The Body Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus The Body

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Zusammenfassung von The Body

Name: The Body
Rating: 4.5 (286 reviews)
Author: Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson

A Guide for Occupants

4.5 (286 Bewertungen)

29 Min.

Themen

Erkrankungen Wandel & Evolution Der Körper Das Gehirn Medizin & Naturheilmittel Ernährungsformen Biowissenschaften Schlaf

Inhaltsübersicht

The Body
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What’s in it for me? Find out what’s going on inside you right now.

When was the last time you thought about your body and how it works? We rarely stop to consider just how mysterious our bodies actually are, but we should. They’re mysterious even to the doctors and scientists that devote their lives to studying them. The human body is spectacularly complex and profoundly strange, and it should fill us with wonder.

In these blinks, you’ll discover more about the elements that make up each and every one of us, from the brain and the heart right down to the thousands of species of microbes that live both in and on us. You’ll learn about the ambiguous role of sleep, the difficulties in managing a balanced diet, and the vital part that hormones play in everything from regulating your sex-drive to generating feelings of affection.

So let’s go on a journey through your body!

Along the way, you’ll learn

how much it would cost to build the actor Benedict Cumberbatch from scratch;
the connection between walking on two feet and the pain of childbirth; and
the category of disease from which you’re most likely to die.

The human body is a miraculous thing.

Imagine that you had to build a human being from scratch. How would you go about it? What building blocks would you need? How much would it cost?

Well, in 2013 the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry took on the bizarre task of estimating the specific cost of building actor Benedict Cumberbatch. According to their calculations, you’d need 59 different elements, although only six in any serious quantity – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous. Those elements would cost you £96,546.79 - labor and taxes not included.

But that’s only one estimate. An episode of the science program Nova, broadcast by US network PBS in 2012, pegged the cost of building a human at a mere $168.

Even the cost of the materials for building a human body, then, is uncertain – but more to the point, even with all those materials, the actual act of building a human being would still be beyond us. All we’d have would be a pile of inert elements. The miracle of life isn’t something you can create simply by sticking stuff together.

In fact, we can’t even say with certainty where life begins. The cell is the essential life-giving unit that we’re all made up of. But how exactly do cells coordinate themselves to create a functioning human being? Science still can’t tell us the full story – which is wondrous in itself.

Science can tell us a lot, though. Inside the nucleus of each cell is a meter of DNA. Made up of chromosomes and genes, DNA contains the information needed to make you. It’s amazing to think that your DNA is the product of generation after generation of transmission: the information encoded in your genes links you directly to your ancestors of some three billion years ago.

Some people think of the body as a machine, but it’s so much more mysterious and impressive than that. On all the time, it usually goes for decades without needing repairs, and all it needs to run is water and food. Plus, it’s conscious.

It’s also remarkable to think that we arrived here through evolution, having started off as nothing more than a few cells in the ocean. All the developments that humans have undergone since that time have basically been wonderful accidents.

We’re not alone: each of us contains trillions of microbes, which we need to survive.

We all owe a debt of thanks to the uncountable microscopic things that live inside us. Without them, we wouldn’t just die, we would never have existed in the first place.

You have trillions upon trillions of microbes both inside you and on you. There are around 40 thousand different species, nine hundred of which live in your nostrils alone.

Your head contains one of the most extraordinary things anywhere: your brain.

The body as a whole is amazing, but the brain is particularly amazing. It’s a unique structure, no matter how you look at it. It’s 75–80 percent water, strangely soft, and permanently sealed away from the outside world that it lets you comprehend.

Our brains work hard. The myth that we only use 10 percent of our brain’s full capacity at any given moment isn’t true: we use the whole thing. In fact, it takes up 20 percent of all our energy – for a newborn baby, that number is 65 percent – yet it is highly efficient, needing only as many calories per day as you’d get from a blueberry muffin. The brains of other animals, such as dogs and hamsters, are made up of the same components, and the size or ours is nothing special either – relatively speaking, they’re the same size as those of mice. But the 86 billion or so neurons it contains form trillions of connections with each other, adding up to something quite remarkable.

Our understanding of the heart and blood has improved, but still has far to go.

We’ve got the heart all wrong. It isn’t where we think it is, on the left-hand side of the chest – it’s more towards the center. It also isn’t shaped like the standard symbol that represents it. What’s more, it’s not really a very romantic sort of organ at all, and has nothing to do with our emotions. Just as well, considering it has such a singular and crucial job to do: to push blood around our bodies. In our lifetimes, our hearts will get through 3.5 billion beats.

Given that it weighs less than a pound, it’s remarkable that it manages to do this. Your blood has to travel as much as four feet or so, down to your feet and back up again, going against the pull of gravity. The powerful thrusts of the heart dispense about 260 liters of blood every hour.

Hormones are vital yet mysterious chemicals manufactured within the body.

Hormones deliver chemical messages around the body. They’re a diverse group, but can be broadly defined as anything made in one part of the body that causes something to happen in another. Partly because of their diversity, it’s comparatively recently that scientists have started to focus on them. Since 1958, the number of known hormones has risen from about 20 to at least 80.

Nothing better illustrates the importance of hormones than diabetes. Diabetics are unable to produce enough insulin, the hormone that regulates the amount of sugar that’s present in our blood. As late as the 1920s, diabetes was effectively a death sentence: without insulin, sugar levels would just rise and rise, which would eventually cause death. The only defense was to stop eating.

Humans have evolved a uniquely flexible structure that lets us walk on two feet.

How many bones do you have? Approximately 206, but it actually varies: one in eight people has a thirteenth pair of ribs, for instance. Plus there are the sesamoid bones, which are like sesame-seeds, mostly very small and are found in our hands, feet, and elsewhere. They’re not included in that calculation.

So what do all these bones do? More than just hold us together, that’s for sure. Bones offer us protection, make blood cells and store chemicals. In the early 2000s it was discovered that they even make a hormone, osteocalcin. Incidentally, this may explain why regular exercise, which strengthens bones, also helps to reduce the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease.

You are literally what you eat – and that includes all that sugar.

Cooking is more than a popular pastime. It’s also another of the major things that separates us from other primates. Cooking softens our food, and is the reason we’ve evolved smaller teeth and a comparatively weak jaw. It also kills off toxins, makes stuff taste better, and frees up time that we’d otherwise spend chewing. Plus, it lets us extract more energy from food.

Eating isn’t just about getting energy, though. We also need to take in vitamins and minerals. Vitamins are found in living things like plants or animals, and minerals in inorganic things like soil and water. In essence, they’re chemicals that we need but can’t make ourselves.

Our body tracks the time of day so it can tell us when to sleep.

Nobody knows why sleep is so important. Yet on average it takes up a third of our lives.

Sleep seems to do a lot of things for the body: it’s a sort of reset for memories, hormones, the immune system, and a lot more. But why do we have to lose consciousness while the body does all this? It’s not clear, yet there must be a reason. As sleep researcher Allan Rechtschaffen points out, either sleep does something extremely important, or it’s an evolutionary mistake of truly unique proportions.

Medical research on women lags behind, and childbirth research is still in its infancy.

Gender science is a comparatively recent development. The Y chromosome, the companion to the X chromosome that males have and females don’t, was only discovered in 1905. Ironically, Nettie Stevens, the female scientist who made the discovery, gets none of the credit because a man also discovered it at roughly the same time.

Another manifestation of sexism in science is the fact that women have been studied far less than men. Until recently, many drug trials excluded women in case their menstrual cycles happened to skew results – yet accounting for the menstrual cycle is important, as it’s a potential factor in why some drugs affect women differently than men.

We’re winning the fight against communicable diseases – but other diseases will claim us instead.

2011 was a notable year in the history of disease. It was the first time there were more deaths from non-communicable diseases – diseases that can’t be transmitted from human to human, like heart failure and strokes – than from communicable ones, like viruses. This points to progress in medical science, but also to the increased role our lifestyles play in our deaths.

Many communicable diseases were deadly until recent times. In the West, we have successfully subdued many of these – in the US, for example, diphtheria once killed 15 thousand people a year but is now vanishingly rare – but have only rendered one disease extinct. That, thankfully, was smallpox, probably the worst disease humans have ever faced because of its rampant infectiousness – it killed some 500 million people in the 20th century alone before being declared officially eradicated in 1980.

We’ve gotten better at avoiding death, but it comes for us all.

Overall, since the turn of the 20th century, medicine has made astounding progress. As Harvard physiologist Lawrence Henderson has noted, at some point between 1900 and 1912, a patient’s chances of getting something useful out of a visit to the doctor suddenly jumped above 50 percent for the first time. It’s just gotten better from there.

It’s not just medicine that has improved, though, as the British epidemiologist Thomas McKeown hypothesized in the 1960s. He realized that, since the 19th century, there had been a decline in deaths caused by many diseases, including tuberculosis and measles, even before there were any effective treatments for them. The reason for this was everything else that had improved in life: better sanitation, better diet, and even the railways, which meant that food could arrive in cities much fresher.

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Worum geht es in The Body?

The Body: A Guide for Occupants (2019) is an entertaining and fact-filled account of how we all work. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson explains the astonishing ways in which our bodies are put together, and what goes on inside them.

Bestes Zitat aus The Body

... the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.

—Bill Bryson

Wer The Body lesen sollte

Popular science fans
Biology and medicine enthusiasts
Anyone keen to learn more about their own body

Über den Autor

Bill Bryson is a best-selling American author who lived in the UK for many years. His books include Notes from a Small Island, which in 2003 was voted the book that best represents England, and A Short History of Nearly Everything, which won both the Aventis and Descartes prizes.

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