Apparently, before this video came out, everyone thought that tortoises were vegetarian, even vegan. Some people still can’t accept the fact that giant tortoises, creatures they have long revered, are capable of stalking and devouring baby birds. These people are suffering from information aversion.

I am so excited to learn that there is a name for a particular bad habit I have. Do you ever wonder why you repeatedly, perhaps incessantly, do certain things that clearly annoy your friends and family and are not even in your own best interest?

“Why do you do that?” you are asked by your (check one or more if applicable: mother, father, wife, husband, friend, child, grandchildren, co-worker, employer, other), and you mumble some excuse, while thinking to yourself, “danged if I know.”

Sometimes just naming something you dread brings it out of the shadows, makes it less mysterious and therefore easier to deal with.

“Oh,” you say, “so that is just black mold (coulrophobia, dermatitis, assassin bug, the uncanny valley effect, francophilia, extreme hoarding, northern shrew, dyscalculia, Munchausen syndrome by proxy). What a relief! I was afraid it was something serious.”

As long as you can call something by its name, you have some power over it. It is a well-known fact — although whether it is true or not, I can’t say — that in some cultures a baby’s true name is kept secret. Everyone just calls him something informal, like Biff, or Bubba or His-ears-stick-out, for his whole life, thus preventing possible voodoo spells or other assaults against his person or even his soul.

“Oh, come on, I’m talking about old His-Ears-Stick-Out! Just work the spell!”

“No can do, his real name is required in order to make him disappear.”

Magic is ineffable; it operates by its own set of rules.

Rumpelstiltskin simply self-destructed when the Miller’s Daughter “guessed” his name correctly. Rumpelstiltskin, of course, knew very well she had cheated. After all, nobody could guess a name like Rumpelstiltskin — a woodcutter had overheard the dwarf talking to himself in the forest and told her. Still, whether she knew it by fair means or foul, the Miller’s Daughter was able to utterly defeat Rumpelstiltskin simply by uttering his name. He stamped his foot and disappeared through a hole in the ground, thereby freeing up the Miller’s Daughter to renege on her side of a bargain to give Rumpelstiltskin her firstborn child. So you see the power of a name.

This same emphasis on proper names exists to this day in our highly technological society. Our names and numbers are serious business to the feds. After all, they have to keep track of us. Just look what happened to Edward Snowden. (Word is that he and his wife and children are happy now in Russia, but what a hassle!) In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term “uncanny valley effect,” referring to the anxiety robots or virtual characters with human characteristics can trigger. It’s similar to the fear people wearing Halloween costumes or clown makeup sometimes induce in children (and others).

Coulrophobia is the fear of clowns. A study conducted in Sheffield, England, shows that children universally dislike clowns, and that a group of children, when asked for suggestions on how to refurbish the children’s wing of a hospital, requested the removal of the existing clown decor, which was supposed to be cheering, but which in reality frightened and revolted young patients.

So yes, I do suffer from information aversion. I’m not the only one!

I have never understood my own reluctance to perform such disparate tasks as have medical tests performed, open certain pieces of mail, whether hardcopy or electronic, or even, on occasion, to answer the telephone.

Really, it is so simple. A study at Claremont Graduate University, California, found that some participating students did not want to know the results of certain medical tests.

Their aversion to this information increased according to the seriousness of the disease being tested for. So it follows that a person might be more reluctant to get a mammogram — let’s say — than to have her temperature taken.

That’s it — information aversion! Through a very interesting combination of diligence and incompetence, I have figured it out. I also suffer from coulrophobia.

Have a good week.

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(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the Lake Placid News since 1996.)