Urban Legends and Myths: It's a War (With Earwigs?) in Our Brains, and We're Losing

I did not grow up in a city full of urban legends. I grew up in a town rife with suburban legends, to be sure, but we children had the sense to know that these fantastic stories about people we knew were balderdash. Hooey. Baloney. Except for the one where the librarian slept with a student. That student was a friend of mine, and the librarian got fired.

Naturally, I heard some of the famous urban legend fare as I grew up, but didn't think people really believed in things like a murderer telephoning the babysitter from inside the house (a bit I also happened to have seen in the 1979 film, "When A Stranger Calls"), or that drinking bleach cures AIDS (without killing the patient, painfully, that is).

It is said that the appeal of the urban myth or urban legend is that the stories ring true with some deep-seated and universal psychological fears or concerns that we human beings all share. Yeah, it's deep like that, but the psychological basis of our urban legends and myths has been done to death. What we're going to do is look at these stories' basic elements and hold them up to the light of our own common sense.

Superficially these tales seem plausible. We somehow figure that if guys with hook hands happen, and murders happen, then a murderer with a hook hand is a totally reasonable thing to expect from the world. And it really is a horrifying thought, getting killed with a hook hand; as they're actually quite blunt. Or, we consider that if a dog can look like a rat, that a giant rat might well be able to pass as a dog. Let me put it in different terms. We believe that there are people out there living in the same world as you and I, the one that contains both rats and dogs, who cannot differentiate between the two. All this while full-knowing that the equivalent of giant rats exist: they're called Nutria, people in Louisiana eat them, and they certainly aren't being confused with small dogs.

Losing faith in the human race yet? Don't feel bad. For some reason, the human brain is programmed to believe bullcrap. Books have been written which postulate a human inclination to superstition and "magical" thinking as being an important part of what makes us successful as a species. To most of us, at first hearing, these stories sound perfectly reasonable- and that only changes when you take a minute to think about what you're being told. It just so happens that people are often not very good at performing these two tasks at once; listening and thinking.

For an example, let's take a look at this rather harmless story which we'll call:

"The Earwig Myth"

A woman is said to have come home from the beach with a bad earache. After the problem persisted a while, she went to see a doctor, who came to the conclusion that an earwig which had crawled into her ear and was eating through her head was the source of her ear pain, and that the best course of action would be for her to wait for the little critter to come out of the other ear.

OK, let's stop here for a second. There are two versions of this story that I know, and in the first one, the doctor doesn't even see the earwig itself, but still knows it's there, eating through the woman's brain, from ear to ear. Hit the brakes. How did we get from earache to earwig without an explanation of what the doctor did see? If we assume that he saw the bug, but that this part was accidentally omitted from the story, then we have to ask ourselves why the doctor wouldn't remove the critter that he saw. In the second version of the story, the lady is said to feel the earwig enter her ear. She apparently has some prior experience with identifying insect species intra-aurally. Or maybe the earwig whispered his identity to her as he knocked on the door to her brain. "Hello, I am an earwig. Word up."

Also, assuming you are one of the many people who has seen an earwig up-close, I ask you: Do you remember what the insect's mouth looked like? Did you see any mandibles at all? Probably not, because they are tiny bugs with even tinier heads. Their mandibles are so small that there is no way that you could convince me that an earwig would be able to eat through all that brain with them. Much less the quarter inch thick bone which we like to call "the skull." To buy this bit, we have to assume that earwigs walk the auditory nerve, like a tightrope, through the tiniest of nooks all the way into the brain. Possible? I guess so. Plausible? Doesn't seem so.

Also noteworthy: relative to their body size, the earwig does have some impressive pincers. But, those are on its back end- where it poops, not eats.

Even if you had never seen an earwig, you might ask some simple questions about this creatures behavior, which could conceivably cause one to hesitate in buying wholesale the contents of the earwig story. Here are a few examples:

How does an earwig know the way from one ear to the other?

And why would it need to take this path at all? Does this insect eat its way through somebody's head because it prefers to lay eggs in the other ear?

Why, if earwigs eat brains, why don't we hear about a lot more of this happening? Wouldn't there be public service announcements on television or something? I mean these things are all over the place! There should be signs up in doctors' offices next to the ones that tell you about the flu and how to properly wash your hands. Maybe next to a E.D. medication ad.

Let's get back to the story.

A few weeks later, the lady found an insect on her pillow and took it back to the doctor to see if it was the bug from her ear; the brain eating one. The doctor examined the patient and confirmed that the earwig was indeed gone from her head. The terrible news to follow (brace yourself!) is that the earwig had lain eggs!

The earwig laid eggs in her brain? Well, that is a frightening thing to hear. But let's ask some more questions:

If the doctor never saw the earwig in the first place, how does he know that the insect she found on her pillow is the same earwig that crawled in a few weeks earlier?

Why, if eating brains is its desire, would an earwig want to leave for the outside world, when there's a skull-full of grey matter just dying to be eaten?

If the doctor knows that eggs have been lain in the brain, then we can assume that he sees the eggs- right? So is there some reason that he can't take them out?

So, this is just the kind of stuff that comes up when one stops and takes a few seconds to think about what he's being told- just forget about it if you took five minutes online to research the subject of your urban legend; the way suspicious-minded scoundrels like I do. Here's another tidbit I pulled up on the subject of earwigs, just for fun:

It turns out that earwigs are maternal, in that they care for their eggs and nymphs. Why, then, would one crawl out the other side to die before the eggs were even hatched? And obviously, if there is no parent to take care of all those baby earwigs, they would not survive. This is perhaps a tragic ending of a completely different sort, but not so horrifying to the woman patient as the prospect of a skull-full of writhing brain-devouring hatchling earwigs. A brain filled with dead bugs is still gross, though, I'll admit.

I think that is enough on this subject.

With that, I invite the reader to apply my simple analytic technique to any weird story that you hear. You should have similar results with any bogus story, even if the subject matter is out of your field of expertise; such as entomology, in my case here.

And don't feel badly for falling for these things in the past. You aren't stupid. You just weren't thinking.