Act Four. Small Thoughts In Big Brains.

Ira Glass

OK, so all this hour we've been talking about kid logic. And sometimes, the incorrect logic of childhood does not get corrected during childhood. It does not get corrected till much, much later, when childhood is long over. Alex Blumberg explains.

Alex Blumberg

I can reconstruct the events that led me to one of the most embarrassing conversations of my adult life. The chain starts back when I was 11 or 12, when I first heard the term Nielsen family. I was probably listening to some adults talk. And from their conversation I gathered that networks consulted Nielsen families to find out how popular a television show was.
But that didn't make sense. Why would they only ask people named Nielsen which shows they liked? I started thinking. I knew that when they figured things like this out, they didn't ask everybody. They just asked a small percentage of people and then extrapolated. I think I figured they'd done some research and found that the name Nielsen, because it was a common name maybe, and it seemed to cut across class and economic lines, actually came pretty close to a representative sample.

I knew this wasn't the way they measured public opinion now, but it seemed like the Nielsen surveys had been around for a while, and I figured they were just a holdover from a more primitive, less statistically rigorous time. After that, I really didn't think about it again. Or if I did, it was only with a mild curiosity. "I wonder why TV still does it that way?"

Fast forward 20 years. I was talking with a friend of mine, who was telling me about her friend, who had been selected to be a Nielsen family. And I said to her, "Isn't it weird that they're all named Nielsen?" My friend looked at me for what seemed like a long time. Somewhere during her very long pause, because of the very long pause, in fact, I realized, "Of course they're not all named Nielsen. That makes no sense at all."

At the time of this conversation, I was 34 years old, and I couldn't believe I'd gotten this far without ever stopping to think it through. It made me wonder what else I'd missed, and if this has ever happen to anyone besides me.

Jodi Mace

When I was a kid, and I would see the school crossing signs, and there's a picture of the little kids walking, and then it would say "School Xing" And I thought that the "Xing" was a word. And I pronounced it "zing."

Alex Blumberg

Turns out I'm not alone. I've been talking to people about this for weeks, and there's a lot of us out there, like me and this woman Jodi Mace, carting around our childhood beliefs well into adulthood. Jodi thought there were lots of xings, deer xings, railroad xings. It makes sense.

Jodi Mace

Well, I was in my 20s, and I was walking into work, and about 10 geese walked in front of me on the sidewalk. And so I just turned to my coworker and casually said, "It looks like they should have a xing sign there for the geese." There was a long, awkward silence. And I thought that he was thinking, "You know, that really is a good idea." But instead, he finally said, "You know, 'xing' isn't in a word."

Alex Blumberg

In talking to people, I found out that a lot of these lingering misconceptions involve mispronunciation. And often the mispronunciation survives into adulthood because the mistake just sounds better. It makes more sense.

Jodi Mace

You know, it should be a word. And it should be xing. You don't want a kid to walk slowly across the crossing. If he's smart, he's going to xing.

Alex Blumberg

Consider the word "misled." I talked to three people, including my own father, who used to pronounce it "my-zulled." All three believed it was the past tense of a nonexistent verb "misle," which means "to deceive" or "to mislead." There's another guy I spoke to who thought well in his early 20s that the word "quesadilla" was Spanish for "What's the deal?"
Most of the common childhood myths, like that babies come from storks, get corrected sooner or later. They're not obscure enough to sneak into adulthood unscrutinized. But occasionally even a very popular childhood myth can make it through, like unicorns.

Christy Kruger

In my head, a unicorn wasn't really any different than a zebra.

Alex Blumberg

This is Christy Kruger.

Christy Kruger

I mean, in terms of believability, I think the unicorn's really ahead of the dinosaur.

Alex Blumberg

What do you mean?

Christy Kruger

Well, I mean when you think about a dinosaur, like, from a kid's perspective, a dinosaur is one of these really large, monstrous animals roaming the earth. And then you have a unicorn, which is basically just a horse with a horn.

Alex Blumberg

As Christy Kruger grew up, she says that if she ever thought about unicorns, they were on a grassy plain, somewhere in Africa, drinking from a watering hole with the wildebeest and the impala. And then one night, she found herself in a conversation at a party.

Christy Kruger

It was about a group of five to seven people, standing around the keg, just talking. And somehow, a discussion of endangered species came up, in which I posed the question "Is the unicorn endangered or extinct?" And basically, there was a big gap of silence.

Alex Blumberg

As you might be gathering, at some point in all these stories, you come to a big gap of silence.

Christy Kruger

And then everybody laughed. And then that laughter was followed by more silence when they realized I wasn't laughing. And I was like, "Yeah. I-- oh god. Unicorns aren't real? Oh. Oh no!"

Alex Blumberg

Sometimes, a ridiculous belief will survive into adulthood, and it's our parents who are to blame. Robin didn't think there was anything strange about the way she was raised. She lived together with her sister and her parents in a nice house in the suburbs. She went to school like the other kids, watched TV and did her homework. And she ate the exact same thing for dinner every night of her life-- baked chicken.

Robin

It was like Monday, chicken, Tuesday, chicken, Wednesday, chicken, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, chicken. Chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken every night of my life until I left for college.

At the end of the first week of college, when everyone's desperately trying to fit in and it's important that you act cool, and sophisticated, and whatever, everyone begins complaining about the food that we're being served. What was the hard stuff in the sloppy Joe? What was that mystery meat? What animal did it come from?

And I'm looking at these people like they are crazy. The variety we were getting here, every night, every night there's a different meal. I mean, one night it's mac and cheese, one night it's mystery meat, one night it's sloppy Joe. One night it's-- I was like, how can you critic-- I mean, it's a testament to what great chefs they must be that they can make a different meal every single night of the week.

And they just kind of-- they kind of stared, and they're like "What?" And I'm like, "What what?" What's running through my head is, wait a minute. These people are implying that they had variation in their meal plan for their entire life. It's mind-bending. I mean, I don't care what I learned throughout college. This is the revelation that has stuck with me. This is what I've learned. All of a sudden, like holy god!

Alex Blumberg

When Robin came home for Thanksgiving that year, she confronted her mother with the startling fact that everyone else ate things besides chicken growing up. Her mother just shrugged her shoulders and said, "You liked chicken." Robin had to concede the point. Even when they went out to restaurants, Robin ordered chicken. They all had.

Here's one more. When Harriet Lerner was a girl, her family was going through some lean years. There were two kids. The house needed repairs. There wasn't much money for holiday gifts. Harriet was seven, and she wanted a bike. Her sister, Susan, was 12. She wanted a set of encyclopedias. But when they came downstairs on Christmas morning, there were only two small boxes waiting for them.

Harriet Lerner

What was inside them-- and we both had exactly the same gift-- were these real ugly metal tissue holders painted black with these corny red and yellow roses. They were painted with these cheesy looking red and yellow roses. And I looked at my tissue box and I started to cry.

And I looked at my big sister, Susan, and I thought, of course, she was going to cry too. And she looked like maybe she was going to cry, but then she put on a big smile. And then she told me that the boxes were painted by trained monkeys.

Alex Blumberg

The box became Harriet's prized possession. She kept it on display in her room through elementary school, through high school. Her friends asked her about it and she'd say, "Oh yeah. It was painted by trained monkeys." Nobody ever challenged her on it. Maybe because she believed it herself so completely. And then one day, she was home from college, back in the house where she grew up.

Harriet Lerner

And I'm going through some papers, or maybe I was snooping through Susan's papers. And I found a composition, and it had her name on it. And she had written it in high school, and it was called the Tissue Box Story. So I sat down on the floor of Susan's bedroom to read this composition.

And Susan told the story just as I told it, except that she wrote how she felt when she saw me crying, and how she then looked at my parents and saw that my mother was about to cry too, and how she looked at the tissue boxes and then she remembered that my father had a friend who made them, and she knew how much my parents hated taking charity.

And suddenly, even though she was about to cry, she forced herself to smile, and she pretended those boxes were painted by trained monkeys. And then, of course, I didn't know any of this. But the funny thing she wrote in her composition is that she just rushed upstairs and started crying all over her pillow.

And she wasn't really sad about the gift, really, is what she said in the composition. She wasn't sure why she was crying except that it was like she had volunteered to be a grown up before she was even ready for it.

Up until that moment, I had never thought to question my sister's story. I had never subjected it to the scrutiny of a grown up mind. I mean, I was 20. I don't know. I had this tissue box that was painted by trained monkeys, and then it wasn't painted by trained monkeys, really.

Alex Blumberg

Up until reading that story, Harriet thought that her sister's lies had been only to torment her, like the time Harriet swallowed an apple seed and her big sister convinced her that she had an apple tree growing inside her. She'd always been jealous of her sister, always wanted to be the big sister. But reading her sister's story that day made her realize how responsible her sister felt for her, and for their entire family, and how there were benefits to being the baby.

It was good to learn all that. But the vision of the lie, that we live in a world where monkeys can be trained to paint, is hard to give up.

Harriet Lerner

And really, it's just that I can still picture this tissue box and how much I loved it, this tissue box painted by trained monkeys.

Alex Blumberg

I know what she means. For me, there's something appealingly weird about a world where only people who happen to have been born with the name Nielsen get to decide what goes on television. And not long after the day that Jodi Mace's coworker set her straight about the word "xing," she found herself on the opposite side of the exact same situation.

She was having a conversation with another coworker, and he asked her if elves were real. "Elves? Like that live in the forest, with the pointy toes?" He nodded. She paused, and then she said, "Yeah, of course they are."