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Originally Posted by Neapolitan
I heard a person on average can (while sleeping) eat 3 spiders in his/her lifetime.
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Variations of that "fact" have been circulating the net since the early 90s.
Quote:
Fear not. This "statistic" was not only made up out of whole cloth, it was invented as an example of the absurd things people will believe simply because they come across them on the Internet.
In a 1993 article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of "facts" that were circulating via and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own list of equally ridiculous "facts," among which was the statistic cited above about the average person's swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst's propagation of this false "fact" has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.
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snopes.com: Spiders Swallowed Per Year
There are lots of made up "facts" like this on the internet. I've never heard of a real study that tries to find out how many spiders the average person eats during a lifetime, but perhaps 3 isn't such a stupid number.
