Jay Leno is famous for his Tonight Show bit where he roves the streets and interviews people, exposing their ignorance on world affairs and random trivia. We get a big kick out of how stupid people are, right? Well, be prepared for a whole new low.
According to a new survey, more than half of people couldn’t locate the exact location of the human heart on a diagram. And as if that isn’t bad enough, nearly 70 percent can’t correctly identify the shape of the lungs. But wait, there’s more: even patients who were being treated for a specific condition involving an organ often didn’t identify that organ correctly.
Here are the results of the survey:
– 46.5 percent knew which drawing represented the heart
– 31.4 percent identified their lungs
– 38.4 percent identified the stomach
– 41.8 percent the identified the thyroid
– 42.5 percent identified the kidneys
– 85.9 percent identified the intestines
– And 80.7 percent found the bladder
There’s no rhyme or rhythm to how people identified their organs. More people could identify the thyroid than their own stomach. The intestines were easiest, and that make some sense. But almost twice as many people could find the bladder but not the heart?
This survey was actually conducted in the U.K. But the lead author ,John Weinman, Ph.D. of King’s College London, believes the numbers may be even worse in the U.S.
“I asked one of my colleagues, who is from the U.S., and she felt that Americans might be worse because, to quote her, ‘Very many Americans don’t even know where New Jersey is, so how would they know where their pancreas is?'”
Sad ignorance aside, the main thing to come away with is that there is a concern that this ignorance may have larger implications. Being ignorant of your own anatomy may also infer an ignorance to medication and symptoms for specific ailments.
(via: CNN)