15 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS THAT MOST PEOPLE STILL BELIEVE TO BE TRUE
WES WALCOTT
Let’s face it, nobody’s perfect. Once in a while everyone gets something wrong that they previously felt so confident was right. But don’t sweat it, it happens all the time in the sciences. In fact, challenging our preconceived notions is often times the only way we can further our knowledge of the things in nature that we don’t quite yet have a complete understanding of. So before go thinking you’ve got it all figured out, you should probably familiarize yourself with these 15 common misconceptions that people everywhere are still trying to pass off as factual information.
15. Cracking Your Joints Will Lead to Arthritis
Cracking knuckles and joints are still a relatively mysterious phenomenon. Though there are numerous theories as to why joints crack or pop, the exact cause is still unknown. Nevertheless, the general consensus among the professionals seems to be that cracking your joints isn’t harmful and it won’t lead to arthritis. However, if the cracking is accompanied by pain, there could be underlying problems with the structures of the joint, such as injured ligaments or loose cartilage.
Just like eating carrots won’t improve your vision, reading in dim light won’t ruin it. In fact, the only harm reading in a dimly lit environment might cause is a little extra eyestrain, which should go away in a few moments if you simply rest your eyes. Of course, this misconception should have been corrected long ago given the fact that prior to the 1900s people had been reading by dim candlelight for centuries without there being reports of a rapidly deteriorating eyesight epidemic.
Despite the common misconception that Tourette syndrome is characterized by sudden uncontrollable bursts of profanity, only 10 percent of Tourette patients actually exhibit that symptom. The vast majority have much milder expressions such as tics, shoulder-shrugging, rapid blinking and compulsive throat-clearing.
There is, however, a very small faction of Tourette patients who have a condition known as Coprolalia. This is an extreme example of a vocal tic marked by the involuntary utterance of obscenities, profanities and derogatory remarks.
If you were a picky eater as a child you can probably remember your parents telling you that you’ll need to wear glasses if you don’t eat all of your carrots. While it’s true that carrots are a good source of vitamin A, which promotes healthy skin and eyes, eating them won’t give you sharper vision. In truth, the supposed link between carrots and better vision stems more from manufactured propaganda than any actual science. During World War II, Britain’s air ministry put the word out that a vegetable-rich diet helped pilots to better see Nazi bombers in the sky at night. That was a lie fabricated to prevent the Nazi’s from discovering the existence of Interception Radar, which alerted allies of incoming bombers before and was the real reason for the Royal Air Force’s successful defense.
So even though eating carrots won’t give you more acute vision, believing they did might have helped us win World War II.
As early as the 1700s Spanish matadors began using a small red cape, or muleta, in bullfighting. Ever since then, the myth has been perpetuated that the color red drives bulls mad.
MythBusters actually tested this idea by placing makeshift matadors in an arena. Each of the dummies were holding a different colored flag and the aim was to see if one particular color seemed draw the bull’s attention more than the others. The test showed that red, blue and white flags got equal, half-hearted attacks when they were motionless. An aggressive charge response from the bull could only be evoked by flags that were being waved.
As it turns out, the color red doesn’t seem to make bulls charge or get fired up in the slightest. In fact, bulls don’t seem to have any sort of color preference at all. They’ll just go for whatever object happens to be moving the most.
Chameleons are famously known for being able to change color. They achieve this feat by way of specialized cells called chromatophores that are able to change their hue.
Most people think that chameleons change color in response to their environment to better enable them to blend in with their surroundings and hide from predators; however, this actually isn’t the case. The real reason why chameleons change color is for communication. Depending on their color, they can signal aggression, receptiveness, mating behavior, and a host of other moods. So a perfectly calm chameleon might have a pale green appearance, while a chameleon that’s looking to mate will take on a bright yellow color.
It has been a long-standing belief that people are either right-brained or left-brained and their nature, in turn, is either based on creativity or logic. But the idea that our brain has a dominant side responsible for governing our character—the things we’re interested in and the ways we conduct ourselves—is complete nonsense according to scientific research.
Using brain imaging techniques, neuroscientists have show that while the brain does use different sides to carry out certain functions, there is no one side that’s shown to be dominant over the other when it comes to determining our personality. Really, the biggest difference between the two sides is that the brain’s right hemisphere controls the muscles on the left side of the body, while the left hemisphere controls the muscles on the right side of the body.
