Re-evaluating the "Facts"

When I was in the eighth grade, my science class went to visit the Coco-Cola factory in Arizona. Looking back, I cannot figure out what we must have been studying that would have warranted such a trip, and to this day, I only remember two things from it. One was that the actual reason they put caffeine in soda pop was so that people would get addicted and buy more. I remember thinking it strange that they would admit such a thing, and it felt almost criminal that the manager stated it so matter-of-factly, with no hint of remorse. The other thing I remember from the trip was the tour guide telling us that Coco-Cola used to be green.

Nearly eight years later, neither of these facts has impacted my life in any way. I do not drink caffeine, due to the headaches it causes, and while mildly revolting, the fact that Coco-Cola used to be green has never affected my view of soda pop, tour guides, or the color in general. And yet, the fact remains, a seemingly permanent resident in a brain that is completely unaffected by its presence. And it is not alone. Over the years, I have amassed a large fortune of completely useless information. I do not wish to get into the controversy of the age-old whine, “When will I ever use this?” that becomes the soundtrack of high school. I will therefore avoid organized education and stick to the facts that I have collected from remembered and unremembered wanderings through the texts and conversations of everyday life.

There is, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a tremendous concourse of statues, a few of which depict men on horseback, frozen forever in the moment of battle. The statues have plaques down near the earth, most of them rendering a single name. I recognized a couple as I wandered through the battlegrounds several years ago, but most were unknown and as common as the men who once answered to them. There, wandering through the statues, I was introduced to a fact about the construction of the statues. Apparently, they were not frozen in the moment of battle, but in the manner of death. The horses with two front legs rearing in the air carried a soldier who died in the Battle of Gettysburg. The horses with one leg in the air held men who were wounded in battle, and later died from those wounds. If all four legs were on the ground, the rider had made it through the fight unharmed.

I thought this fact intriguing, and at the time, filed it away for some unknown future use. Writing this essay, four years later, is the first time I have ever recalled or used it. For some pieces of information, this is the way it is. I am sure I have things stored in my head that I don’t even realize are there until they are recalled by a sudden connection or a card drawn in a game of “Outburst.” Other thoughts swim through my consciousness, making laps that bring them again and again to my thoughts.

One of these is the “Death of the Leftie fact,” as I call it. I remember my astonishment and delight when I first heard that right-handed people lived an average of nine years longer than left-handed people. (And the delight had nothing to do with me being right-handed because, in fact, I am not. My own hand orientation is ambiguous, and often referred to as “ambidextrous.”) This is one of those facts that does not hide in hibernation, but surfaces quite frequently, usually when I meet a left-handed individual and proceed to evaluate their seemingly normal physical health. I long wondered why these people were fated for an early death. Was it some brain defect that caused the left-handedness in the first place? Was the trait a result of a long-buried genetic flaw? The only explanation that really made sense to me was that the world was made for right-handed people, including equipment, appliances, and services, and perhaps there were a large number of accident-related deaths from lefties trying to use technologies that were simply not made for them.

Eventually, I needed to set the question to rest, and so I did what any 21st century college student would do—I Googled it. There, bold and strong and affirming my brilliance at coming to the correct conclusion were the words, “2,500 left-handers die each year using products designed for right-handers.” Another website reported that a large majority of left-handers try to switch hand preference at some point in their lives. I can only imagine the awkwardness of this, which might make something as seemingly harmless as a pair of scissors into a sudden tool of bodily harm.

Unfortunately, not all of my bits of trivia are so easily proven, and, indeed, sometimes I find that science presumptuously insists on un-proving them. One of my long-time favorite facts is: “The average person swallows seven spiders in their sleep over their lifetime.”

At least, that is what I learned, years ago. However, today, as I was browsing collections of pointless information online, I ran across it again. Only this time, it said that the average person swallows eight spiders. Was the change in statistics due to an increase in the spider population? Do more people today have allergies, and thus are forced to sleep with their mouths open? I suppose there are countless possibilities for why the fact reads differently today, and yet, something tells me that it is simply due to the unreliability of statistics, and that if I wasted a few more moments of my life surfing the Web, I could find the same statistic claiming that the number was 19, 4, or 57. In addition, (being fair to science), I am also aware that anthropoids flee from breath, recognizing it as a threat, therefore making it awfully unlikely that such a large number of them actually meet their demise in this fashion. Why, then, is it so easy to believe those delicious bits of information we are fed from unreliable sources, sifted through eighty-nine different mouths and ears before being passed on to ours?

I would guess that it has something to do with humans’ delight at the uncanny and unexpected. The thought of swallowing spiders in one’s sleep is almost as delectable as reading in a science journal that people’s hair continues to grow for a couple of months after death. And something as obviously fiction as Monster from the Black Lagoon would never be able to compare with a movie about people’s stomachs digesting themselves in mass numbers when biological warfare creates a drug that prevents the stomach from producing that needed layer of mucus every two weeks. (In the unlikely event that such a movie were ever created.) Thus, the saying: “Fact is stranger than fiction.”

And yet, as with the spider statistic, sometimes fact and fiction have an ambiguous relationship. I remember hearing in some motivational talk once, that children laugh approximately 400 times a day, while adults only laugh about 15. I think the point of the talk was to encourage us all to look at the positive in life and laugh a little more. But if I laughed 400 times a day, I would be laughing every 3.6 minutes. After a few days of being purely obnoxious, I fear that, rather than appreciating my happy outlook on life, people would begin to doubt my sanity, and my happy, positive life might be lived from inside four padded walls. And while it seems that children are indeed generally happier than adults, most kids I know give equal, if not greater, attention to various explosions of crying, yelling, and whining, as they do to laughing.

And yet, despite the inconsistencies, the exaggerations, and the straight-out falsehoods that mingle with the random facts in my brain, I find that since most of them serve the purpose only of my own enjoyment, sometimes in the moment of learning, sometimes later as they pop up unexpectedly, I do not usually mind a little fiction mixed with the fact. After all, fiction can only be drawn from fact in the first place, since it is all that we know, and the best and most interesting “facts” of all, those that make me smile at the quirks and complexities of life, often walk the fuzzy line between two kinds of truth—fact and imagination.