10 x very bizarre facts about your body

Ready to be in shock?

1. You get cancer every day. Every day, one in five cells in your body is at risk of developing into cancer. However, the immune system captures and kills those cells over and over again. Every time your body saves itself. Most cells replicate billions of times with nothing ever going wrong.
2. There is no race if you look at the body purely biologically. The color of the skin only depends on your location on the globe. Throughout evolution we have been ‘depigmented’ (become paler) or ‘repigmented’ (darkened again) due to a sunnier or less sunny climate, or as a result of genetic mutation by alien peoples. Incidentally, our skin is our largest organ, of which we lose half a kilo (!) every year in the form of skin flakes.
3. We all lose on average between fifty and a hundred head hairs per day (!). For some men, that number is much higher: they become bald because their hormone dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, gets upset by ageing. The only effective remedy is castration. Wait, what?
4. Our memory is totally unreliable. In this way we can vividly recall certain major events, but we invent new details that do not add up at all. Moreover, you can ‘fool’ someone into a memory, research has shown. Marketing and advertising in particular appear to be very interested in this…
5. All strands of DNA from our cells form a ribbon of 16 billion kilometers in a row.
6. We blink about 14,000 times a day with our eyes, which are closed for about 23 minutes a day.
7. Researchers not so long ago discovered that saliva contains a natural painkiller, albeit in small amounts: opiorphine. Advantage: it is natural and unlike morphine and some other painkillers not addictive. Attempts are now being made to synthetically produce opiorphine or to find drugs to increase the dose in the saliva. And just another fact: in the past people had their wounds licked by dogs, because that relieved the pain…
8. Your eyes only see a small part of reality. When we see something, only 10% of the information comes from the optic nerve. The brain itself provides the rest of the information, which gives meaning to that 10% and fills in what we don’t ‘really’ see. What’s more, there’s a fifth of a second delay in the information being passed on, so the brain compensates for that shortcoming: it constantly predicts what the world will look like within a fraction of a moment in the future. Which means that we don’t literally live ‘in the moment’.
9. Our skin is constantly peeling: we lose about 25,000 flakes per minute
10. Adult at 21? Not really. The synapses in the brain, or the points at which two neurons communicate with each other, only appear to be fully developed from the age of 25. So the years in which we are still immature actually last much longer than people usually think. Hence the impulsive and less thoughtful behavior and the greater sensitivity to alcohol under the age of 25.

Read more? These facts about your body come from The Body, a travel guide, a beautiful and funny book about the functioning of the body, full of interesting information. Bill Bryson, Atlas Contact, €29.99.

Els de PeacockGettyImagesMarch 9, 202312:00