The Earth is round (and ancient), vaccines don’t cause autism, and antibiotics are useless against viruses—though it’s no challenge to find people who will categorically tell you otherwise. I know this because I research the curious confidence around obvious, easily debunked untruths. But I was recently disquieted to discover my own filters are more poppycock-permeable than I’d assumed, in at least one area—and who can say how many more?
I used to spend my summers weed-whacking for a landscaping company. Some hills are too steep for machines, so they send humans with handheld machines to chop down the tall, thick grass that grows all too happily on almost any grade. Each year, the first few days of the task left my hands feeling like a thousand ants were scurrying all over them, just below the skin (the medical term, fittingly but hilariously, is “formication”). The sensation, I always thought, was owed to my circulation system adjusting to the constant vibration—but that’s not necessarily the case.
Pins and needles aren’t the exclusive domain of circulatory issues; they may also be nervous ones. Here I’d been assertively blaming poor circulation for my frequent unpleasant experience with the sensation for years—never once bothering to check the erroneous (as it turns out) belief. “Never assume,” my parents were fond of intoning with well-worn grins to accompany the well-worn phrase, “that makes an ass of u and me.” This assumption, though, seemed so unassuming that it sat undetected in my mind for as long as I can remember; I never even thought it an assumption (I perceived it as more akin to Gospel Truth) until it was punctured a couple of months ago.
Whence came such abject allegiance to a lie? Why did I assume that circulation was the only culprit? I was (I think—less confidently now) relying too heavily on intuition to inform my ideas. Ski boots squeezed the feeling out of my legs; the eventual uncinching of the hideous things invited a rush of prickly pain—I imagined the blood flowing back into the clumsy frigid limbs, carrying the sensation with it. But it may have been my nerves, apparently, that were pinched, and their prickly protests have long been a hallmark of ski trips, study sessions, twelve-hour shifts with a furiously vibrating weed whacker, and something as simple as sleeping gone awry.
Intuitions are ubiquitous, occasionally useful, but also at times dead wrong (and dangerous, for that). I’m advised to rely on them in my philosophy class and fend them off in my research classes. They seem so beguilingly logical when my head is spinning (or so my intuition tells me) through the muddle of philosophical proposals and so dangerous when research beckons and the scientific method is the only admissible route to knowledge.
What else have I intuited incorrectly? Well, the pronunciation of a plethora of words, for one thing (the book devourer’s dilemma). Those, however, are easily and swiftly put to rest. What of the unquestioned assumptions that lurk unconsidered in the dustiest recesses of my mind? I’d best step with caution even there, I (tentatively) surmise.
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
