Author: Noah Berman / Source: did you know?
We all hear stuff when we’re young that just stays in our brain – we’re built so that’ll happen. But even though this is handy for remembering when we should use our indoor voices, it also means that some of the things we pick up are bound to be wrong.
Or maybe a lot of the things we pick up.
Myth 1: Knuckle Cracking Causes Arthritis.
I crack my knuckles constantly – it’s probably one of the most annoying things about me. And for years my mother told me that if I kept it up, I would give myself arthritis.
Before we can really talk about why this is wrong, it’s important to talk a bit about what arthritis is. Arthritis is actually not very well defined – the word itself is just a catchall term for syndromes that cause joint swelling and pain, which can be chronic or not, or severe or not. There are dozens of different types of arthritis, some of which are extremely mild, and some of which are debilitating. Some arthritides can affect your internal organs in various ways, and some, like lupus (technically a type of arthritis – again, it’s a very broad term), can even be deadly.
When you crack you knuckles (or any of your joints), bubbles of nitrogen gas are being pulled into existence in the synovial fluid (the fluid that lubricates your joints) by the negative pressure you place on your knuckles by doing, well, whatever it is you do to crack them. These bubbles collapse quickly back into the fluid, which makes a noise.
If you don’t feel any pain when you crack your knuckles, then what you are doing is, medically speaking, harmless.
If you do feel pain, then that is a sign that you may have an underlying issue, and the knuckle cracking could be affecting it in some way.Even though knuckle cracking doesn’t raise your risk for arthritis, there are a few, minor drawbacks that reviews of the knuckle cracking literature have discovered. 1) People who crack their knuckles are more like to have weak grips, and 2) they are more likely to have swollen hands.
If that doesn’t bother you, crack away!
Myth 2: We use only 10% of our brain.
You may remember the 2014 film Lucy, which revolved around this exact concept.
You may also have seen some of the scientific rebuttals of the film’s premise. It is not exactly clear where the myth arose from, though…
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