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Unlike UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, which are all totally real things that exist, there are still a lot of myths and urban legends that people believe that are complete fabrications.
We know this because recently someone on Reddit asked the question: “What’s the dumbest myth people today believe?”
The post got almost 36,000 upvotes and generated an astounding 27,300 comments.
Interestingly, out of the top 10 myths people listed, I’m still not 100 percent sure that all of them are false. (Not that I will be telling you which ones. I don’t need that smoke.)
10. “That humans only use 10% of their brain. This is false, regardless of how those who proclaim this myth seemingly demonstrate that it is in fact true.”
“This is like saying we only use 33% of a traffic signal,” someone replied, to which another responded, “To be fair, a lot of people only use 10% of their brain at a traffic signal.”
9. “Had to explain to a grown a** adult that blood isn’t blue inside the body and red once it hits oxygen because… blood already carries oxygen.”
“Red blood is iron based. Blue blood is copper based,” someone replied. “Off hand, the only organism I can think of with blue blood is a horseshoe crab.”
“Octopus blood is blue too,” another reader added.
8. “It is believed in Indian culture that keeping your unibrow means ‘good luck.’ I kept my unibrow for 20 years thinking it is my ‘good luck’ until I got stage 5th of kidney failure and I did my eyebrows after that because who gives a f*** about luck anymore. Now my eyebrows look cute af.”
“The Greeks thought having a big forehead meant you had a big mind,” someone added.
7. “Anything about MSG. I battle with my health conscious wife about this often.”
“Almost nobody has any real reaction to it and most the ones who say they do just think they do,” read one reply. “It naturally occurs in all kinds of foods most people eat regularly.”
6. “That you eat spiders in your sleep. [A] spider will not knowingly walk into a predator’s mouth. They can sense both the heartbeat, heat and noise from humans. All things that would alert them not to go into our mouth.”
5. “Still blows my mind that people think the Earth is flat.”
“If the earth was flat, cats would have pushed everything off by now,” someone astutely observed.
4. “Halloween candy is commonly laced with drugs or razor blades.”
“No one – and I mean NO ONE – is giving their drugs to your 8 year old for free,” one person commented, probably accurately.
3. “Many people still believe hymens are like plastic food seals that cover up the hole and get popped when you have sex for the first time, and if a girl doesn’t bleed she’s not a virgin.”
2. “I remember the myth that gum takes 7 YEARS to fully pass through your digestive system.”
“I think that was just a mom tactic to keep you from constantly swallowing your gum,” someone replied, again, probably accurately.
And with over 27,000 upvotes… 1. “There are dumber ones out there, but the one I, as an estate lawyer, deal with constantly is the idea that there needs to be a “reading” of the will, where the family all gather and the lawyer reads it aloud to them for the first time. We don’t do that, we just mail everyone their own copy if they want it.
“It’s a really stubbornly persistent one because people continue to see scenes of it in movies and TV shows, where it’s used for some big dramatic reveal. I’ve even had irate beneficiaries insist that the administration of the estate can’t be “official” until there’s a reading.
“Way, way back, like 150 years ago or so, I believe we used to do something like that at times because you couldn’t exactly presume literacy on the part of the beneficiaries, but now we feel it’s a pretty safe bet that you can either read it or find someone who can.”
Check out the rest of the bizarre myths people still believe over on Reddit.