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ISSUE 055 · FUN FACTS · USELESS BUT FASCINATING

In 1965, riding the fitness wave that followed the Tokyo Olympics, a clock and instrument company called Yamasa Tokei Keiki released one of the first consumer pedometers. They named it the Manpo-kei — literally “ten-thousand step meter”.

The number was not the output of a study. It was chosen because it was round, memorable, and because the Japanese character for ten thousand, 万, looks a bit like a person walking. I-Min Lee, the Harvard epidemiologist who has spent years studying step counts and mortality, puts it flatly: at the time the device launched, there were no studies that had looked at ten thousand steps at all.

When researchers eventually did look, they kept landing lower. Lee's own study of 16,741 older women found the benefit levelling off somewhere around 7,500. A sixty-year-old product name is now the line millions of people draw between a healthy day and a lazy one.

August 1973, a bank on Norrmalmstorg square in Stockholm. Four hostages, six days. The most outspoken of them was Kristin Enmark, 23, who phoned the prime minister mid-siege and told him the authorities were gambling with their lives.

The man who coined Stockholm syndrome to explain her behaviour was Nils Bejerot — the police's own psychiatric adviser during the siege, and therefore partly responsible for the tactics she had been criticising. He never met, spoke to, or corresponded with any of the hostages, during or after. He diagnosed them anyway.

It has never appeared in the DSM. Christoffer Rahm, a psychiatrist at the Karolinska Institute, states plainly that it is not a psychiatric diagnosis. Enmark spent decades saying the same thing in her own words: she was not in love, she was a 23-year-old trying to survive six days in a bank vault.

The spiked cabinet is the single most recognisable image of medieval cruelty. There is no medieval record of one. No English, French or German legal text mentions it.

The first known description comes from Johann Philipp Siebenkees, a German writer, in the late 1700s — a lurid account of a coin forger supposedly executed in Nuremberg in 1515. Historians generally think he made it up. The famous Nuremberg maiden itself was assembled around 1790 to 1800 and first exhibited in the early nineteenth century. It was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944, by which point historians already knew it was a fake.

The likeliest origin is a genuine medieval object called the Schandmantel, or shame cloak — a wooden barrel that offenders were made to wear in public while people threw things at them. Humiliating, but conspicuously lacking spikes. The upgrade was the work of eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers who very much wanted their ancestors to look like savages.

30 October 1938, Orson Welles broadcasts a Martian invasion, and America allegedly loses its mind. It is in the textbooks. PBS made a documentary about it. Radiolab opened an episode calling it mass hysteria the country had never seen before.

The panic was so small as to be practically unmeasurable. Ratings data suggest around two per cent of surveyed households were even listening. Researchers chased down the rumour that people had been treated for shock at a hospital in Newark and found it untrue. A survey of six New York hospitals six weeks later turned up no cases attributable to the broadcast. Not one newspaper reported a verified suicide.

So where did the story come from? Radio had been eating newspaper advertising revenue right through the Depression. Media historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow argue the papers seized on Welles to discredit radio as a source of news, and to demonstrate to advertisers and regulators that broadcasters could not be trusted. A Princeton psychologist then gave the whole thing academic respectability in 1940 with a book built on bad data.

The genuine act of mass misinformation in 1938 was the reporting on the panic, not the programme.

Somebody once told you that you learn best from diagrams, or from listening, or by doing. Perhaps a quiz assigned you a letter. As many as 71 different learning-style schemes have been proposed, most of them variations on visual, auditory and kinaesthetic.

The testable claim is called the meshing hypothesis: that matching how you teach to someone's preferred style improves what they learn. In 2008 Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork reviewed the literature for Psychological Science in the Public Interest and found that almost none of it used a design capable of testing this. Of the studies that did, several contradicted it outright. Their conclusion was that there is no adequate evidence base for putting learning-styles assessment into general educational practice.

The preferences are real enough — people genuinely do have a favourite way of being taught. What has never been shown is that indulging it helps.

Lee, I-M. et al. (2019). “Association of Step Volume and Intensity With All-Cause Mortality in Older Women.” JAMA Internal Medicine 179(8); Tudor-Locke, C., on the Manpo-kei slogan; Popular Science interview with I-Min Lee.

Rahm, C. “Stockholm Syndrome: Psychiatric Diagnosis or Urban Myth?”; Wade, A. (2015), “The myth of Stockholm Syndrome,” Dignity Conference; Åse, C., Stockholm University; Enmark, K., interviews with Aftonbladet (2015) and the BBC (2021).

Siebenkees, J. P., Nuremberg guidebook (late 18th century); Konieczny, P., quoted in Live Science, “Are Iron Maidens Really Torture Devices?” (2016).

Pooley, J. & Socolow, M. J. (2013). “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic,” Slate; Cantril, H. (1940), The Invasion From Mars; Snopes fact-check (2023).

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D. & Bjork, R. (2008). “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9(3), 106–119; Coffield, F. et al. (2004).

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