I thought that when you peed, your pee would go to a place where it was manually boiled on a stove, making it 100% clean drinking water, and then when you turned on the tap, they would get a garden hose and pour water into the pipe that gave you water. Somehow I assumed this all would be done manually with normal sized stoves and kettles, and that each tap had it's very own pipe.

I also thought that black people were just tanned, because colder countries had white people and warmer ones had black or brown people. Then I asked myself: why are there black people in cold places? I came to the conclusion that all the black kids in my kindergarten would eventually lose their tan and become white.

If you cut your own hair, it won't grow back. That was a lie my mum told me (after I experimented with the scissors). I believed her for years because there was a gap in my hairline. Eventually I realised "how would the hair know who cut it?" The gap in my hairline was just my parting.

I believed LCD screens in digital watches were made of mercury (they were silver after all), which I knew was toxic. I thought that if you touched the display directly, you'd die. One day, I'd disassembled a cheap watch to see how it worked - I took everything apart back then, eventually I got good at putting them back together again. Drove my parents mad, but these days they always have something for me to fix whenever I go round.
Anyway, I had this watch in pieces, handling the innards like an IED, but disaster! I brushed the back of the screen with a fingertip.

I was dead. It was just a matter of time. I didn't cry or run for help, nothing could be done, I was resigned to my fate.
After about an hour of continued existence I began to doubt my assumptions. It dawned on me that something so frighteningly lethal wouldn't be simply handed to children with nothing but a cheap, press fit case! That said this was in the 80s, and back the I also believed it was both safe and fun to help demolish an asbestos cement outbuilding by jumping on the sheets to smash them into little pieces. That one might still get me, we'll see.

When I learned balls have a significant role in child-making my first though was women got pregnant by surgically transfering a man's testicle to their belly. Then I realized balls come in two's and I do in fact have more than one sibling

There is a god who created the world and watches our every move and we as humans are fallen creations who can't live up to his super holy expectations with our sinful lives. But don't despair just yet because that holy god has set up a blood sacrifice solution involving his own son and all you have to do to not end up in eternal damnation is to believe in the blood magic of a god for which no evidence exists whatsoever outside of the ancient myths of primitive bronze age men - a god who chooses to remain hidden for some weird reason although he apparently wants to be worshipped and believed in. Easy right? Also, if your life isn't working out quite right for some reason, that's certainly your own fault because the lord's blessings are very dependent on you doing those very fuzzily defined Jesus-ing activities right and you're quite obviously doing something very wrong, have sins in your life, aren't believing hard enough, doing it with an impure heart or whatever...

You couldn't make this shit up if you tried!

I thought superheroes were real and all lived in New York. To be fair, it was my only contact with Western culture.

If you stir chocolate milk counter-clockwise you can separate the milk and chocolate syrup.

In order to learn how to whistle you had to eat enough pickles first.

Found a rock that kind of looked like a coin and thought I could carve it into a passable counterfeit and repeat enough times to become rich.

I thought that during commercial breaks the characters in the show I was watching were still doing things and I was missing it because the commercials were not pausing the show in the background but playing over top of it.

That sun and moon switch places during day and night. Like in a cartoon.

That you could catch pneumonia from breathing in steam from the shower as I heard that a symptom is water in the lungs. A friend's dad died of pneumonia and I had to shower with my head stuck out of the curtain.

Girls pee out of their butts.

When I was a kid and McDonald's started to became a thing here I was scared that Ronald McDonald would be at the restaurant. When I was invited to a birthday party and the parents wanted to take us to McDonald's I refused to go inside and the dad had to wait with me on the parking lot until my parents picked me up. I also figured that he could potentially be at Burger King, so I never went there either.

That an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being created all of existence, knew everything that would ever happen and everything its creations would ever do, but still either doomed to damnation or lifted up to paradise each one of them as a result of them doing exactly what they'd been programmed to do

When I was young, my mom told me that Dad went to work too make money. In my head, I had envisioned him going to an office and running machines that made coins. Imagine my disappointment when I got to visit him at work and there were no coin making machines.

In Germany they put up mobil speed control and radio stations warn you about that. In German them doing this is called "blitzen" which is the same word as lightning. As a child I thought they were warning very precisely where lightning strikes were happening.

Though I wasn't actually raised religiously, just the prevalence of religion in society led to many of my early theories have religious components.

I thought that between dying and being reborn you spent your time in heaven as an angel. While there, you could select your next parents from all the currently pregnant people on earth. I imagined giant 'rooms' full of computers in heaven, where every pregnant woman had a profile you could check out (mind, that was in the early 90s - I like to think I secretly invented social networking^^). Once you decided on a mother, you'd be kicked down into her womb and be reborn. I did realize pretty soon after that this theory doesn't hold water when you see that many children are not born into happy families, but for a short while I was certain I picked my mother from all the possible mothers around the world. She was very charmed by that :D

I was assured that power-hungry politicians would face checks and balances, and get voted out for saying insane things.

Everyone in the whole world is the world champion of something. Could be something normal like running, or jumping, but it could also be something really niche like solving the Rubik’s cube with your tongue while being under water with your hands tied behind your back. You just need to find what you’re really good at and that might be your thing.

Each video game copy was customized and knew exactly what you would try to do always.

Not from button inputs. That never crossed my mind. Literally thought it was some magical fake interactive movie and the wizards who made them accounted for everything and knew you better than you did.

Needless to say, learning about code and how you can make things read button inputs was a mind-blowing moment for me. I learned what the secret behind the magic was.

I have ever since then been far more curious on how and why things work. Learning about the methods behind the magics.

Livestock have joyful lives before being killed peacefully 🤗

god

I thought the priest at church was Jesus.

Cows that are completely brown give chocolate milk.
My mother said it as a joke, but at the time it made complete sense to me. By logical extension, there must’ve been a farm with pink cows for the strawberry milk.

I thought that actors on TV shows and movies were acting in real time, and that they had a special ability to do the exact same thing over and over again.

As I grew in the Spanish speaking world, I also believed that Hollywood actors spoke Spanish, and that their voices changed dramatically only by switching languages.

I remember watching Spartacus with Kirk Douglas. I remember that I thought he was wearing some sort of muscle prosthetics bc I thought people couldn't be that muscular. It's funny because by today's standards he wasn't buff at all.

I thought that all languages were actually the same, just our ears differed. So e.g. as a native German speaker, I thought all people 'speak' German (I.e. make the sounds of the German language), but the translation of sounds into thoughts by the ears would only work when the source was 'my version' of the language. Very hard to put that into words, I just realize...

Another thing was that I had my own religious philosophy. I believed in reincarnation, and thought that all life was just a giant circle where you would be reborn as your own worst victim. Only when you have lived a victimless life, you would ascend into heaven. My go-to example back then was if you stepped onto a worm you will be reborn as a worm that is being stepped on. This one has horrible victim blaming implications when you think about it but in my childlike naivety I thought it was very fair.

That women are attracted to nice guys.

It’s 97% untrue.

Not saying they are attracted to jerks either - in fact my overwhelming impression is that women despise those too (some exceptions exist of course).

Just saying that however equality has come, and should still come, attraction exists at a lower level. And at that level, someone who can hold their own, push their way through and be kind about it, will always attract more women than the “nice guy”.

Before you react - I’ve been together with my wife 17 years, we have four kids and I’m not some kind of player.

Just stating that I was brought up to believe women always prefer nice guys. And in retrospect I can see that I was brought up by a well meaning parents (mother, my dad was in the navy so away a lot) who tried their best to make me “not an asshole”. They succeeded. But I wish my dad at some point had sat me down to tell me a few home truths about how the biology of attraction works.

I remember reading a Robin Hood book when I was maybe 6 years old, and it mentioned that Robin Hood hated 'bloodshed.' I thought this was an actual shed or something where people went to fight. I hadn't learned the other meanings of 'shed' yet.

Other than organized religion, you mean?

Probably that cops are benevolent keepers of the peace and that putting humans in cages decreases crime.

I thought the abbreviation for pounds (lbs) stood for "lullables."

I have no idea why.

I thought that everywhere was ocean except our town, my grandparents' town, and the interstate we used to get there.

I was a towhead, which means I was born blonde and it turned to brown as I got older. When I first started noticing my hair turning darker, I asked my mom why and she told me it was because I ate too much peanut butter. I stopped eating it for about a week until I decided that I loved peanut butter more than being a blonde.

I used to think that how your belly button looked was based on a surgical procedure following birth, and "innie" vs "outie" was an indication of a surgeon's skill. I was legitimately surprised when my son was born and you find out they clamp the umbilical cord and just wait for it to fall off.

I earnestly believed that quicksand was going to be a far more prevalent danger in my life than it has.

I thought the people in movies lived in the video cassettes. I would only watch a video every once a while cause I didn't want to get them tired and or take them away from their families.

Was like 9 when I realized I was wrong. Lol.

That meritocracy exists.

That night was caused by really thick clouds. I think I saw light through dark black clouds during twilight and assumed night was caused by black clouds covering the sky. I went to test this theory by flying out of London at night but I fell asleep before we took off.