What are your thoughts about these wives tales?

I’m not a fan of wives tales. I’m not very superstitious. There is one thing that bugs me though – have you heard the one where if your ears are red, somebody is talking about you? It’s rather laughable.
To answer your question, I do not believe in the first one.
I’m not sure I believe the second one either. I do think deja vous has significant meaning, but whether it means you’re on the right path or not, I’m unsure.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s a collission of past lives

“1. If you are being talked about you will sneeze”

I thought it was your ears turning red or burning when you were talked about.

@HTDC That’s what I’ve always known it to be. Do you believe it?

I don’t believe in those superstitions. I don’t believe in them because there is no evidence that there is a link between the two things being compared. They’re nothing more than, well, wives’ tales.

The idea of the brain being able to sense distant conversations about you and turn them into somatic symptoms is nothing short of absolutely ridiculous. :)

Deja vu does sometimes feel to me like I am predicting it. What I mean is that when I get a feeling of deju vu, for example, like a conversation between me and a friend, I kind of feel like I can predict what is going to be said next. Deja vu is poorly understood in the scientific community. I am not sure what causes it, but to me there’s nothing psychic about it, it’s just the feeling of having experienced it before and being able to predict, but you’re not actually predicting anything and you haven’t actually experienced it before.

@stardust Nah, I don’t believe in any wives tales. It’s kind of self explanatory.

They are just superstitions and have no bearing (in my opinion).

I always wondered why they were called “old wives tales.” Why not “old husband’s tales?” Or just simply “superstitions?”

Hmm…I do both get talked about and sneeze a lot o_O

Just because you get déjà vu does not mean that you are on the right path in life. Moreover, one of the defining characteristics of déjà vu is the conviction that you know what’s giong to happen next.

Déjà vu is actually a known symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy, so if you get it a lot, you should probably get it checked out.

As you can probably tell, I think both of these tales are nonsense. In fact, they give the word ‘tale’ a bad name.

The experience of deja vu alerts you to the presence of a set of stimuli you have seen before. It may be predictive of what may happen, assuming your perception is correct and the situations (in the past and now) are indeed similar and share a common cause. Otherwise it may be a random coincidental repeat of a previous impression with not real meaning.

In general, these folk myths as they might properly be called, signify nothing but spurious alleged correlations that predict or explain nothing and should be disregarded!

As a folklorist, I love hearing about wives’ tales. I have never heard either of these . . . can I ask where (geographically) you heard them?

I wouldn’t not believe in something just because we don’t understand it, or we can’t explain it. Now I know this probably isn’t the most realistic example, but in the show True Blood, Bill shared his thoughts about things we don’t understand. He was talking about how his body works with Sookie, and she was getting all dramatic because he said he dosen’t have a pulse, or electrical impulses. She said he wasn’t real or something. Then he said something like this: “just because you understand the mechanics of how your body works doesn’t make it any less of a miracle.” It makes me think that maybe one day we will understand deja vu more, but for now people don’t believe certain things just because we cannot explain them. I’m not very good getting what I want to say across, but that’s my opinion on the subject.

@HTDC Yeah, I have heard of that one too, but lots of people have told me if you sneeze people are talking about you.

@stardust I think that’s very interesting, I never thought about deja vu as a collision of past lives, I like that idea. :)

@Kayak8 I’ve heard both of them from just generally people I know. I hear about the deja vu one a lot though. Wierd how you jellies never heard of them, when they seem so known to people I have met.

I have heard that if your ears are ringing it means someone is talking about you (but not sneezing). I have also heard that if you get a sudden shivver, it means someone is walking over your grave. I have heard if your palms itch, you should expect to come into some money.

@Kayak8 Wouldn’t you getting a shiver require you to be alive? So how does someone walk over your grave?... haha
I’ve heard the itchy palm one too.

@desiree333 They are walking over where your grave is going to be . . .