No one is safe from believing in a myth. As anthropologists well know, when a society lives immersed in one, it does not recognize it as such. This very human trait also affects scientists. Nicholas Spitzer, professor of biology and director of the Kavli Institute for the Brain and Mind at the University of California, San Diego, believes that researchers are not immune to accepting claims without demonstrating: “They think they are too objective to believe anything. so folkloric ”.
The bottom line is not that we believe the myths, but “why they appear and why they are so persistent”, says Paul Howard-Jones, professor of Neuroscience and Education at the University of Bristol: once they are installed in our brain , it is very difficult to evict them. As those who dedicate themselves to refuting the pseudosciences know, the more you try to explain and demonstrate that a belief is wrong, the more it will be held by someone who holds it for true without a rational basis to support it: in a recent article published in Nature, science journalist Megan Scudellari cited an experiment in which vaccine-reluctant parents were shown messages in favor of vaccines. After the test, these people radicalized their previous position.
Holding that the rise of scientific culture will rationalize our decision-making, or that –as Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the creator of positivism, thought– one day we will abandon the belief in supernatural beings because science will demonstrate their incongruity is another myth and very powerful. This idea was revealed to be fallacious in 1956, when Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, psychologists at the University of Chicago, published the book When Prophecy Fails . In this work they demonstrated with numerous examples that the failure of religious predictions, far from making the faith of their followers disappear, increases it, and even causes a wave of proselytism . As the old aphorism says, “Against human stupidity, even the gods fight in vain.”
Hence, it continues to be believed, for example, that having a laptop between your legs produces sterility. This idea was born from a study by Argentine researchers that indicated that electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi signals damaged male sperm. However, the authors of the work soon backed down, because their research had very obvious weaknesses. One is enough: nobody puts the laptop on their testicles for four hours, as happened in the study, but on their thighs, and for much less time. Another widespread falsehood claims that urine relieves the sting of a jellyfish sting… when it is the opposite. Here we gut you four other myths of scientific origin that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, refuse to die.
Myth 1: We use only 10% of our brain
As if the rest were always off, when MRIs and CT scans have been showing us just the opposite for decades. It would be extraordinary if our gray mass worked so little, because we would find ourselves before the first palpable proof that an organ can maintain its functions when 90% of its cells are useless. And what about brain tumors or strokes? It would be a more than remarkable misfortune if they were always primed with that modest tenth that we use.
The audacity of the supporters of this assumption of indeterminate origin goes so far as to attribute to Albert Einstein a false quote in which the famous physicist would have defended its veracity. But where does the persistent force of this myth come from? Maybe from our narcissism: we like to think that we only use 10% of our brain power. If we do so much with so little, how far would we go if we took advantage of the rest?
The evidence against this idea is overwhelming. Our large brain demands a good-sized head, and that is why we are born before we are ready to survive alone. If we continue to develop in the uterus, the head will grow until it does not pass through the cervix at birth. And it makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view to develop an organ that we are going to waste almost completely. If the claim refers to 10% of the brain regions, it is easy to disprove. Scanners have proven that an action as simple as making and opening a fist requires the involvement of much more than a tenth of the brain. If you want to say that it refers to neurons, the absurdity is total: they are too valuable and complex for the body to leave nine out of ten unemployed .
The brain remains busy even when we do nothing. It is enough to control unconscious functions such as breathing and heartbeat. And imaging technologies have taught us that its activity is intense even in the depths of sleep , in which a large number of brain areas are involved.
Myth 2: Cold causes colds, and colds can be cured with antibiotics.
Antibiotics kill bacteria: no matter how many we take, neither the cold nor the flu will go away sooner, as they are caused by viruses. And no matter how cold we are, we are not going to catch a cold : the only way is to come into contact with an infected person. Despite this, long known, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that, in their country alone, doctors write ten million prescriptions of antibiotics for viral diseases annually. Worse, this antibiotic free bar is helping antibiotics’ true targets, bacteria, become increasingly resistant to drugs.
As we said, the cold is caused by a virus , not a cold environment. Although there is an experiment that raises certain doubts in this regard. In this test, conducted in 2005 by researchers at the University of Cardiff in Wales, ninety volunteers dipped their feet in icy water for twenty minutes. The other ninety participants were deprived of that torture and asked to play with their toes. After five days, 29% of those who had exposed their paintbrushes to cold water developed cold-like symptoms, compared to 9% of the other group. Were those symptoms the sign of a real cold? The researchers did not determine.
Colds are conducive to false beliefs and remedies, perhaps because of how common they are. Who has not heard that vitamin C helps fight and prevent them? This assumption has its origin in someone who we would all doubt would possess an unscientific mind: the American biochemist Linus Pauling, double winner of the Nobel Prize – that of Chemistry in 1954 and that of Peace in 1962 -. In the 70s he published the book Vitamin C and the Common Cold, where he defended that ingesting 3,000 milligrams a day of this vitamin – fifty times the recommended daily amount today – would prevent bronchitis, pneumonia and … colds.
However, the nearly thirty scientific studies on the matter conducted since then deny the biggest one: by drinking too much orange juice, you are not going to shorten the duration of any upper respiratory infection or reduce its symptoms . And if your family is still determined that you take vitamin C, remind them of another falsehood: orange is not the food that contributes the most. It has 69 milligrams of that substance; a bowl of strawberries 84.7 milligrams, a mango 122.3, and a red pepper about 190. But, watch out, they might try to stuff you with the juice of this nightshade.
Myth 3: Early detection of cancer always saves lives
You can do it in the lung, cervical or colon, although it is not the norm. Since 1997, South Korea has followed a very rigorous thyroid cancer early detection policy. The gland is removed and the patient is put on medication for the rest of his life, but the survival rate has not increased.
This myth emerged a century ago, when doctors found that they had better results if they identified the tumor and treated it when symptoms began. From there to thinking that the sooner it was diagnosed, the greater the chances of survival, there was only one step. Thus the method of finding it soon and cutting it was established. But research into thyroid, prostate, or breast cancer has shown that early detection does not ensure a better chance of survival. A Cochrane review – the most rigorous study in the biosanitary world – of five clinical trials with 341,342 participants found that regular check-ups for prostate cancer have not reduced deaths from it.
A study done in Canada for twenty-five years with 89,835 women between 40 and 59 years of age has revealed that annual mammograms do not reduce the mortality of those who suffer from breast cancer . And according to the biochemist and health journalist Jörg Blech, in Germany “100,000 percutaneous breast biopsies are performed each year, which are later found to be superfluous.”
It is necessary to prove with more certainty that early diagnostic mechanisms save lives, especially if these same tests carry risks for the health of the patient, as happens for example with exposure to X-rays. One last piece of information: in Germany, a follow-up From a decade to a thousand women between fifty and sixty years old, it has revealed that mortality among those who underwent mammographic examinations decreased only 0.2% compared to those who did not undergo this procedure.
Myth 4: Antioxidants are good, and free radicals are bad.
In 2014, the media reported an investigation that claimed that organic vegetables were healthier than those obtained by conventional methods , given that they contained 60% more antioxidants, substances that neutralize free radicals; The latter are highly reactive molecules that appear in our body as a by-product of metabolism and cause cellular damage: they have had a bad reputation since the 1950s, when the American gerontologist and chemist Denham Harman linked them to aging.
The idea spread like wildfire, even though Harman himself was unable to make a diet high in antioxidants increase the life expectancy of the mice in his experiments. In fact, in the 90s the consumption of vitamin C and ß-carotene, antioxidants present in fruits and vegetables, skyrocketed.
But research is eroding this belief. In 2008, a team of English and Belgian scientists published work showing that mice genetically modified to produce higher amounts of free radicals lived the same life as normal mice. The following year, researchers at the University of Texas proved that rodents modified to generate more antioxidants were not longer-lived than normal ones . The editors and reviewers of scientific journals were so imbued with the myth of the evil of free radicals that the authors had a hard time finding one to publish their findings.
And there is more: in 2014, a study led by Volkan I. Sayin, from the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), found that antioxidants accelerate the development of lung cancer in mice . Are there tests with humans? Few and contradictory. One of the most recent, conducted by Danish researchers, has concluded that “ß-carotene, vitamin E and high doses of vitamin A – all of them antioxidants – could be associated with higher mortality.”
In the face of such ambiguous results, how can the legend of antioxidants continue to exist? Much of the blame is on the vitamin supplement market: in 2013, the antioxidant business generated a billion dollars in the United States, which is expected to be 3,100 in 2020. The myth is perpetuated because many people are making money from it .
