The unpowered fact

[larryhammer]

It's really hard to stamp out a good myth. Myths have story, making them more powerful than mere facts. I'm talking about myths like:

• In the 1950s, neurologists thought that only 10% of the brain's capacity was used (neurologists determined that when we're not engaged in anything (brain at rest), about 10% of the brain is in use; that when we do different things, different other parts of the brain are used; and that over all possible activities, we use all parts of it) or


• The brain is divided into logical/creative sides (no study has ever shown more than a mild statistical bias for types of activities and side, and most of the recent ones have come close to entirely erasing that bias) or


• Victorians were more prudish than the generations before or after (they knew, accurately, that their standards of behavior were more liberal than their grandparents' during the Regency; they also openly discussed birth control, the first time this was remotely considered acceptable) or


• According to current theories of aerodynamics, bumblebees can't fly (which, actually, is true — but only if you assume fixed wings; as soon as they beat, you can get them flying) or


• Columbus argued that the world was round, and thus you could get to China by sailing west from Spain (he argued that it was smaller than commonly believed, and thus shorter to go west instead of east around Africa; all educated people in the West from the classical Greeks on knew the earth is round — it was even Church doctrine — and the size Columbus argued against was right) or


• The nuclear family of the 1950s is how American families always were, and we've been deviating from that ever since (the 50s were the aberration, and by moving to more free-form families, we've been returning to the previous norms).

These are all examples I've met in the past month. All hard to correct, unless you can cite an authority like Snopes at someone — and even then, that corrects only one mythically engaged brain at a time. This is because the popular versions have story (even the 10% one, because it leads into the question of what the other 90% is doing). We are pattern-finding primates, and will find patterns even when they aren't there — thus, astrology; thus, gamblers' lore; thus, WMD in Iraq; thus, myths like the above.

Something to keep in mind when trying to disabuse people of cherished, but incorrect, beliefs. It really helps to give the correct facts a story, with a power as strong as the counterfactual story's. (Also something to keep in mind when creating your own stories.)

<glyph of trying not to jump up and down and shout THERE IS NO LEFT BRAIN/RIGHT BRAIN DIVISION! THERE ISN'T! THERE ISN'T!>

---L.