The Little Plastic Castle: Goldfish and Memory

“They say goldfish have no memory

I guess their lives are much like mine.

And the little plastic castle

Is a surprise every time.

And it’s hard to say if they’re happy,

But they don’t seem much to mind.”

~Little Plastic Castle, Ani Difranco

I was listening to this song this evening, it’s one of my all-time favorites. The album came out in 1998, I remember going to the store and buying it on the release date when I was 13. I guess, even outside of the context of the song, I believed the common saying that ‘goldfish have no memory’ or ‘goldfish have a 3-second memory.’

But if you’re reading this, you are reading ‘Uncommon Knowledge: Sometimes the things you know just ain’t so.’ So you know I’m about to say that Ani, as well as many of you out there, are wrong.

One of my favorite shows for both entertainment and content value is Mythbusters. Airing Feb. 22 2004 on the Discovery Channel, Adam and Jamie tackled this myth head-on through a lab test. They bought goldfish. Each man used a different method to train them to go through a basic maze (both used a food reward). It worked. But Adam and Jamie weren’t the only ones to put the myth to the test.

ABC Net Australia reported in 2009 a similar experiment done by 15-year-old Rory Stokes. His hypothesis was simple: that animals couldn’t really evolve without having a memory, because animals depend on it for survival. His first trial was to acclimate the fish to being fed near a red Lego. He removed the Lego for a week, and noticed upon replacing it that the fish remembered that it meant food. The article also sites research Culum Brown from Sydney’s Macquaire University, who has also done a study of his own. Brown tried to teach fish how to escape a net. The net had a small, but feasible, escape route and the fish were able to learn to escape within five trials.

The Telegraph UK wrote about goldfish memory in 2006. The article reports that according to a study done out of the Queen’s University of Belfast found that goldfish could remember pain for at least a day. The study showed that ‘pain avoidance in fish does not seem to be a reflex response, rather one that is learned, remembered and is change according to different circumstances,” the article states.

A quick Google search reveals a myriad of science fair project websites that suggest testing a goldfish’s memory as a project, as well as numerous reports refuting the popular saying. So perhaps songwriters should do a little research when it comes to their metaphors, and try the truth on for size.

　

　

Sources:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0768499/

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/19/2166204.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1509199/Painful-memories-for-goldfish.html

　

Hemispheres and Toilet Drains

One of my favorite things to read about is so-called "mythinformation." That is, commonly held beliefs that are actually false. It is the subject of this blog, after all. While I thoroughly enjoy reading new pieces of information that fit into this category, I get an even greater joy out of discovering something that I myself have long believed that is actually not true. Today's topic covers one such instance.

How many of you reading this have heard of the Coriolis force, or Coriolis effect?* It's okay if you haven't. Up until a relatively short time ago I hadn't either. Though you may not recognize the scientific sounding names, you'll probably be familiar with the effect they are said to create.

First, a definition. The Coriolis force, according to the Oxford American Dictionary, is "an effect whereby a mass moving in a rotating system experiences a force (the Coriolis force) acting perpendicular to the direction of motion and to the axis of rotation." It continues, "On the earth, the effect tends to deflect moving objects to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern…"

While this force is important in the formation of cyclonic weather systems, it is also pointed to as the cause for toilet and sink drains in the Southern Hemisphere draining clockwise, while drains in the Northern Hemisphere spiral counter-clockwise.

The problem? That is simply not true! It's a classic case of mythinformation. The truth is the Coriolis effect has nothing to do with how sinks and toilets drain because the direction water spirals down in sinks and toilets is determined not by gravitational pulls, what Hemisphere you happen to live on, or anything of the sort. Instead, it is determined by plain old ordinary structural conditions.

In their textbook, "The Atmosphere: An Introduction to Meteorology," authors Lutgens, Tarbuck, and Tasa (2006) write, "…a cyclone is more than 1000 kilometers in diameter and may exist for several days. By contrast, a typical sink is less than a meter in diameter and drains in a matter of seconds. On this scale, the Coriolis effect is miniscule." It's the shape and how level your sink, toilet, etc. is that causes the direction of the water drainage, not your position on the globe!**

I thought about this myself and concluded that, if this is true, the sinks and toilets in my house might just drain differently from one another. And, if they did, the idea of water drainage being affected by the Coriolis force would be, well, flushed right down the drain.

So, that's exactly what I did and, wouldn't you know it, that is precisely what happened. I filled two sinks and flushed two toilets. While the toilets each flushed in a counter-clockwise spiral, the sinks did the exact opposite; draining in a clockwise manner. How foolish of me that, for years, I believed in the effect of the Hemispheres on our drains while concrete evidence to the contrary was there in front of me all along. But, at the same time, how satisfying to know the truth!

It is the moment of enlightenment that I had myself regarding this issue that I hope to bring to you with some of the posts on this blog from time to time. A simple instance of time where you stop and realize, "Everything I thought I knew was wrong…and it's awesome!" If you're anything like me you'll sit quietly for a moment, smile, and think, "Science sure is amazing."

And guess what? You'd be right.


REFERENCES:

http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect

Christopher Columbus and the Round Earth

When I've asked people who it was the figured out the Earth is round, I've gotten a few different answers. Some have said Galileo. Others, still, think it was Magellan. But the answer I get most frequently; indeed, the one that seems to be the most commonly held belief, is that it was another explorer; perhaps the most famous of them all: Christopher Columbus.*

Doing a quick Google search, the reasons for this answer seem to fall along a pretty straightforward path: Columbus proved the Earth was round when he didn't fall off of it during his journey to the New World.* But the truth is that Columbus knew the world was round because it had been pretty common knowledge for well over a thousand years by that point.

In fact, many men who lived long before Columbus had used various ways to prove the Earth was round. Famed philosophers and mathematicians, like Pythagoras and Aristotle, for instance, had made observations to this effect years before even Christ is said to have been born; in some cases many hundreds of years beforehand!*

The interesting thing is where exactly this myth came from: a work by one of our most famous American storytellers, Washington Irving! Irving, of course, is noteworthy for having written such classics of literature as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." But it was his biographical account of Columbus, "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus," published in 1828, that the myth seems to have first appeared. Before this time, writes Jeffrey Burton Russell, historian and religious studies scholar, no one believed that medieval people thought the Earth was flat.*

In "The Myth of the Flat Earth," a paper which summarizes his book, "Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians," Russell writes that "This vast web of falsehood was invented and (then) propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day."

Surely, a true testament of the power of the media to not only entertain, but also to deceive.


REFERENCES:

http://www.yesnet.yk.ca/schools/projects/renaissance/columbus.html

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060815201048AAsSEbs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/history/1997Russell.html

The King of the Jungle

Quick! Which animal is considered to be "King of the Jungle"?

If you answered "Lion," of course you are right.* But this piece of common knowledge is wrong, and do you know why? Because lions don't actually live in the jungle!

In the wild, lions actually live on the Savannah, in the sub-Saharan region of Africa and in Asia.* Definitely not the jungle.

Where this myth got started I am not sure, but if you believed it, don't feel too bad. There are plenty of other people who believe it too.* But the good news is, now you know the truth…and you get to laugh in their faces!


REFERENCES:

http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/prani/predators/lions.htm

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_the_lion_called_king_of_the_jungle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion

http://www.kenya-travel-packages.com/african-lion.html