6 Lies About the Human Body You Learned in Kindergarten
When we reach the age of two, we start to have a few questions about our bodies. At first they're simple. 'Will that toy fit into the wet hole in the middle of my face?' But as we mature, the questions become more complex and too numerous for any reasonable human being to answer. It's no coincidence that around this time, your parents ship you off to school where someone is payed to give you answers.
Unfortunately, many of the answers you get there are lies that seem specifically designed to make the world around you seem boring. Because how else are they going to get you to stop asking so many damn questions? For instance, you probably still believe ...
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Sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing. Them there's your five senses. Since kindergarten, you've probably been told that anyone who thinks she has a sixth sense is either a television psychic or M. Night Shyamalan. This original classification is widely attributed to Aristotle, so if you try to argue that there are more than five, you're basically arguing with the guy who invented being smart.
And wannabe intellectuals have rocked the comb forward/beard combo ever since.
The Truth:
Scientists still aren't quite sure of exactly how many senses you have, or what even constitutes a sense, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one who believes you have five. Depending on how they count them, they usually wind up with something like 14 to 20. The five you learned about in school were just the five most evident senses, aka the boring ones you could have figured out for your own damn self. The rest are far more interesting.
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Pictured: #19, smision.
The Harvard School of Medicine lists six extra ones that are pretty hard to argue against. Close your eyes, then touch your nose with your index finger. How did you know which one was your index finger without looking at it? How did you know where your nose was? Did you smell your finger to your nose? Did your sense of touch somehow tell you what the air molecules you encounter along the way to your nose feel like? Nah, that's proprioception, your body's awareness of where it is in relation to itself.
Oh, yeah. We just dropped the H-bomb on you.
Maybe the most interesting one they left out is your sense of timing, which might seem like it's only a sense in the way that fashion is a sense. But leading neurologists like David Eagleman think it's the most important of all the senses, since it's the thread that ties the rest of them together. An apple is just a series of different sensations without your sense of time telling you they're all happening at the same moment. Still not convinced? Try staring at a white wall in a totally silent room. Your sense of time tells you how much of your life has been wasted because you didn't take us at our word.
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Good on you, fella.
It's also worth noting that this sense your kindergarten teacher failed to mention can operate like a freaking superpower. For instance, if you're walking in the woods and a bear growls in the bushes behind you and to your left, the bear's growl hits your left ear a millionth of a second before it hits your right. Your sense of time is able to pick up on that infinitesimal difference and allows you to perfectly triangulate the bear's location behind you.
If you were only relying on your sense of hearing, you would only know that the bear is somewhere on the left side of your body. Your ears don't swivel around like a dog's, so you would have to turn and use your eyes to pinpoint the bear. A blur of brown and black fur would be the last sight you ever saw.
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Two members of our PR team died getting this photograph. Honor their sacrifice by chuckling dutifully.
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One of the first things many of us learned in science class was that the tongue is organized like a factory floor plan, with each region assigned responsibility for its own highly specialized tasks:
The Brew Samurai
The empty middle is where you taste irony and things that are so close you can taste them.
If you spent your childhood shotgunning Pixy Stix like the rest of us, you may have noticed that you could taste sugar even when it was bypassing the tip of your tongue at 70 mph. You were left to conclude that your teachers were liars or that there was something hideously wrong with you, depending on whether you were raised Catholic.
The Truth:
Your teachers were probably just being fed the same line of bullshit that's been passed from biology class to biology class for decades, and it's totally false. As with the myth that spinach is rich in iron, this one started with a mistranslation of a century-old German study (maybe stop relying on those, science). In 1901, German scientist D.P. Hanig conducted a taste test and found that some volunteers experienced certain flavors more intensely in certain regions of the tongue. Forty years later, a Harvard academic appropriately named Dr. Boring mistranslated the results of the German survey, mistaking a vague tendency among a bunch of Germans (who were probably taste-testing four different varieties of sauerkraut) for the precision workflow chart you see in the tongue map.
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Our research for this article has informed us of the existence of sauerkraut pie. Will you stop at nothing, Germany?
Researchers have known for years that all areas in the tongue are about equally good at detecting different flavors. It's not an evenly distributed democracy of taste buds, but every tongue has different patterns of strength and weakness. Your tongue map is like your mouth's fingerprint, if the pattern on your fingerprint determines whether or not you like Brussels sprouts. Each of our "tongue maps" will detect different tastes, sometimes from the same meal. Also, far from being relegated to specific locations on the tongue, your taste buds go all the way down your throat into your digestive system. When you've eaten some bad food, the ones in your stomach warn your gag reflex that if it doesn't evacuate the building, the shit's about to hit the fan (and everything else within three square blocks).
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"Well played, Taco Bell."
The taste map has hung around 30 years after it was officially debunked even though it's less interesting than the reality because teachers need cool-looking color-coded maps to fill out science books, and fat-cat wineglass makers like to pretend you need a golf bag's worth of specialized wineglasses to direct different types of wine to the best possible place on the tongue.
Vintage Cellars
We prefer to chug it out of a bag.
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This is one of the first, and for those of us who don't go into medicine, only pieces of anatomy we learn. The blue veins you see on white people's arms look that way because they are carrying deoxygenated blood away from the heart. This is your body's helpful way of color-coding which direction everything is moving for biology textbooks. Blood is red when it has oxygen but blue when it lacks it. And you never bleed blue because blood turns back to red thanks to the oxygen in the air. You've seen even more evidence of it, either in movies or firsthand if you're a homicidal maniac: People who hold their breath or get choked turn a purplish blue before passing out. Because they're not getting any O2! Case. Closed.
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"Does anybody know mouth-to-mouth?! These boys need serious help over here!"
The Truth:
When it comes to the color of your blood vessels, your eyes can, and frequently do, deceive the shit out of you. Usually, veins are close to the surface of the skin, and they're the ones that carry oxygenless blood. That means it's true that those blue vessels you're seeing carry blood without oxygen, but the blood itself is not blue. Even the vein itself isn't blue. It primarily looks blue because of the way light reflects off it. The vessels carrying blood toward the heart and the blood they carry are both actually darker (also known as even more) red.
Wikipedia Commons
Blood with oxygen on left, without oxygen on right.
They appear blue on white people because of the way light passes through their skin. In typical white-person fashion, whoever came up with this myth looked down at his arm and assumed that the little blue lines running up and down his arms must actually be blue, failing to notice that different colors of skin reflect different light waves, making the veins look anywhere from green to pink when viewed through other colors of skin.
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Stuff White People Like: Making ridiculous generalizations about blood.
The blue appearance doesn't stop blood from being red, just like the color of the sky doesn't make outer space Carolina blue.
"But as we mature, the questions become more complex and too numerous for any reasonable human being to answer"
ReplySuch as: Does this Toy fit onto the wet hole at the bottom of my body?
your genetic makeup defines your body structure that is fact, i am not saying it 100% responsible but atlest 60-70% responsible,like when you will start balding or how tall you will be...
ReplyAm I the only one craving sauerkraut pie now? The picture looked awful good...
ReplyI am german and I have never ever heard something like that exists. And the pie on the pic looks like an ordinary apple pie.
BTW, Sauerkraut is consumed very rarely in germany. Call us out on sausages and beer if you want, but the Sauerkraut thing is really ridiculous.
There's a reason breakfast is considered the most important meal of the day. It's in the name: Breaks a fast. I read that you need to eat at least 400-600 calories in the morning. Number one is completely wrong.
ReplyCite a source please. I skip breakfast all the time. Losin' weight like a champ.
"I read that you need to eat at least 400-600 calories in the morning"
Or what? I haven't had breakfast in weeks, I function completely fine and am at a very healthy weight.
"If you want to know why you're fat or skinny, take the number of calories you put into your body and subtract the number of calories your body is using."
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesRight, because as we know the human digestive system is 100% effective at removing calories from food. Or at the very least, every single human's digestive system is equally efficient.
Do either of those two statements sound likely to you? I mean at least one of them has to be true for your statement to be accurate, doesn't it?
Seems like an ok statement to me.
How can I tell how much calories my body uses? That seems much more difficult to put upper/lower boundaries on.
I know! I used to eat ~2500/3000 calories per day as a child, and I was still "underweight." Then I hit puberty and I can only have ~1700 and I have to exercise a lot to maintain a healthy weight. Metabolism isn't a myth. I've also seen overweight people who eat healthy, control their portions, and exercise a lot, and then skinny people who eat twice as much and lead a sedentary lifestyle.
im inclined to agree with ert, i'm a 5'10 guy and i eat more than anyone i know, but i cant get my weight up to more than 135. And i don't exercise or anything. So apparently it's not as simple as OP would like us to believe. I would imagine people that gain more weight have some different genes that tell their body it needs to store more fat. Did i mention i'm a scientist, like the best one in the world?
You were learning around deoxygenated blood in kindergarten?? My school sucks.
ReplyI just want to say thank you. You stopped me from lying to my 3rd graders about tongues yesterday. You and Wikipedia... Apparently, these are my top 2 reliable resources.
ReplyJust looking at the stock photos in this article is a little nauseating... Thank you for helping me avoid fourth meal.
ReplyMan you've got some serious fat people issues. You either are, were, or just detest fat people and it completely carries over into what you wrote there, I mean, the funny thing is, I'm not some fat advocate or anything, but I don't really thing making insane amounts of fun of one group is that nice. Fat people piss me off. Americans also piss me off. Most people piss me off. I don't spew vitriol all over a comedy website, ya know? Get over it!
ReplyI don't think his fat people issues are as bad as your anger issues.
Those things about metabolism aren't true at all!
ReplyIt's not just math! Our hormones affect how much calories we use. Insulin determines how much of those calories are transformed into muscles and fat and what just goes through us.
And it isn't just the amount of insulin, our insulin sensitivity (or resistence) determines how much our cells listen to what insulin says.
And you know how much our insulins are crappy with all those fast foods.
Yes, there are factors that effect the Cal in vs Cal out formula. BUT the Cals in vs Cals out are still the big part of the formula.
ok, just pausing my reading to jot down some useless trick i was taught in high school: hands cold = put hat on. Feet cold = put another jacket on. Has worked without fail for 3 years of my life. In other words, its complete bullshit to think that your head is the most prone to losing heat.
ReplyI'm on the fence about the metabolism one... I eat what I want, as much as I want, I eat a philly cheese every morning at 10 to get me until lunch. I have not great but still average cholesterol, and don't exercise much. I'm 30 and have always been that way. And I'm so thin that when I broke my foot and hand and couldn't exercise, I LOST weight, around ten pounds, probably muscle or something from not exercising. 5'8 and 135. Is this supposed to like, even out some day? Otherwise I think the metabolism one must be more or less true.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesOr, because you eat based on your own perseption of what you need, you are taking in the correct amount of calories and there for not gaining weight. People's main problem tends to be when they eat more because somewhere in the back of their mind they think they should.
Most exersize doesn't really boost your burn rate that much. Unless you say... boxed. If you walked, biked or lifted weights, none of those are really doing to burn much more Calories than sitting on a couch. Your body was probably using more energy to HEAL you, while since you were less active, you probably ate less.
You've always been 30? o.0
you eat less, you will lose weight, you exercise more, you will need to eat more... some days i eat 700 calories and some others i eat 3000 but overall the weekk i eat less than before and i lost 45 poundsm ive kept my ideal weight and im hungry only when im stressed, but i compensate in a couple of days with sub low calorie intake... its like your car tires, you need to check the pressure every week to see when you need more nitrogen...
ReplyYour tongue map is like your mouth's fingerprint, if the pattern on your fingerprint determines whether or not you like Brussels sprouts?
ReplyThe fools, the fools! Brussels is in Belgium, not Germany!
The arrangement of taste buds on your tongue still determines whether you like Brussels sprouts.
If you have any taste buds at all, you don't like Brussels sprouts...
Oooh, I forgot one thing. The various glasses related to various wines is not a total fake. It is not related at all to the tongue, but to the nose. Anybody can try that at home, blind test with 2 or 3 different glasses. It does not change fundamentally things, just the amount and "order" of esters/alcohols arriving on average in the nose when sniffing the glass.
ReplyAnd if you sip with nose closed, you'll discover that the glass has no influence on the "taste in mouth" :D
Thank you, thank you for #4 and #3.
Reply#4 because I swear that I taste stuff all over my tongue, not just in the front or the back or whatever. I can taste bitterness in the front and sweetness in the middle and the back. But the strange thing is that I wouldn't believe in my own senses and refer back to the tongue map, believing fake science to be smarter than my personal experience. Ho boy...
#3 because it makes me sadface, as a rightie, that I'm destined to be mathematical and logical and not creative, even though I have known for my whole life that I preferred creative writing and singing and stories and such. Then again, ever since I've gotten into MBTI I've pretty much subconsciously thrown the left/right brain theory out the window of my mind.
The senses thing is fascinating. Too bad the Harvard link doesn't seem to work anymore. I was interested in reading about more of these extra senses.
Metabolism makes it easier for some people. But that does not change "cal in - cal out". Metabolism explains why some people eat more but don't gain weight but others do. Basic physics eat less, exerice more and lose weight. Some people just burn more doing nothing
Replyto add to this, exercising=muscles, muscles=metabolism (muscles burn more calories than fat, and they burn for longer than fat does)
i work with 2 girls at quiznoes (if you guys don't know, an average large sub is about 1k calories). one works out a lot and is healthy-thin and the other doesn't work out and she's average weight. they both eat the same amount (1 large sub each on break), but the one who doesn't work out is slowly gaining weight while the other seems to be staying the same (if not, she's getting skinnier).
me, i've stopped working out for about 6 months and if i ate nearly as much as they do i'd slap on like 10 pounds a week
That metabolism section is not completely accurate. Metabolism affects the rate you use the energy you intake. It is the reason why you use some nutrients and store others. Think about the person who is heavy at fifty but skinny at twenty. He eats the same when he is twenty as he does when he is fifty. Why does he weigh more at fifty years old? Because he/she stopped growing and his metabolism slowed down. Now consider the person who eats a lot but also frequently intakes a stimulant such as adderall for ADD. Why does he/she not gain weight? Because the drug speeds up his/her metabolism. Metabolism does matter. However, when explaining why some is overweight, they often intake more calories than they need to burn to maintain a healthier weight.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesSorry I did not cite any sources, basing this off what I learned in a physiology class at an ivy league school.
adderall (and other stimulants) doesn't speed up your metabolism, it decreases appetite
Not only that, but counting calories at all is pretty much BS, especially for people who aren't in good enough shape to burn what they need in order to lose weight. People don't eat well, carbs+fat is usually why people gain weight and that's pretty much all anyone who is fat eats. Combined with junk food (ie processed food packed with bad fats, sugars and little nutrients) breads, heavy sauces, little veggies usually too much fruit to compensate the lack of health everywhere else. That's a recipe to make anyone fat, or if they've got high metabolism, due to lots of muscle, they'll become unhealthy, though it's usually less apparent if they work out and are younger. Really, being healthy/losing weight is as simple as what you eat. You don't even have to count calories. Just exercise, eat lots of veggies, lean meats complex carbs, fruits and drink lots of water. Problem is that eating like that is expensive and most peoples taste buds aren't accostumed to eating that way and therefore it's hard to stick to something like that when most really over weight people are all out addicted (just like a drug) to what they eat. The body insists they need what they crave (cravings are usually BS too, but it is good to indulge a tiny bit once in a while - Cutting things cold turkey is extremely hard for some, just like quitting smoking or some drug is nearly impossible cold turkey.) Nearly all diet, exercise plans out there are set up so you fail. Eating less won't make you lose weight if you're over weight, it makes you fatter in the long run. Truth is, most people don't eat enough and on top of that, what they do eat isn't what our bodies are remotely designed for.
I wish my tastebuds were accostumed, I'd have them dressed up like different stereotypes and have a pride parade in my mouth! BOAS!!
Interesting, but I do have to disagree with #3.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesMostly because I went to a school specifically for smart/creative types, and the first year I attended, 79% of the students were left handed.
Maybe that could be considered an anomaly ... but then the 4 years since then have seen very similar left:right ratios.
So I'm forced to believe that left-handers are in fact, more naturally creative.
And smart. MWAHAHAHA
Coming from an relatively creative and Mrs-137-IQ-at-11 rightie, I call bullshit. They could possibly ambidextrous. Or lucky. Yeah, my Mensa level Uncle is right handed, so is his relatively smart daughter. My extreme creative uncle is right handed, also.
Great job calling bullshit on a s****y anecdotal argument by substituting your own s****y anecdotal argument, CrackHead.
I don't know what the statistics are, but I am very creative, I write, I draw and paint, and I love art, and I am right handed. I'm also really good at math though, I was in advanced math all throughout school and then when I took classes in college I also did very well. So I don't know, technically wouldn't that mean I use both the right and left sides of my brain? I'm not ambidextrious though. I'd say I'm more into art though than I am math. So I don't know how I fit into this right brain left brain logic, but I never believed it to be true. Really, it really can't be true, because if you were in school with creative types, then wouldn't they ALL have to be left handed for the myth to work out? You can't say oh the right side of the brain controls the left hand and that's what makes people creative if 21% of the creative people are using the left side of their brain.
Wait....don't ALL blue things look blue because of the way light reflects off of them?
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesExcept the sky, which is obviously blue because it reflects the ocean.
-Elle Owell
Blue stuff looks blue because blue sensitive cones in your eye receive that colour from the unabsorbed light that hits your eye from objects. Thats where all the colours come from.
The sky looks blue because blue is the shortest light wavelength. Gas molecules absorb the blue light and radiate it all around the sky. So when you look up, that's what you're seeing that makes the sky look blue. So yeah, the reflection of the light waves is what gives objects the appearance of having color.
Colour can in fact be relative, depending on its surroundings. There are many illusions out there that illustrate these points, but a simple one is the checkerboard shadow illusion.