12 Reasons You Have An Amazing Body

(If you don't mind me saying.)

Hello! This is Everything is Amazing, a newsletter about science and wonder.

Today, in something of a sequel to this, let’s talk about the rest of you.

1)

In early September of 1978, French entertainer Michel Lotito sits down to one of his favourite meals - one he’s regretfully concluded is a little too rich for his constitution to enjoy more than three times a year.

His first act is to cut his food up into pieces one or two cubic centimetres thick (just small enough to pass through Lotito’s remarkable gullet without chewing). This isn’t easy, since it requires an electric power-saw.

His first chosen delicacy: a steel bicycle chain, for the tragic reason that unlike every other item on his menu today, “it has taste”.

Once that’s slipped down with the aid of a big gulp of mineral oil, Lotito tackles the remainder of his banquet. It consists of more than 15 pounds (7 kg) of metal, constituting the rest of an entire bicycle sans the rear wheel, pedals, handle-bars and crank-gear - and once he’s finished, he’ll be paid $5,000 by the Regina, Saskatchewan fair he’s the star attraction at. This is how Lotito makes his living.

Of all the inadvisable courses of action this edition of my newsletter might suggest to the terminally incautious, eating raw metal is particularly daft. Not only did Lotito suffer from a recognised if unusually bizarre eating disorder, he also had exceptionally robust guts, with stomach and intestine linings twice as thick as the average person, protecting him from internal tears and punctures that would land you or I into an emergency room.

(Not that any of this was comfortable for him. He revealed to Guinness World Records he’d built a high tolerence for pain from the age of eight, through “sophrology, a combination of self-hypnosis and other relaxation techniques that can assist pain control”.)

All this sounds completely absurd until you consider the nature of the average human stomach.

What we call “gastric juice” is partly hydrochloric acid - the same stuff you were warned about in chemistry lessons at school - surrounded by thick and continually replenished layers of mucus awash with bicarbonate (the ingredient in many antacids), which helps protect our sensitive stomach lining from being eaten away by all this fierce acidity.

Meanwhile, anything else entering our stomachs is in for an astonishingly rough time - and that seems to include metal, as one 1997 study suggested:

“Razor blades, disc batteries, and pennies were incubated in simulated gastric juice at 37 degrees C. The weights of the objects were recorded hourly. When no change could be detected, the solution was subjected to mass spectrometry to verify absence of effect. The findings were correlated with clinical observation in one patient who swallowed razor blades repeatedly.

Results: Dissolution of the razor blade was proportional to the duration of acid immersion. At 24 hours, the blades weighed 63% of the original weight…. The thickened back of the single-edged blade totally dissolved in 2 hours.”

- “In vitro effects of simulated gastric juice on swallowed metal objects: implications for practical management,” Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, August 1997.

(That ‘patient who swallowed razor blades repeatedly’? I think I know who that might be, considering he was alive and well at the time, & would only die of natural causes, aged 55, in 2006.)

So - next time you sit down for a meal in a nice restaurant, take a good look around you. It’s quite possible that, with the right amount of time, effort and health-destroying recklessness, you’re entirely capable of digesting most of the room you’re in, and most of everything in it.

Bon appetit.

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2)

“It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.”

- Bill Bryson, A Short History Of Nearly Everything.

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3)

As a human being, you’re already aware of how marvellous it is that you can use your breath to warm your hands up and to cool them down.

However, here's another way to achieve the former that I never knew until I started reading Ryan McCormick, M.D.:

“Cold hands? Deep breaths. Like taking 5 seconds to breathe in, and then 6-7 to breathe out. Within a minute this can magically tame the sympathetic tone in our whole bodies, and we feel a vital warmth returning to the outposts of our cold hands and fingers. With so many nerve endings concentrated in our fingertips, this warming has an outsized effect on our sense of wellbeing.”

Cold hands, warm and stressed heart

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4)

Substituting “blood vessels” for a more precise “capillaries,” the answer is…well, nobody quite knows, because nobody’s tried it. I personally feel this is for the best.

By the way, the beloved and opt-quoted “100,000 km long” is from an estimate in 1922 (!) by August Krogh, winner of a Nobel Prize for Medicine, and - ehhhh, yeah. Probably not? 10,000-ish km is probably much nearer. But that’s still an astonishing amount, and I hope we’ll continue to be wise enough to leave it there, thanks.

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5)

A few weeks ago, I had the honour of being on a panel for the virtual yearly conference of the American Society Of Journalists And Authors, alongside the supremely accomplished Erika Hayasaki and Pamela Weintraub, to talk about the power of braiding multiple narratives together in a non-fiction essay.

I’d honestly struggle to explain to you exactly what I was doing there, considering my lack of experience in writing for big publications! For actionable essaying advice, you’re much better off subscribing to Erika’s newsletter - she’s an experienced longform journalist and a professor at the University of California in its Literary Journalism Program.

But as a fan of the narrative grab-bag approach, and because I also teach storytelling, I frequently challenge myself to weave together as many interesting story threads as possible to discover if something readable can emerge (for example: teddy bears, anthropomorphism and my favourite video game).

This is messy and imprecise work, at least for me. I often feel like I’m madly wafting fog around, trying to make shapes that look recognisable enough to tell me I’ve stumbled on something workable.

But there’s one piece of advice I gave on the panel, and I’ll continue to give to all new writers until I run out of breath, and it’s this:

Inside you are two writers. Unfortunately, you’re the dumb one.

By “you” here, I mean you, the conscious, fleetingly aware, hopefully somewhat upright version of yourself that regularly interacts with the wider world.

Because modern life is a primal scream given material form, this version of you is always tight on time and has a similarly throttled mental bandwidth. Any creative demands you put upon it will yield limited results.

But have no fear! Because you’re a tag-team! Inside you is another mind, a deeper you, sitting in pristine darkness and silence, undistracted by the noisy world pressing against your senses, and with the ability to think about stuff in a way you just can’t.

In this sense, it’s functionally a lot smarter than you are. It’s what you’d be like if the whole world would just ****ing well shut up for five minutes.

Unfortunately, you can’t hear what Deeper You is saying. Your conscious thoughts are far too noisy, and this quiet, wise voice is always getting drowned out. It can only communicate with you indirectly - say, by churning up the emotions in your body and sending mysterious ‘gut feelings’ your way, or by smuggling an idea into your overheated brain through a dusty cognitive side-door you hardly ever use.

And while you’re thinking about a particular problem, it can’t.

Your role in the great creative team of You & Other You is simple.

(a) You should do all the necessary and relatively mindless legwork - all that research, background reading, notemaking, scribbling down interesting ideas and so on - everything your deeper mind can’t do itself , because you have control of all this outward-facing apparatus….

(b) …and then you should stop thinking about the problem altogether, handing it over to that deeper-thinking self, until the regions of your mind assigned to this problem has quietened enough that Conscious But Overwhelmed You will be able to hear any message Smarter, Calmer You has sent back up the well into the daylight of consciousness.

None of this is terribly original. Writers have been speculating on the creative role of the subconscious for centuries, and it’s unlikely they’re done yet. Take author Mark Haddon’s recent realisation that he’d subconsciously built the plot of his novel around a central image from a story he’d previously abandoned, as if some deeper part of himself decided this was the right course of action, but neglected to inform the rest of him…

And as I recently wrote here, newer ideas around embodied thinking outside our brains suggest ways this might (might!) be happening.

But honestly, who knows? Not the idiot writing this newsletter. All I can say is: like any creative tool, it’s worth testing.

6)

As everyone has known since forever, human noses are utterly pathetic. Dogs have roughly forty times the olfactory receptors we have, and they’re specialised enough to be able to out-smell us numbed meatbags many millions of times over. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with a measly nasal “vocabulary” of just 10,000 different smells.

At least, that’s what researchers believed until they actually started to test this - at which point, those calculations made in the 1920s started to look embarrassingly incomplete - or, to put it another way, yet another late 19th-Century myth.

According to the first of these new studies, undertaken at Rockefeller University in New York City in 2014, our real range of discernable smells might be closer to a trillion:

“The researchers calculated that the least successful smeller in the study would be able to smell only 80 million unique scents. And the best performer had a far more sensitive sense of smell, likely able to distinguish more than a thousand trillion odors.”

What this suggests - and I’m tapping the “more work needs to be done” sign here, as always - is that our sense of smell, generally regarded as the most disposable of our senses, is potentially staggeringly more powerful than we give it credit for.

With echoes of what tetrachromacy (seeing 100 times the colours the rest of us can) might be like for the women who could train their eyes to take advantage of it, one of the study’s co-authors, neurobiologist Leslie Vosshall, noted:

"Knowing we have these capabilities, I hope people, as they go about their business, start saying, 'Hey, I can smell all these things.' Maybe the companies that make scented products will start making greater use of the human capacity and develop cleaners and perfumes with new, more interesting scents," she says. "Maybe we're going to start using those corners of our smell capacity that have just not been exercised lately."

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7)

“Our bodies are like tubes or levers or computers, but they are, above all things, like bags. Bags that are stuffed in other bags, stuffed in still more bags. Our bodies are nesting bag situations like the used bags stuffed under your kitchen sink, with the added bonus of thumbs and anxiety.”

- Bethany Brookshire, “The Human Body Is Bags, Bags and More Bags,” Scientific American.

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8)

“Kish [has] taught himself to form a broad acoustic map of his surroundings, but it’s still nowhere near the fidelity of bats (which can determine distances down to 1 centimetre, which is how they can snatch insects out the air) or of mechanical acoustic location devices like active sonar.

It’s also a very long way from Daredevil/Matt Murdock’s ability to dodge unseen punches or air-ballet his way through a brawl. But it’s certainly something - and that something requires Daniel Kish’s brain to be doing things most of ours can’t.

In 2021, Assistant Professor Lore Thaler of Durham University (England) co-led a study of 14 sighted and 12 blind people learning to echolocate using mouth clicks, the same way Kish does - and by taking brain scans of the participants before and after their training sessions, “both groups showed increased auditory ­cortex activation in response to sound in general, as well as higher gray matter density in auditory areas.”

In other words, the sound-processing parts of their minds seemed to get a boost from doing it, which is the kind of progress they expected to see if any manifested during training.

However, at the same time, the visual parts of their minds were put into action as well - suggesting that this acoustic mapping process really is, on some level, creating a spatial map inside our head:

““We weren’t sure if we would get this result in sighted people, so it was really rewarding to see it,” Thaler says. She suspects that rather than just processing visual data, this brain area takes in information from varied senses that aid spatial understanding.”

As for why you’d even want to learn this skill:

“Three months after the 2021 study, a follow-up survey found that 83 percent of blind participants who had learned echolocation reported improvements in independence and well-being. The researchers are working on disseminating the training more widely, Thaler says: “It’s a powerful sensory tool for people with vision ­impairments.””

And that training? It took just 10 weeks of echolocation training to show progress. Admittedly, that’s 2-3 hours a day, which is no mean commitment, but still - as a sign of the power of neuroplasticity…it’s an exciting glimpse of what our brains might be capable of.”

- from “How To ‘See’ The World Like Daredevil”.

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9)

Vampires may sparkle - but humans are aglow.

(A bit.)

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10)

One remarkably tedious thing I discovered about the Internet while researching this newsletter is that when you look for articles on remarkable human feats of human endurance on various search engines (and scroll past the AI summaries as fast as possible), you’ll find umpteen pieces on high-ranking fitness websites that answer this question by only using examples of men.

To properly address such a - well, I wouldn’t even call it a bias, to be honest - is the work of a newsletter much longer than this one. So I’ll just use this opportunity to once again yell about one of the most astounding performances in the history of ultrarunning, which took place in 2019:

“The British ultrarunner Jasmin Paris is celebrating after becoming the first woman to win the gruelling 268-mile Montane Spine Race along the Pennine Way. What made the performance even more extraordinary was that she shattered the course record by 12 hours – while also expressing breast milk for her baby at aid stations along the route.

Paris, a 35-year-old vet who works at the University of Edinburgh studying acute myeloid leukaemia, is well known in British endurance running circles having won the British women’s fell running championships last year as well as a series of leading ultraraces. However, her performance at the Montane Spine race was undoubtedly the best in her career as she beat all her male and female rivals in completing the course from the Edale in the Peak District to the Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish borders in 83 hours, 12 minutes and 23 seconds.”

- “Jasmin Paris becomes first woman to win 268-mile Montane Spine Race,” Sean Ingle, The Guardian.

(This was also far from being a one-off.)

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11)

The time you will spend on the toilet during your lifetime is time you cannot avoid spending. That’s the thing about bowels: there’s no arguing with them.

(Just imagine if we could talk to ourselves with the unquestionable authority of a squirming innard. How transformational that would be!)

It’s also a surprisingly considerable duration. It doesn’t feel like it on a day to day basis, but holy hell does it add up.

Calculating an average rate of 1 poop per day, each with an average time of 12 minutes, gives you 4,380 minutes or 73 hours per year. Assuming a life expectancy of 79 years old, that’ll give you a total of around 240 days on the cludgie. That’s more than half a year dropping the kids off at the pool.

I hope this makes you think - because what it makes me think is, “I really need to fit a mini-library in my bathroom.”

(You should also get a foot-stool.)

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12)

Somewhere between the folk who absolutely refuse to think about their bodies and what they do with them and put into them, and the horrifying obsessives who will go as far as grading the biome of their partner’s ‘Eye Of Sauron’ is - what?

Maybe it’s an appreciation of the everyday wonder of that incredible bag-of-bags you’ve been born into, and look out at the world through, every day of your life. It’s got you this far, against so many odds - and you know better than anyone what an absolutely journey that’s been.

Science is still learning what the human body is really capable of. It’s probably more than any of us will ever know - which, to my mind, is a good reason to raise an eyebrow at any form of technology presented, implicitly or bluntly, as “better than human”. (Especially if money is involved. 🚩🚩🚩)

And hey, never forget how your body got here:

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

- Carl Sagan, Cosmos.

Give yourself a high five. You’re one hell of a team.

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Images: Dayne Topkin; Megan Dujardin; Paul Dobson; Casey Horner.