The Body by Bill Bryson: 3 Takeaways
“There are thousands of things that can kill us—slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization—and we escape every one of them but one. For most of us, that’s not a bad deal.”
—Bill Bryson
]Bill Bryson is the British-American author and journalist whose penned best-sellers like A Brief History of Nearly Everything and A Walk in the Woods. His writing skill and style remind me of Michael Pollan in the way he can zoom out on a topic, convey the complexity clearly, and add splashes of wit and humor.
In The Body: A Guide for Occupants, he widdles down a vast array of knowledge on anatomy, physiology, and science into 464 pages. While each paragraph likely has series of textbooks dedicated to the relative topic, The Body is more than just a study guide for the anatomy theme during Quizzo. He weaves in narratives of humans discovering so much of the body that we now take for granted as just general knowledge. Along the ride, he also conveys the struggle many researchers and scientists had when their discoveries to advance medicine were claimed by others or not recognized at all and the consistent effect of depression and isolation that this had on them (which happened a lot apparently).
While this is a long read, I highly recommend it for every “occupant”.
3 Takeaways From The Body by Bill Bryson
1. The Power Of The Brain
The brain is nothing short of incredible. I've had the opportunity to touch the brain of a donor and it felt like a compact ball of squish, for lack of a better description. It was interesting because it was a rare opportunity. Still, it was more incredible because that 3-pound organ has been responsible for so much: regulating millions of breaths, steps, and heartbeats in a lifetime; surviving against all odds for hundreds of thousands of years, getting man to the moon, and handling your own in a backward Beer Olympics event.
Without it, we're boring organisms and our food, light, sounds, and smells are just complex codes of chemicals, photons, sound waves, and olfactory molecules. With it, these messages are transformed into lively, emotional experiences. Or, as Bryson puts it, "your brain is you, everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding."
Here are some fascinating facts about the brain:
"Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years."
"A morsel of cortex one cubic millimetre in size – about the size of a grain of sand – could hold 2,000 terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book."
"Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something in the order of 200 exabytes of information, roughly equal to ‘the entire digital content of today’s world’."
"Our brain requires only about 400 calories of energy a day – about the same as you get in a blueberry muffin."
"Each neuron connects with thousands of other neurons, giving trillions and trillions of connections – as many connections ‘in a single cubic centimetre of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way’ to quote the neuroscientist David Eagleman."
"What is surely most curious and extraordinary about our brain is how largely unnecessary it is. To survive on Earth, you don’t need to be able to write music or engage in philosophy – you really only need to be able to out-think a quadruped – so why have we invested so much energy and risk in producing mental capacity that we don’t really need? That is just one of the many things about your brain that your brain won’t tell you."
2. Antibiotics: Hero And Villian
You might have heard the unique story about how Alexander Fleming first discovered penicillin in 1928 but that is just the start of the wild world of antibiotics. And it didn’t take Fleming long to realize the concerns with this new discovery. He won the Nobel prize for discovering penicillin in 1945 and in his acceptance speech he "warned that there could be resistance to antibiotics if they were carelessly used."
Whereas a prescription for antibiotics 100 years ago wasn't even possible, today the average human in the Western world gets somewhere between 5 and 20 doses in childhood alone. To complicate things, these antibiotics can permanently kill both good and bad microbes (being "as nuanced as a hand grenade" as Bryson puts it) and they have the potential to pass on their cumulative effects to future generations.
Antibiotics have saved countless lives but because they are so common, the microbes they are intended to kill have evolved into superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics. "In 1945, the year that Alexander Fleming won the Nobel Prize, a typical case of pneumococcal pneumonia could be knocked out with forty thousand units of penicillin. Today, because of increased resistance, it can take more than twenty million units per day for many days to achieve the same result." Antibiotics are, therefore, less effective and pharmaceutical companies are testing and manufacturing significantly less because they simply don't work, and it's only getting worse by the day. These superbugs have spawned bugs like MRSA and CRE and they’re forecasted to lead to 10 million deaths a year. Some surgeons even forego more common surgeries like hip replacements because the risk of infection can be too problematic.
One issue is that antibiotics are being prescribed even for things that they can't treat. Of the 40 million prescriptions written every year, 75% of them cannot be cured by antibiotics (e.g. acute bronchitis). Another issue with overconsumption is that we ingest antibiotics not just with prescriptions but in our food (see here for how to avoid these toxins). In fact, of all of the antibiotics that are used in the world, 70% are sold for animal use. Want a dose of tetracycline with that steak?
Before the discovery of penicillin, a simple prick of the skin by a thorn while gardening could lead to death. Bryson warms that those days, again, may not be too far ahead of us.
3. The Hand
The hand is another incredible part of the body we often take for granted. In each hand, we have 29 bones, 123 ligaments, 17 muscles (and 18 more in the forearm which also controls the hand), 3 main nerves and 45 other nerves, and 2 main arteries.
One muscle in the hand that 14% of humans lack is the palamaris longus. Due to its importance in grip strength, it's rare that standout athletes are among the 14% but otherwise, it's anything but essential. Curious if you have it? Do these quick and simple hand movements to find out.
It's often cited that the main difference between humans and other animals is that we possess opposable thumbs (opposable simply meaning that it can touch the other fingers), however, most primates have opposable thumbs. The bigger difference is that ours are more mobile. This mobility is reliant on a pliable joint and the control of three main muscles: the extensor pollicis brevis (EPB), flexor pollicis brevis (FPB), and the first volar interosseous. As Bryson points out, "You may never have heard of them, but these three small muscles are at the heart of human civilization. Take them away and our greatest collective achievement might be winkling ants out of their nests with sticks."
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