|
|
by
bud simpson |
April
19, 2006 |
Everyone
Knows
No matter how “strange” you may feel during
a full moon, science has not found any correlation between
lunar phases and accidents or crime rates. |
“Be
very, very careful what you put into that head,
because you will never, ever get it out.”
Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1471-1530)
Except for that shard of wisdom, Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor
of England under Henry VIII, never contributed much to the spheres
of science or education. That one statement, though, has often
led me to till the soil of ideas and to question everything.
I’m annoyingly skeptical of nearly everything, from science
to media to politics. I usually don’t settle for easy
answers.
The flags of skepticism start flying for me every time I hear
someone begin a statement with, “Everyone knows that….”
This is often the way we’re taught, and we’re just
as often given very bad, very wrong information by those who
should know better. Even worse, over time, bad information takes
on a life of its own, and, with our help, actually repels the
truth in favor of the more comfortable assurances of myth, assumption
and fable.
Here’s one that a lot of people will defend to the end:
The Full Moon Effect – the notion that crime and medical
emergencies increase with the appearance of the full moon. This
is pure myth and continues to survive in spite of abundant evidence
to the contrary.
Ask any emergency room nurse or police officer. They’ll
probably be willing to swear an oath that all the stories you’ve
heard are true. Why? Two systems are at work here. One is the
reinforcement of myth, repeated legends that are never looked
at critically. The other is a willingness to participate in
the myth. We remember the times when circumstances reinforce
our prejudicial thinking, but dismiss our wrong guesses as unexplained
occurrences. The nurses and cops really believe what they’re
saying, but they also expect the results they believe in. The
fix is in. A number of studies into the effects of the full
moon on human behavior, however, don’t reinforce the myth.
A recent study at Missouri Western University “…found
no significant difference in criminal activity and fire and
emergency calls between the full moon phase and the other lunar
phases….”
Anything repeated often enough takes on a ring of truth, or
at least a cozy familiarity. I was taught in school –
elementary school, high school and what little college I could
sneak into – that water circling a drain in the Southern
Hemisphere swirls in the opposite direction of water circling
an identical drain in the Northern Hemisphere. The Coriolis
Force – the effect of the spinning planet – was
called into action, the idea took root in my head, and has stayed
there for decades. I have defended the “facts” of
this effect at great length, in spite of the fact that it’s
completely and totally bogus. The rotation of the earth isn’t
strong enough to affect a bowl of water, regardless or where
it is.
Another strange idea that gets reinforced year after year, particularly
by TV weathermen, is the notion that on the first day of Spring
– the Vernal Equinox – then and only then, can you
balance an egg on end. As I write this, we’re barely three
days past Groundhog Day, and I tonight successfully balanced
not one, but three different eggs in the Flyover Test Kitchen.
My grandson balanced an egg on its small end last August. To
celebrate this seemingly impossible feat, we scrambled the egg
with a few of its carton mates and made some totally delicious
French toast. Eggs are easy to balance any day of the year and
pretty tasty at that.
Where is this guy going with all this, you might ask. Is he
an insufferable know-it-all or does he just enjoy making hamburger
from sacred cows? Neither really, although both ideas have some
basis in reality. You and I live in an age when information
comes at us so fast and from so many directions at once that
it all starts to blend together. This same glut of input also
provides us access to a to of good information on demand. The
ability to question what goes into your head before it gets
stuck there becomes more important as so much more information
becomes available. Questioning ideas keeps bad information from
forming a solid foundation for still more bad ideas.
Shaving doesn’t make hair grow back thicker, humans use
all their brains, not just 10 percent; brain cells do regenerate,
the seasons have nothing to do with our distance from the sun,
swallowed chewing gum doesn’t stay in your digestive tract
for seven years, space is not really an empty void, hair and
fingernails don’t continue to grow after you die, and
if you stop feeding the birds in your back yard, they won’t
all drop dead from the codependent relationship you heartlessly
walked away from. Myths can be hard to walk away from unless
you first hold them up to the light and see how little truth
shines through.
My advice, worth every last cent you paid for it, is to question
everything, especially “common” knowledge. You may
find an uncommon revelation hiding somewhere. But whatever you
do, don’t take my word for it. Dig a little deeper. It
won’t make the beauty of a full moon any less magical
to behold, but you might see it a bit differently.
Enlightenment doesn’t come from answers, but from questions.
Bud
Simpson is a member of the infamous Northeast High School Class
of 1968 and a professional photographer. Learn more at www.budzilla.com.
