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Myths Adults Believe

A reaction to the Sandra’s five senses[a].

[a]

As mentioned in the post, we don’t have five senses. We can sense gravity, so we know when we are upside down, so that’s six. We can sense heat, and cold (two different senses, which can be activated both at once), and we can sense when we’re hungry and thirsty.

Once I read about this old myth (I never figured it out myself), I started writing out lists of senses. I think I got to about twelve, but I’ve heard others have got to 18 distinct senses. It’s one of many myths I’ve believed in life, and every time I find one, I start wondering about how many others I’ve accepted.

I’ve informed my partner, and she said she had to poop. I asked her how she knew, and whether or not this is a new sense. The debate will have to wait.

If you only speak English, I can give you another common delusion now: words don’t sound like you think they do. Our garbled writing forces us to believe falsehoods, even while we know the writing isn’t accurate. Get any native English speaker (I’ve subjected a few to this experiment), and ask them to write down words as they sound, rather than how we normally write them. Allow them to make new symbols for new sounds. Nothing matters but accuracy.

Everyone fails, no exceptions. They can’t distinguish between the ‘au’ sound on ‘aunt’, and the ‘a’ sound in ‘ant’. They don’t notice the difference between the vowels in ‘floor’ and ‘caught’.

I continue looking sceptically at how I see things, and after noting a few of these delusions, a certain scepticism has remained with me. Maybe I’ll notice I don’t have two eyes tomorrow, or that Santa is in fact real.

It’s all rather confusing.