There was once a well- known story about the entrancing power of the human imagination that is now either completely forgotten or so entirely unappealing that it bears no allure, even for the most superstitious among us. It began as the story of “maternal impression”— an extraordinarily prevalent notion about the human mind that was dominant in intellectual discourse from the mid- 1500s until the early- nineteenth century.2 This dated medical theory purported that the potency of maternal imagination was so singular that an over-excitement of the mind while pregnant could lead to disastrous consequences for the ensuing progeny. It was a strangely compelling idea that traced its influences as far back as ancient Greece in the works of Aristotle and Hippocrates.3 So-called “monstrous births” included anything from bizarre physical anomalies to severe birth defects.4
The fact that it took several centuries for this wild idea to be fully discarded reveals much about the endurance of myths. They are incredibly hard to shake off once they have set in.5 Even when a mountain of evidence against the established narrative accumulates, it has little persuasive sway when no (satisfying) alternative story to latch onto is offered. “The problem is that most of us find it more comforting to have certainty, even if it is premature, than to live with unsolved or unexplained mysteries.”6 Therein lies the reassurance of pseudoscience— it allows for real conviction to take root in our minds that the ideas we have about the world are grounded in reason (as opposed to superstition) because they are experienced as stable and coherent, rather than unstable and incoherent. It is not enough to know
what isn’t. One must also be able to readily grasp
what is.
Introduction 2. Havelock Ellis
, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. V: Erotic Symbolism; The Mechanism of Detumescence; The Psychic State in Pregnancy (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Co., Publishers, 1920).
3. Marie- Hélène Huet,
Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
4. Originally introduced in 1573: Ambroise Paré and Michel Jeanneret,
Des monstres et prodiges (Paris: Gallimard, 2015).
5. Norbert Schwarz, Eryn Newman, and William Leach, “Making the Truth Stick & the Myths Fade: Lessons from Cognitive Psychology,”
Behavioral Science & Policy 2, no. 1 (2016): 85– 95, https://doi.org/10.1353 /bsp.2016.0009.
6. Michael Shermer,
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 53.
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