-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.
smoking gives you a moustache
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.
