I opened a pamphlet the other day labeled “Society For Scientific Inquiry of Cosmic Anomalies.” All that I could find on the inside was “Trust us, the next part is going to be amazing. We have no answers and you can no longer question.”

They, however, whoever they may be, are still entitled to tell you what to believe.

As few of us take the time to look into everything, we just believe what we have been told. We take some things for granted as they become common knowledge. Being a nonconformist and finding comfort with the uncomfortable, I thought I would question some of the truths that we have been educated into believing. My answers swirled into the cosmos and found that some of the truth was in fact untrue.

Because the 3 pounds of gray matter that we carry is such a mystery, we have been told that people only use about 10 percent of their brain. Several types of brain imaging studies show that there isn’t a part of the brain that is completely inactive.

Staying with the head, we all have been told that most of your body heat escapes through your head, so wear a hat when it’s cold. According to the British Medical Journal, you only lose about 7 to 10 percent of your body heat there. The rest you lose through any other exposed part of your body.

We have also been told growing up that going outside in the cold will cause a cold. Being in the cold with wet hair might make you feel uncomfortable, but it does not cause a cold; only viruses can do that.

Trying to stay warm, we also have learned to believe alcohol warms you up. It may feel good to have a sip of whisky on a cold day, but that burning sensation is just scorching your gullet. The fact is alcohol dilates blood vessels, causing blood to be pumped closer to the skin, leading to a drop in your core body heat.

It is also said that drinking coffee makes you dehydrated. Caffeinated drinks do have a slight diuretic effect, making you have to use the restroom, but researchers have found that there is no risk of dehydration in coffee drinkers.
Another misconception about coffee is that it will stunt your growth. This myth about the coffee bean is based on zero scientific support. Coffee beans are not even beans. They come from the pit inside the coffee fruit and are seeds.

If you like Twinkies with your coffee, you need to keep them fresh. There is no truth that if the apocalypse ever came, the only thing left in the store would be Twinkies. Any food that includes moisture will break down quickly, even when in their packaging. Just as it doesn’t take 10 years to digest gum if swallowed because it passes through your gastrointestinal tract like any other waste. Twinkies are not immortal.

I was tormented a bit by learning the untruth that we have all been told about Mount Everest being the world’s tallest mountain. At 29,035 feet from its base to its peak, Mount Everest is generally considered to be the world’s tallest mountain. This information depends on your definition of the highest. If you define highest as closest to the moon, the highest mountain is Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.

The Earth is not a round sphere, as it bulges in the middle. From base to peak, Chimborazo is 20,548 feet, but it also sits on a bump on a bigger part of the Earth’s bulge than Everest, meaning that it’s actually 35,826 feet from the center. If you define “highest” as the tallest mountain from base to peak, then the highest mountain is Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. This volcanic mountain measures over 32,808 feet from its base in the Pacific Ocean to its peak, which is almost a mile taller than Everest.

We cannot even believe in the colors of the rainbow that we have been falsely presented with. This falsehood goes back to Sir Isaac Newton and his superstitious beliefs. He believed in the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras. Pythagoras’ vision of a harmonious universe, was that the number 7 was a magical number that connected all kinds of natural phenomena.

Unlike his contemporaries, Newton believed that clear, white sunlight was made up of all the colors of the spectrum. He proved this in the 1660s in a series of experiments that refracted sunlight through a prism, breaking it into smaller wavelengths. However, Newton saw only five colors. When Newton published his original color wheel in 1704, he added orange and indigo to the colors he had already identified.

What we call “color” is perceived by our minds. The light spectrum contains a continuous distribution, therefore an infinite number of colors. The colors we see depend on how much each of the cone-shaped photoreceptors in our eyes, which see red, green and blue, is stimulated. So, the colors of the rainbow may be different for everyone.

After reading this, how can we believe we only have five senses, which are sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing? According to some neuroscientists, we are forgetting about 15 others. Some of the senses such as nociception, the ability to feel pain, chronoception, the ability to feel the passing of time and equilibrioception, the sense of balance, are not thought of.

There is also the of sense of achievement, a feeling that you have succeeded in doing something difficult to reinforce your sense of achievement. An achievement as in making it to the end of this week’s column.

Looking around at what has become of what is, I ponder slightly to make sense of what is. All that flows into thought, besides your sense of achievement, is what is seen cannot be ignored. Perhaps this planet we call Earth is nothing more than a reality show for some other more advanced planet. - dbA

You can find more of the unfiltered insight and the Art of Dan Abernathy at www.contributechaos.com.