Everyone reading this has got a clapper . Everyone reading this has , credibly , also heard the old proverb about how different parts of the tongue try out different things . For decades , this misconception stayed alive . It was still being learn when I was in grade school . My inquiry is ; why ?
We sometimes express mirth at the obviously wrong so - called facts of yesteryear , particularly if they can be easily see . How could hoi polloi believe that , for good example , the womb cuckold around the physical structure of a woman ? That ’s mad . But we have our own advanced myth , ones that can be well tally and debunk , but for the most part are n’t . The major one is the tongue mapping . Almost everyone study this had at least one teacher who pulled out a diagram of a tongue and show to different areas , talking about how this one taste sugariness and that one rancour .
This diagram , and enduring myth , start in 1901 , in Germany , were D.P. Hanig wrote a conservative little newspaper publisher that mentioned that different areas of the tongue seemed slimly more sensitive to different taste perception . In 1942 , Edwin Boring , of Harvard , picked Hanig ’s idea and lean with them in his rule book , Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology . Some say Boring mistranslate Hanig ’s schoolbook . Others say he just stressed it . However it happened , over sentence , different sensitiveness became total ability . It was n’t until the seventies when Virginia Collings , a physiological investigator , repeated the test and detect that the sensitiveness were there but made little - to - no practical difference . Even then , the myth keep chugging along for decades in actual biology program .
I have to wonder ; why . We all have tongues , do n’t we ? We ’ve all tasted thing . What teacher were telling us conflict straight with all our experience . It had to have conflict with their own experience . Why did it keep getting recite ? I reckon , in part , because the truth was deserving a lot less than the tale . No one particularly suffered because of the myth . It did n’t be anyone anything . On the other hand , it was great modest talk of the town , or at least a good way to get kids to yield attending for about another five minutes , until the bell rang . And it ’s the story , not the the true , that I remember is the rationality it got so thoroughly expose on the internet . Once the understructure was laid , and nearly everyone on Earth had “ get wind about that somewhere , ” it suddenly became worth contradicting . It ’s interesting that debunkery , including this article , is more a victory of one good tarradiddle over another , instead of a net breakthrough of true statement . make you wonder what other myth people could start .
Top paradigm : Flickr
ViaThird AgeandJSTOR .
BiologyMythsScience
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