-When i was a child, i thought researchers were actually fighting each other when I heard “researchers are fighting to find a cure for this disease.”
-When I was little, I thought that high-voltage lines were there to allow little men to travel in cable cars.
-I thought an autopilot actually worked like in the movie “Airplane”, that it was really an inflatable dummy.
My belief in question isn’t that dumb, but it’s cute, so here it is:
I used to believe that, inside our blood, there were literal dragonlets* swallowing every invader. Virus? Bacteria? The dragonlets chomp it! They’re really small so you can’t see them; but they have stubby legs and wings, a round and white body, and big mouths full of teeth.
This belief survived well into school times, when I eventually learned about macrophages.
Some time ago (I’m almost 40 now), I was drinking some beer with my mum, and we were commenting on my nephew getting a cold. And I mentioned something like “let’s hope that the dragonlets do their job”. She gave me a hearty laugh, told me that she was surprised that I still remembered it. Apparently the “dragonlets” were the way that she found to teach me how the body fights against infections, when I was three or so.
*the word is actually Portuguese “dragãozinho”. I could translate it as “little dragons”, but “dragonlets” sounds cuter.