I’m a big fan of random facts. Trivia is my jam.

And I don’t think I’m alone. Useless as they often are, we absorb facts like sponges to water.

Bats are blind.
Napoleon was short.
Goldfish have short memories.
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.
Touching baby birds causes their mother to abandon them due to the introduction of foreign scents.

These are generally considered common knowledge. There are dozens of examples like this. Most of them are utterly useless to know, but some actually influence our day-to-day lives, such as the “I before E except after C” rule for written English.

Weirdly, neither the words protein nor height follow this rule. Not very scientific if you ask me.

It’s because all of the beliefs I listed are nonsense. They’re misconceptions, complete and utter bullshit. Still, we pass them on as fact.

We’re exposed to an incredible volume of incoming information and are only capable of analyzing so much. Unless it sounds strange enough to make us question it, we default to believing it to be true. This causes us to absorb a surprising amount of data without filtering.

And while it’s not necessarily a bad thing — it’s unavoidable by nature — it’s worth acknowledging.

There’s power in understanding the faults of our minds. However, there is a fine line between a healthy dose of skepticism and outright paranoia.

Attempting to question everything will drive you mad.

On that note, Humpty Dumpty isn’t an egg.

But that doesn’t matter.