As much as we would like to think of medicine as a concrete set of scientific laws, the truth is that medical science is always evolving. There’s a lot that we don’t know about the human body and mind. It’s this uncertainty and the quest for knowledge that spur us to create new theories for things we don’t yet understand. The theories here seem so strange that they must be false - but remember that when renegade chemist Louis Pasteur first described his germ theory in 1860, he was widely thought to be a crackpot…and look at how that turned out.

bizarre medical theories smart people glasses hawking

1. People with glasses are smarter. Well, specifically, near-sighted people. In the late 1980s, several studies were conducted that made a tentative correlation between myopia (near-sightedness) and intelligence. The relationship may be due either to a single genetic factor that influences the size of both the brain and they eye, or to the amount of “near-work” (namely, reading) done early in life.
Read the rest of this entry »