Humans are breathtaking beings. The second you start looking at humans from a third-party point of view, you can’t help but be struck by all of our fabulous peculiarities.
We. Are. Awesome!
To start with, baby humans are born with 300 bones and all 300 of those tiny little bones have to fit into that teensy, tiny package! All in. No parts bag. By the time each little tot grows into an adult of say, 25 years, that bone count has slipped to 206 bones! Now, I can understand that some of those bones would join others as the body grows, but…94 of them??
A full one quarter of our adult bones are accounted for in our feet alone. That’s a lot of joints!
The largest joints we have in these odd bods of ours, are what we lovingly refer to as our knees. No other hinge is quite that big.
Did you just do a mental walk through of your joints? Good for you—always question the research!
It takes over 600 muscles to operate one of us. We have muscles EVERYWHERE throughout our bodies. The biggest is our gluteus maximus muscle and the smallest one is a wee fella that connects our ear drum to our inner ear. Try flexing that one while you’re waiting endlessly for the dryer to finish a load.
Did you just try it? You are so predictable.
On average, our muscles make up 40% of our overall body weight, our skin takes up around 15%, and our blood weighs in at about 10%. Your bones are maybe 13% of your total weight and that means you’re responsible for the rest of it. Put whatever spin on it that you need to.
That skin on your elbow that doesn’t really have any feelings, is referred to as the “weenus” or, for those intent on passing their first-year medical exams, the “Olecranal Skin”. It doesn’t have an extensive job description, but it’s come away with its own formal and informal monikers. Impressive.
The job of keeping our weenuses in good working order, falls to our 97,000 kilometers of blood vessels. 97,000 kilometers! That means that if someone with plenty of time on their hands wanted to lay their blood vessels end to end, they could circle the earth two and a half times (though it might get a little slow going by the end of it). What the heck are we DOING with all of those blood vessels? Bewildering!
I am told that whenever we blush (something that only humans are capable of doing), the linings of our stomach flush red along with our cheeks/necks/ears. That weird feeling you have in your stomach every time you blush is your stomach lining overcome with chagrin of its own.
Of course, I now question how they figured out that tidbit of information. One COULD make a claim like that just to get one’s name into the medical journals and finally win the approval of one’s peers. No one would really be able to prove you were just mixing up your own juice, would they? Meh, I’m sure it’s a real fact…
One provable thing (though I wouldn’t suggest YOU try to prove it) is that our right lung is 10% larger than our left lung. That left lung needs to be a bit smaller in order to make room for our hearts, so that seems like a reasonable trade-off.
Also for reasons of internal organ accommodation, our right kidneys have been placed slightly lower than our left kidneys. That region feels good to me so I’m confident that that was a good call.
Speaking of pairs, although many of our organs are handed out as singles, some of them come in a set of two. Interestingly, for all of those organs that come in sets, the body is able to continue to function on only one of the pair if something should happen to the other. Handy. I’m wondering why we need the set in the first place. Just for spares?
Our lungs are our only organs that can float in water. And since they come in a pair, rest assured that both of them float. You will likely never need that information but now you can dwell on it endless anyway.
A woman’s heart, of which there is surprisingly only one per, has been proven to beat slightly faster than a man’s heart. Is that because she is always panicking about stuff that she still needs to get taken care of by Friday morning, I wonder?
Fun fact: our heartbeats will often synchronize themselves to the music that we are listening to. What genre should we try first???
The enamel on our teeth is stronger than our bones are, and in turn, our teeth are as strong as the teeth of a shark. Take comfort in that nugget of information the next time you’re surfing off the coast of California and get bitten by a shark. Just bite that guy right back and give him a taste of his own medicine! Teaching moment: we don’t tolerate bullies in this house.
Surprisingly, each of us produce 1 litre of saliva every single day! Why then are we instructed to drink so much water if we’re working with that much self-made mouth liquid?
Each human has their own unique fingerprint (as do Koalas), tongue print (though, for the life of me, I can’t visualize how you’d prove that), and comes complete with their own individual smell—except for twins, who apparently smell alike. Of course I encourage you to test that one out for yourselves and get back to me with the video.
Another mind blower is that our noses can recognize, and our brains catalogue, at least 50,000 smells. 50,000 smells! I have been woefully underestimating my aromatic storage capacity.
That same astounding brain doesn’t come out of the box fully formed. It takes until we are in our mid-twenties for our brains to become full grown. That explains SO much, doesn’t it?
At this point, I’ve burdened you with a lot of information about your outstanding body and just how distinctive it really is, but I think it would be best if I walked away now and left you quietly fondling your weenus, to think about things.
Besides, on average it takes a person 7 minutes to fall asleep and I am dangerously close to exceeding that deadline at present.
