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Humans are naturally curious. We seek to explore, learn, and understand. In fact, the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the HAAS School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that when the brain searches for information, it accesses the same neural code as when it's hunting for money.
"To the brain, information is its own reward," said co-author of the study Ming Hsu, Ph.D. According to him, just as we like empty calories from junk food, we can also overvalue data that makes us feel good but may not be useful.
Or, as one Reddit thread shows, even accurate! Started by platform user lilCRONOS, it has folks sharing "the dumbest" things someone made them believe to be true that they later found out wasn't. Below you will find the most popular submissions to the discussion, which serve as a reminder that we can't trust everything we hear.
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#1
Many years ago when my little sister and I were between 8-10, we were listening to Christmas music while decorating the tree. The Little Drummer Boy sang about performing for the newborn king, telling us “the ox and lamb kept time” while he played. Little sister asked me to explain what this meant.
Very seriously, I informed her that when barn animals hear music, they instinctively tap their feet. This helped the Little Drummer Boy keep the beat while he played for Jesus. She accepted this new piece of wisdom as fact and carried on.
A decade later we were sitting at Christmas dinner with the whole family which now included little sister’s fiancé. Little Drummer Boy played on the radio and she looked to her future husband and said, “did you know when barn animals hear music, they instinctively tap their feet?”
He laughed hysterically, calamity ensued, and I had to run for cover. Worth it. Pa rum pum pum pum.
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#2
My father used to have a “turbo button” in his car that he’d pressed to make the car go faster. Dumb a*s kid me didn’t know it was the ac button, so when the air would hit my face while seeing the car move, I thought we were flying. Coolest s**t ever until I grew older and realized lol.
However, these stories don't prove that we're doomed. Yet Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris, thinks that in order to fight disinformation more effectively, we need to stop believing in our own gullibility.
"We are skilled at figuring out who to trust and what to believe, and, if anything, we're too hard rather than too easy to influence," Mercier said. He bases those statements on a growing body of research in fields such as neuropsychiatry and evolutionary psychology, and argues that humans are hardwired to balance openness with vigilance.
#3
I asked my sister what the small brown round things i saw in the fruit aisle were and she told me they were goat balls. Later found out they were kiwis.
#4
Not intentionally, but for a long time as a young kid I thought women with dark eyebrows and blonde hair were robots or androids or whatever.
I heard my mum and dad saying that someone on TV was fake or not real or something to that effect. When I asked why, they said her eyebrows are black and her hair is blonde. Whatever the terminology was, it was unclear to me they were talking about her hair colour not being real, I just assumed it was a giveaway to know who weren't real humans.
To gauge a statement's accuracy, we instinctively test it from many angles, including: does it jibe with what I already believe? Does the speaker share my interests? Have they demonstrated competence in this area? What's their reputation for trustworthiness? And, with more complex assertions: does the argument make sense?
So there are a few ways of scrolling through the list: you might view the entries as proof that we can be easily persuaded, or you might treat them as evidence that we, eventually, figure things out. After all, the people sharing these anecdotes did.
#5
Yellow tomato sauce.
When I was about 8 or 9, mum forgot to order a mcDs plain so she said it was yellow tomato sauce from the tomatoes like my grandad grew. I moved out at 18 and went shopping for the first time. Wanted to make a ‘real’ burger. Couldn’t find it anywhere. Called mum; 22 years later she’s still laughing.
#6
I thought that men had one less rib than women. I believe I was told this by Sunday school teachers and my parents and believed this until my girlfriend in college told me that it was not true at all.
#7
When I was a young kid my dad was watching a news segment about funding for NASA. They showed an astronaut strapping into some sort of training device against a wall that began rotating him like a clock. He was spinning faster and faster. The news overlaid an image of a spinning dollar bill which then slowed and came to a stop.
For adults, it was a visual metaphor for the cost of NASA.
For me, it was a demonstration how money is made by spinning people until they turn into money.
#8
That working hard in corporate America actually gets you anywhere.
#9
When I was a kid we had this brush in the car, the kind for getting snow off the windows in the winter, and I asked my mom what it was.
She told me it was an elephant toothbrush, and that we used to have an elephant, for her that was just a silly joke, but my 6 year old brain never questioned the fact that we used to own an elephant.
A few years later, I must have been more like 9, I brought it up to my mom; something about it didn’t make sense. How did we feed this thing? Where did we keep it? How did we afford an elephant? Where did it come from? What did we do with it in the winter?
My mom, had entirely forgot she ever told me that, and never realized I had been left to believe we owned an elephant.
lol.
#10
That the red triangle (hazard lights) in a car is an eject button for the kids in the back seat. Truly believed that was a great call for crashes or whatever. My dad told me that if we were too annoying on long car rides he would eject us via red button.
#11
When I was little my sister told me tofu was koala meat and I believed it for years.
setsuriseikou 8 months ago
What a stupid thing to believe! Tofu is Japanese, so obviously it's Hello Kitty's meat, duh
#12
My cousins told me that in the Blackpool Tower kids play area, the Jungle Gym I think it was called, that if you jumped in a specific spot in the ball pool you'd go through a trap door into a secret room. Spent the whole of the time we were in there on a school trip trying to find it and didn't have time for anything else. Bastards 😂.
#13
My dad would tell me he can make red lights turn green just by pressing the garage door opener. I didn’t believe him but every time he did it, it worked. Still didn’t believe him but I couldn’t figure out how he was doing it.
When I got older and learned to drive, I realized he was just looking at the other lights in the intersection to time out when to press the opener.
#14
Well I didn’t find out until a few years ago that narwhals are real and not mythical. I’m 35.
Upstaged75 8 months ago
My SIL was the same way. The only place she'd ever seen one was in the movie Elf, so she thought they were made up. :) And I will tease her mercilessly about it for the rest of her life!
#15
Not me but a pal of mine, it's one of the greatest misleadings I've ever heard of. Her older brother told her that seagulls and bats were the same animal, seagulls by day, bats by night. She believed it for years and years, until she confidently told some friends and they all said, "...what?? Are you stupid!"
Hahhaha, fantastic deception.
#16
My older sibling would never let me drink 7up...because I was only 6 years old.
#17
That the black dots on a ladybug tell the number of years they're old. I was already 15 when I figured it out lol.
Chihuahua Mama 8 months ago (edited)
This one's cute. Sadly, I dont think ladybugs live that long ETA: I looked it up and they can only live up to 3 years in perfect conditions
#18
Told my kid that the squooshy stuff they felt when picking their nose was brains, worked a treat til they got a bad cold and had a meltdown in class that their brains were falling out. Fun meeting with the teacher.
Multa Nocte 8 months ago
Don't really approve of parents telling lies to their children for "humorous purposes." And to have children believe this until they were old enough to go to school is even less amusing.
#19
My mum told me that if you fall down a sewer manhole then you turn into a ninja turtle, I was scared because I did not want to leave home and do ninja turtle stuff and also wanted my body to be human but now it would be nice to be a ninja turtle because I would not have to deal with life.
#20
The holes in saltine crackers were made by trained wasps. I believed this for a good few years.
#21
I thought that if you touched a frog or toad, you'd get warts. This led to an irrational fear of amphibians until high school biology class set me straight.
Ariom Dahl 8 months ago
This was quite a common belief when I was young (a long time ago, I hasten to add!)
#22
That my dog went to live on a farm.
Biscuits n gravy 8 months ago
I wish I could find that farm! It must be a lively and fun place with all those dogs running around on it.
#23
When I was in the fourth grade I asked my mom if we were Irish (I think we were celebrating St Patrick’s day at school) and she told me that my grandmother was a leprechaun. So then I proudly told my teacher the next day that I was Irish because my grandmother was a leprechaun and the second I said it out loud I realized how stupid that was and have burned with shame thinking about it ever since.
#24
When I was about 5, my dad told me that if I put salt on a birds tail, I could pick it up and hold it. I ran around throwing salt at birds for years before I realized he had been f*****g with me.
Lesley Relph 8 months ago (edited)
Cerebos brand salt used to have a picture of a small boy chasing a chicken with a salt cellar on the label
#25
That if someone has red eyes in a photograph, that means there is a demon living inside them.
Upstaged75 8 months ago
That does explain a lot about my younger brother! ;) (He's got very light colored eyes and they almost always flash red in photos)
#26
Told my wife the channel tunnel has a 2 mile middle part which is see through so you can watch the fish as you pass through. Completely forgot until about 5 years later when we used the tunnel and she was gutted she didn't see any fish.
Fellfromthemoon 8 months ago
One of our metro/subway lines goes under the river. As a kid, I was always really disappointed that it is too dark to see any fish. Later I realized that the tunnel goes below the river, and the metro cars do not go into the water.
#27
That if you swallowed a watermelon seed a watermelon would grow inside your stomach.
Also, we had a lot of those big black and yellow garden spiders around. They would have these big zig zags of silk down the middle of their web and I was told they were writing spiders, and if you bothered them they would write your name and you would die. The zig zag was them practicing their penmanship.
Cathy Augros 8 months ago
Lol, that'a hilarious about the spiders! Really creative! As for the watermelon seeds, when I was 5 an older kid on the playground told me the same thing. I believed it for years!
#28
There is a snail that lives up your nose and it’ll bite off your finger if you try and pick it. Older neighbor kid.
I googled it and it’s from a Shel Silverstein poem. This has been in my head for 35 years.
Philly Bob Squires 8 months ago
Shel wrote a few songs for Dr Hook & The Medicine Show too! And Sarah Silvia Cynthia Stout, who would not take the garbage out! He was brilliant!
#29
That if my sister put a stamp on on my forehead and stood me by the mailbox,the mailman would take me back to God.
M O'Connell 8 months ago
The last recorded instance of a child being sent through the mail was in 1915, so perhaps at one point this was viable.
#30
I used to believe chocolate eggs were laid by roosters….
What do you think ?
Jesha 8 months ago
Up until I was about nine I was convinced that since female dogs were called bitches, male dogs were clearly called bastards.
Bouche and Audi and Shyla, Oh My! 8 months ago
Mom generally called dogs "he" and cats "she". I believed they were the same species. Oddly enough, we had a female dog and a male cat at the time.
Cosmikid 8 months ago
!!! Well obviously. It was clear to me until I was well into 1st grade I think, that cats were the Mommies, and Dogs the Daddies, and the same for Mommy Cows and Daddy Horses.
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Jesha 8 months ago
Up until I was about nine I was convinced that since female dogs were called bitches, male dogs were clearly called bastards.
Bouche and Audi and Shyla, Oh My! 8 months ago
Mom generally called dogs "he" and cats "she". I believed they were the same species. Oddly enough, we had a female dog and a male cat at the time.
Cosmikid 8 months ago
!!! Well obviously. It was clear to me until I was well into 1st grade I think, that cats were the Mommies, and Dogs the Daddies, and the same for Mommy Cows and Daddy Horses.
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