubtedly the chameleon that can change colour at will to blend in with its surroundings, but that’s not even remotely true as its hue alters depending on mood, temperature, light or as a means of communication.

Whilst on the subjects of colour and animals, bulls are actually colour blind and it’s not the act of waving a red cape in their face that riles them up but the fact that some idiot is trying to goad them. If you ask me, those matadors are suffering some form of Napoleon complex.

The Napoleon complex is of course the idea that short, usually men, counter their limited stature (or perhaps other challenged physical or personality traits) by developing an aggressive or domineering character. Now, Napoleon was certainly no saint, but this rather harsh historical commentary of his build ignores the fact that, at 171cm, he was of average height for a European of his time.

This allows us to segue nicely into our conclusion that concerns confusions about mainly size, and some of space.

As magnificent as the Great Wall of China is, to believe that something that’s, at most, five metres wide is visible from among the stars, is utterly absurd. It can’t even be viewed from low orbit. In fact, no astronaut has ever viewed a single man-made object, though plenty have reported seeing the Great Barrier Reef. Also visible from space is the world’s tallest mountain, not Mount Everest, which, at 8,848 metres, is the world’s highest summit, but Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, a more than 10,000-meter-tall volcano that is partly submerged by the sea (a respectable 4,025 metres still protrude above the water).

Contrary to another common conception, Earth’s distance from the Sun (which ranges from 146-152 million kilometres) has little consequence on the seasons, rather the angle at which the sunlight hits it. And if the idea that we’re all just a bunch of helpless, hairless apes on a planet-sized rock that’s shooting around our enormous Sun makes you feel infinitesimal, consider this: our seemingly gargantuan solar system pales into insignificance when noted that it too is spinning around an even larger mass, the Milky Way, and it takes 230 million years to complete just one orbit.

Oh, and goldfish actually have really excellent memories.

Words: Jamie Christian Desplaces