It was much easier for our ancestors to learn the capabilities and principles of their own body. The gods gave the Vigilant Falcon excellent eyesight, the White Owl is blond and sees perfectly at dusk. Fast legs and strong hands, a tenacious mind and an excellent reaction - all the will of the gods.
With the development of science in general and medicine in particular, people began to learn some of the laws of the human body, but all knowledge was achieved by studying simple reactions. In this way, it is impossible to understand why the heart beats or food moves through the digestive organs. Some understanding of the body's work as an integral system appeared only in the twentieth century.
The human body is so complex that scientists still have not really figured out how and why it all works and how to fix it if it breaks down. Progress, of course, does not stand still, but sometimes the direction of its movement is doubtful. In the USA and Western Europe in recent years, the idea of a commonality of the so-called. “Non-communicable diseases”. It would seem that this is just a new word in the classification of diseases, no big deal. But in fact, this classification, along with allergies and autism, has gradually included depression, obesity and other very dubious ailments. According to the WHO, 63% of the world's population suffer from such non-communicable diseases. Healthy infections, it turns out, practically do not get. However, the same WHO data also cites a figure - for 10 years the treatment of this global hospital will take (will be withdrawn from the pockets of the “Sick”) 47 trillion dollars.
In general, if you thoroughly delve into the human body, you can find in it a lot of interesting, useful, beneficial, and sometimes mysterious.
1. Any, even the smallest movement of the human body is caused by muscle contractions, which, in turn, occur due to electrical impulses transmitted along the nerves. At the beginning of the 19th century, they did not really know about the nature of this phenomenon, but doctors had already discovered the effect of an electric current on muscles (the notorious frog Luigi Galvani). In European countries, the enlightened public paid a lot of money and stuffed anatomical theaters to watch the electric show. Under the influence of electricity, the corpses of state criminals opened their eyes, bent arms and legs, wiggled their fingers and even breathed.
2. The inventor of the mercury thermometer Sanctoritus was the first to think about the fact that a person's weight changes in relatively short periods of time. This Italian doctor put together special scales with which he clearly demonstrated that a person loses weight, even in a cool atmosphere, that is, without sweating much. Later it was found that in cold dry weather a person emits about 80 g of carbon dioxide per day, at least 150 g of water with breathing and at least 250 g due to evaporation of sweat. Performing hard physical work at high temperatures, a person can excrete up to 4 liters of sweat per hour. Losing weight in most cases means that fat and muscle begins to release water into the bloodstream, reducing their weight and overall body weight. Conversely, when a person consumes a lot of fluid at a normal concentration in the blood, excess water enters the muscles and adipose tissue.
Sactoritus on its scales
3. In 1950 - 1960 the Frenchman Alain Bombard gained worldwide popularity. A doctor from France tried to prove that the sailors whose ships were wrecked did not die because of hunger or dehydration, but because of panic and inability to control themselves. Bombar's adventure was actively promoted in the Soviet Union - a friendly Frenchman expands the range of human capabilities, etc. In fact, Bombar's journey almost ended with his death. Dehydrated, thinner, suffering from severe hallucinations, he was picked up 65 days after starting to swim. With all the efforts of the then medicine, Bombar did not get rid of health problems until the end of his life. Theoretically, the fresh sea water that he squeezed out of the caught fish turned out to be too salty for the human body, which adversely affected the state of almost all internal organs.
Alain Bombard at the start of his adventure
4. Human vampires exist in reality. Now they, of course, do not attack other people in order to drink blood, but in fact they suffer from sunlight to the point of destruction of body tissues, and they really need fresh blood. Porphyria is the name of a rare liver disease in which hemoglobin is not synthesized correctly. Nowadays, they have learned to deal with it with the help of hemoglobin injections. And in the Middle Ages, such people could well become the source of terrible legends - drinking blood, although hemoglobin is poorly absorbed from the stomach, really relieves the suffering of patients with porphyria, and attacks to quench such thirst could well have taken place. Moreover, with closely related breeding in closed communities, vampires could become commonplace.
5. Sleep is necessary for a person as well as food and water. Sleep deprivation is considered a relatively quick and reliable way to suppress a person's will. The psychophysiology of sleep has not yet been studied enough, so doctors sometimes cannot explain how people who go without sleep for years survive. The most famous of them can be considered Yakov Tsiperovich. After suffering clinical death in 1979, he completely stopped sleeping. At first, Jacob was tormented by terrible insomnia, but then the body, apparently, managed to adapt to it. The compensation for the lack of sleep was improved physical performance and slowed aging of the body.
Phineas Gage. A piece of reinforcement remained in his head.
6. Brain damage does not always lead to death. The well-known case of Phineas Gage, who lost 11% of the white matter and 4% of the cerebral cortex as a result of trauma - a piece of reinforcement with a diameter of 3 cm pierced his head. They could not remove the reinforcement, and even she brought an infection into Gage's body. However, Phineas scrambled out and returned to normal life. He worked as a coachman of a stagecoach, and even for some time moved from the United States to Chile, then took up farming and died more than 12 years after being injured.
7. In the same place, in the USA, doctors removed the boy's left hemisphere of the brain - due to congenital damage to the connection between the hemispheres, the baby suffered from seizures, and his development was slowed down - at the age of 8 he could barely pronounce the word “mother”. After removal of half of the brain, the seizures stopped, and the child's development accelerated, although he lagged behind his peers quite far.
8. The total length of the nerves in the human body is about 75 kilometers. Impulses are transmitted through them at a speed of 270 km / h. Nerve cells are very much even restored - they are simply replaced by others.
9. As you know, the human body reacts very painfully even to a slight increase in temperature. Rather, even a slight increase in temperature is a signal of serious malfunctions in the body. A temperature of 42 ° is considered critical - the brain cells that control the body cannot withstand such overheating. In 1980, a patient with a temperature of 46.7 ° was taken to a hospital in the American Atlanta. Although it was at the height of summer, there was no particular heat and humidity, no diseases were found in Willie Jones, he was taken to the hospital conscious. Doctors watched him for 24 days and let him go home, finding no explanation for his phenomenon.
10. Infants begin to feed at 4 - 6 months, not because it is "time" or the onset of a special stage in development. There is very little iron in breast milk, which is necessary for the development of the baby's body. Nature has provided for this - in the last weeks of pregnancy, the fetus accumulates iron so as not to need it in the first months of life. The reserve is enough for several months, and then it is time to get iron from additional food.
11. “50 shades of gray” is far from the limit. The eye can distinguish up to 500 shades of this color. At the same time, up to 8% of men and 0.8% of women are color blind - they have poor or no color discrimination. The average healthy person can distinguish up to 100,000 colors, a trained professional - up to a million. In women, there is a rather rare genetic anomaly - an extra retinal cone. Such women distinguish tens of millions of colors.
12. A frequently repeated statement: “A person uses his brain only by 10%” is true in its direct meaning and borders on stupidity in the implied subtext: “But if only to the fullest, then he could oh-ho!” Indeed, solving any single problem, we use about one-tenth of the brain's resources. However, this rarely happens in an isolated room without external stimuli. Parallel to music or TV. Typing text on the keyboard, a person knocks on the keys as if mechanically, but the resources of the brain are still involved, and from time to time you have to look at the monitor. And outside the window, a subway train rumbles, the brain notes ... In practice, the brain works at 30-50% of its capabilities, 10% is devoted only to the main task. It will not be possible to use 100% of the brain power for purely physical reasons - this efficiency never happens. Long-term operation of anything with maximum load inevitably leads to breakdowns and failure.
It increased the performance of the brain
13. The egg is the largest specialized cell in the human body, and the sperm is the smallest. The first is 130 microns, the second 55 microns. At the same time, the sperm cell in the process of development has a much larger size, but by the end of maturation it seems to be compressed, providing a higher speed of movement in the battle for fertilization.
14. The ovum is also the leader in cost. You can get about $ 900 for it. A sperm donor can earn this amount only in a few years.
15. About 7-15% of people are left-handed. Such a large statistical spread is explained by the fact that until recently left-handers in school were forcibly retrained in right-handers, and now the proportion of people whose left hand is the “main” hand is constantly increasing. The proportion of left-handers and right-handers has changed over long historical intervals. In the Stone Age, left-handers and right-handers were equally divided. With the advent of more sophisticated tools and specialization of labor, the proportion of left-handers decreased - in the Bronze Age there were only about 30%. Genetics at the conception and birth of left-handers frolic with might and main. Two left-handed parents have a 46% chance of giving birth to a left-hander, a left-hander-right-hander pair - 17%, and even two right-handers have a 2% chance of giving birth to a left-hander. Lefties are more creative people. This is due to the interaction of the cerebral hemispheres with the senses and body parts - such connections are more diverse in left-handers. But right-handed people live on average 9 years longer.
Famous lefties
16. Human hair color is determined by only two pigments: reddish pheomelanin and dark eumelanin. There are far fewer blonde people in the world than dark-haired people, and the rarest natural hair color is red. At any given time, 9 out of 10 hairs grow, and the longer the hair, the slower it grows. The average person loses up to 150 hairs a day, while a new one immediately begins to grow from the follicle of the lost hair (unless, of course, there are no pathologies). In total, up to 150,000 hairs grow on a person's head, and fair-haired people have much less hair.
17. Erythrocytes - red blood cells - are composed mainly of hemoglobin. Each erythrocyte lives on average for about 125 days, carrying carbon dioxide to the lungs and oxygen to the tissues. Every second, 2.5 million red blood cells are destroyed in the liver and spleen, but this number is negligible - twice as many red blood cells are contained in one cubic millimeter of blood.
18. Most of the blood per unit weight at any given moment is in the kidneys, heart and brain. The liver, which seems to be responsible for blood, has only twice as much of it as in ordinary striated muscles.
19. Producers of cotton bread, rubber sausages, stringy cheese and other joys of a fast-dissolving civilization may well adopt the slogan: "Eat NN - your corpse will decompose later!" Over the past half century, cemetery workers have noticed that buried bodies have begun to decompose much more slowly. Modern products successfully act as preservatives for the human body.
20. From the point of view of chemistry, the human body consists of about 60 elements, and this number can fluctuate. However, the lion's share of body weight is oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus. The rest of the elements account for a total of 1.5%. If you hypothetically sell a human body by disassembling it into substances, you can gain about $ 145 - after all, we are 90% water. Products in the case of the human body are orders of magnitude more expensive than raw materials. If a healthy person is “disassembled for parts”, you can earn about $ 150 million. The most expensive are DNA (about 7.5 grams can be extracted at $ 1.3 million per gram) and bone marrow.
