general

When I was a child I always thought that bar codes were made of fingernails and that the government collected everyone's fingernails to make them. I was always afraid that if my hand fell under a laser at the grocery store that the government would track me down and force me to tell them how I knew the barcodes were made of fingernails.

Jocelyn

As a child I made lots of goofy faces and my mom (entire family, really) used to tell me that my face would stick that way if I kept doing it. Same goes for crossing my eyes. If I kept them crossed for too long, they were bound to stay that way forever. I believed this wholeheartedly.

Anon

I used to believe that my heart (everyone's heart for that matter) was in the shape of a heart and swung on a chain like a pendulum. I thought a heartbeat was it tick-tocking like a clock. This made me a bit uneasy when I did summersaults or was otherwise upside down.

Anon

My parents told me when I was little that the little bumps you get on your tongue that sorta hurt were called "lie bumps" so if I got one, it meant that I told a lie. I believed this up until I was in high school....kinda not really thinking about what I was actually believing. I still call them lie bumps when I get them.

rachel

When I was six or seven I was led to believe that if I were to swallow my baby teeth they would start to grow on my bum.

Jesse

I used to have weird ideas about anatomy. I used to think mums corns on her feet were actually pieces of sweetcorn she had eaten and they had travelled to her toes and got stuck. I also used to think that your bladder and bowel were a small ladder and desert bowl floating around in your tummy, I always imagined the bowl as pretty fine china. Finally I though that when I bled from a cut I was draining from the head down and by the time I was 10 by brain would be dry.

Gemma

I used to think that my body was hallow and tiny people were living in it.

Anon

When I was little, my mother told us that ear wax was duck poop. Every time she cleaned mine and my brothers' ears, she would quack. Whoever had the most "duck poop" got the loudest quack. We were always competeing and trying to make more duck poop in our ears.

Kierstin

When I was younger my mum told me that cavities in your teeth are caused by small worms burrowing and living in the tooth! I believed this till I was about 12!

Sam

When I was about 13, I had heard that an original champagne glass was modelled on Marie Antoinette's breast. I was familiar with the long thin champagne flutes to be the original champagne glasses and it wasn't until I was the age of about 18 that I realised the original champagne glasses were wider and shallower. For all that time I thought that Marie Antoinette had really long thin boobs!

Rebecca

I used to believe that everybody used to have a tail that grew out of your tailbone, but you got it cut off at birth. Same with shoulder blades-- or, as my mother called them, wing-buds.

Emily

I used to believe the bones in my arms were snakes.

Madeline

I used to think if you hung upsidedown too long your head would fall off because of all the blood.I was afaid to hang upsidedown 'til i was 10

Emma

I scraped open my knee one day. My father used iodine to clean it which as you all know burns like hell. So to make me brave my Dad told me that the pain I was feeling was the healing of my wound. Little did he know that I would then become obsessed with ripping the crust off of every wound I had for years since this in my mind sped up the healing process.

Charles

I used to believe that at the tops of my nostrils (inside my nose) there was a man who would go back and forth to each nostril. He had like clothes and a beard and everything. He had a shovel and would dig for buggers and mucus behind my nose and pour it into each nostril like he was mining coal or shoveling snow.

Sarah Cherryy[3