It’s always possible that your doctor will notice something terrible before you do, but most diseases can’t be detected by your doctor until symptoms start showing up. Plus, there’s the danger of false positives: The human body is actually full of things that look like tumors on a scan result, but if none of them are growing tentacles and slithering around your arteries, investigating every one of them just leads to unnecessary scalpel-stabbing. And just in general, you don’t want to be at the hospital if you don’t absolutely have to be: Anywhere from forty-four thousand to ninety-eight thousand Americans die each year because of something they caught in the hospital, which is more than either motor vehicle crashes or breast cancer.
Safety Equipment: We Have Nothing to Fear but Not Fearing for Our Lives
THE MYTH: Safety equipment makes you, y’know . . . safer.
THE TRUTH: Safety equipment turns you into a reckless maniac.
It’s something called the Peltzman effect: “the hypothesized tendency of people to react to a safety regulation by increasing other risky behavior, offsetting some or all of the benefit of the regulation.”
It’s not just a wild theory: The Highway Loss Data Institute bore it out in its ten-year antilock brakes study. Its research showed that a person in an ABS vehicle actually has a 45 percent greater chance of dying in a single-vehicle crash than someone without ABS. Science’s explanation? Unskilled drivers drive more aggressively thanks to their false sense of security.
The same thing happened in 2006, when a researcher in Bath, England, posted the results of a study showing that people in cars are more likely to hit bicyclists wearing safety equipment such as helmets. Motorists drove an average of 3.35 inches closer to the test bike when the rider was protected. The sight of safety gear apparently turns off the brains of nearby drivers. Either that, or the test subject looked really, terribly, murderously dorky in his helmet.
FIGURE 8.12 Still a bad idea, even in a Volvo.
The Weirdly Arbitrary Decision to Kill Yourself
THE MYTH: Whether to kill yourself is the most important decision you make in life, other than who to marry and what your high school yearbook quote is. Suicide is a big deal, and most of us assume that people who kill themselves recognize this fact.
THE TRUTH: Statistics show that most suicides are caused by a temporary fart of the soul that would have passed if the victims had just given their brain a night or two to air out.
The British coal-gas story is famous among suicide experts, whose children tend not to invite them to career day. For the first half of the twentieth century, the preferred method of suicide in Britain was to stick one’s head in the oven, where the coal gas delivered a swift, fatal dose of CO2. When the British government transitioned to a more efficient fuel that, as a happy coincidence, couldn’t kill you, the suicide rate for the entire country dropped by a third, and it has stayed there ever since.
A similar thing happened in the state of Washington, where jumping suicides were cut in half by raising the guardrails on one bridge. At the Golden Gate Bridge—the world’s most popular suicide destination—515 people were grabbed by cops in mid-suicide attempt between the years of 1937 and 1971. A researcher in the late ’70s tracked these troubled souls down and found that only 6 percent had gone on to actually kill themselves. In other words, 94 percent of a random sampling of suicidal people only needed to be saved from themselves in that specific moment.
This isn’t to deny that there are people in the world who have profoundly difficult problems. It just indicates that many of the ones who try to kill themselves only want to do it for a brief window of time. So if you’re thinking of doing something drastic, it’s probably a temporary trick of the mind. Sleep on it. It’s amazing what a night of sleep can do for you. In fact, sleep is so amazing that science can’t even explain what it is, or why or how you do it. The world is crazy like that. It’s terrifying and weird and bewildering sometimes, but rest assured, it is those things to everyone, even the people who pretend they’re “over it.” It is also a magnificent, whirling ball of colors that haven’t been invented yet, and emotions that can’t be explained, and forests that vibrate with mystery, full of animals that are miracles of efficiency and murder and sex and survival, and you get to be one of them.
Image Credits
CHAPTER 1: HEALTH AND ANATOMY
Here Shutterstock
Here Kitty Brown
Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here Steve Stankiewicz
CHAPTER 2: BIOLOGY
Here Adam Moore, Randall Maynard, iStockphoto
Here, here, here Barbara Gibson
Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Francisco Perez
Here, here Steve Stankiewicz
Here Randall Maynard, Shutterstock
CHAPTER 3: WORLD HISTORY
Here Randall Maynard, Shutterstock, public domain
Here, here Randall Maynard, public domain
Here Monique Wolf, Shutterstock
Here public domain
Here, here, here, here, here Barbara Gibson
Here Sean O’Neill
Here, here Dan Campagna
Here Jacques-Louis David, public domain
Here Kitty Brown, unknown artist, public domain
Here, here, here public domain
Here, here, here Glenn Phenecie, public domain
Here, here, here, here Heinrich Hoffman, public domain
Here unknown artist, public domain
Here unknown artist, public domain
Here source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FardierdeCugnot20050111.jpg
Here Randall Maynard
Here Glenn Phenecie
Here Titian, public domain
Here, here, here, here, here, here, here public domain
Here iStockphoto
Here, here Flavio Bolla
CHAPTER 4: SEX EDUCATION
Here, here Brendan McGinley, Glenn Phenecie, Shutterstock
Here Getty Images
CHAPTER 5: PHYSICS
Here Francisco Perez
Here Getty Images
Here, here, here Steve Stankiewicz
Here Glenn Phenecie, public domain photo
Here, here, here public domain
Here, here, here Randall Maynard, Steve Stankiewicz
Here, here Glenn Phenecie, Shutterstock
CHAPTER 6: U.S. HISTORY
Here, here, here, here, here, here, here Barbara Gibson
Here, here Glenn Phenecie, Shutterstock, public domain
Here, here Glenn Phenecie
Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here public domain
Here Glenn Phenecie, Shutterstock
Here, here, here, here Dan Campagna
Here, here Steve Stankiewicz
Here Charles Willson Peale, public domain
Here Randall Maynard, Shutterstock
Here, here Randall Maynard, public domain
Here, here MGM
Here Getty Images
CHAPTER 7: NUTRITION
Here Kitty Brown
Here Glenn Phenecie
Here, here, here Steve Stankiewicz
Here Monique Wolf
CHAPTER 8: PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Here, here, here Glenn Phenecie
Here, here Randall Maynard, Shutterstock
Here, here Steve Stankiewicz
Here, here Glenn Phenecie, Shutterstock
Here Shutterstock
Here Corbis
Here, here Getty Images
1 Author’s Note: This is nothing at all like making love.
Table of Contents
The Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION: A Brief Recap of Your Squandered Education
; CHAPTER 1: HEALTH AND ANATOMY
1: Welcome to Your Body! Here’s Some Bullshit We Made Up About It
CHAPTER 2: BIOLOGY
2.A: Jurassic Myth
2.B: The Animal Conspiracy
CHAPTER 3: WORLD HISTORY
3.A: The Greatest Story Ever Withheld
3.B: Miscast Stars of World History
3.C: History Doesn’t March Forward
3.D: History Had Sex
3.E: Fictional Scenes from History
CHAPTER 4: SEX EDUCATION
4: Sex and Relationship Advice
CHAPTER 5: PHYSICS
5.A: Science Is Bluffing
5.B: The Laws of Physics
5.C: Miscast Stars of Physics
5.D: Practical Physics
CHAPTER 6: U.S. HISTORY
6.A: America’s Origin Story
6.B: Miscast Stars of U.S. History
6.C: American Wars
6.D: Fictional Scenes from U.S. History
CHAPTER 7: HEALTH AND NUTRITION
7.A: Everything You Know About Food
CHAPTER 8: PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
8.A: Your Brain’s Misleading User’s Manual
8.B: Lies Your Brain Naturally Tells You
8.C: Highly Implausible Causes of Death
8.D: What Should Scare You Instead
Credits