Common "Knowledge"

I am always a little bit disturbed when I find out that a piece of common knowledge is actually false. Everyone knows that it's good to drink six cups of water a day and that Neil Armstrong said "One small step for a man, one giant leap for man kind," even though neither is true, and it's upsetting to have your strongly held beliefs shaken, no matter how trivial they may be.

We've all heard about the study where scientists poked electrodes into the pleasure centers of rats' brains so that they would be pleasantly stimulated every time they pulled a lever. We also "know" that the rats pulled the lever at the expense of every other activity until they eventually starved to death.

Not so. It turns out that the scientists, while they did conclude that the rats would have starved themselves to death, did not actually let the rats die. In a rare instance of psychologists not being as creepy to animals as they could be, they removed the electrodes before the rats starved to death. It's actually kind of sweet. But the important thing is that now you know, and your set of beliefs is a little bit closer to the truth.