The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Your body produces about two million red blood cells every second. And yet most of us walk around completely oblivious to the extraordinary biological miracle happening inside us. Bill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, invites you on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body, revealing the astonishing facts and fascinating stories behind how it all works.
This isn’t your high school biology textbook. Bryson brings his signature wit and storytelling prowess to the science of anatomy and physiology, making complex medical concepts accessible and genuinely entertaining. You’ll discover how your body heals itself, the remarkable efficiency of your organs, and the surprising ways things can go wrong.
Packed with extraordinary facts and irresistible anecdotes, The Body explores everything from your brain to your bones, your immune system to your microbiome. Bryson draws on interviews with leading scientists and doctors, weaving together cutting-edge research with the colorful history of medical discovery. You’ll learn about the pioneers who risked everything to understand how we work, and the mysteries that still confound modern medicine.
Whether you’re curious about what makes you tick or simply want to appreciate the wobble of flesh you inhabit, this book will transform the way you think about yourself. Informative, entertaining, and surprisingly funny, The Body is the ultimate owner’s manual for every occupant.
Interesting Facts
One Million Red Blood Cells Every Second: Your body manufactures about one million red blood cells every single second you’re alive. Each of these tireless travelers will circle your body approximately 150,000 times, logging about a hundred miles of travel before wearing out after four months of service.
A Passionate Kiss Transfers Billions: When you kiss someone passionately, you exchange up to one billion bacteria between mouths, along with tiny amounts of protein, salt, fat, and miscellaneous food particles. It’s one of the most intimate microbial exchanges humans engage in.
Your Heart Pumps Astonishing Volumes: Every single day, your heart pushes 1,680 gallons of blood through your body. That’s more liquid than you’ll put in your car in an entire year, and it does this relentlessly, beating about 100,000 times daily without ever taking a break.
Building a Human Costs a Fortune: According to Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry, assembling all 59 elements needed to construct a human being would cost about $151,578. Just six elements (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous) account for 99.1% of what makes you, but the carbon alone costs $54,000.
Your Saliva Contains a Powerful Painkiller: Human saliva contains opiorphin, a natural painkiller that’s six times more potent than morphine. Scientists still don’t understand why our bodies produce it, especially since it’s incredibly diluted in our mouths.
Bones Outperform Reinforced Concrete: Pound for pound, your bones are four times stronger than reinforced concrete when it comes to bearing weight. Even more remarkably, they grow bigger and stronger with exercise and use, just like muscles do.
Daily Cancer Battles Happen Silently: Between one and five of your 37.2 trillion cells turn cancerous every single day, but your immune system almost always captures and destroys these malignant cells before they can cause problems. This silent war happens constantly without you ever knowing.
Sitting Too Much Doubles Mortality Risk: Being a committed couch potato (sitting six or more hours daily) increases mortality risk by nearly 20% for men and almost double that for women. Strangely, it doesn’t matter how much you exercise the rest of the time, the sitting damage persists.
Your Skin Can’t Actually Feel Wetness: Our skin lacks receptors for detecting wetness, only thermal sensors. When you sit on a wet spot, you can’t tell if it’s truly wet or just cold, which is why that ambiguous sensation feels so confusing.
Women Face Autoimmune Disease Overwhelmingly: A staggering 80% of all autoimmune diseases occur in women, even though women are generally healthier and live longer than men. Women are ten times more likely to get lupus and fifty times more likely to suffer Hashimoto’s thyroid disease than men.
Sleep Deprivation Costs Billions Annually: The US economy loses approximately $60 billion per year to sleep deprivation because exhausted workers are less productive. Americans now sleep an average of two fewer hours per night than they did 50 years ago, and this deficit can be fatal.
You Consume 60 Tons in a Lifetime: Over the course of an average lifetime, you’ll eat approximately 60 tons of food. Modern processed foods are so calorie-dense that we can meet our daily energy needs without getting nearly the variety of nutrients our hunter-gatherer ancestors consumed.
Quotes
"The most remarkable part of all is your DNA. You have a metre of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single fine strand it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic." - Bill Bryson
"Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book." - Bill Bryson
"There are thousands of things that can kill us—slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization—and we escape every one of them but one. For most of us, that’s not a bad deal." - Bill Bryson
"I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life." - Bill Bryson
"All that is really going in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It is your brain that reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and vivifies them for your pleasure. Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony." - Bill Bryson
"Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them." - Bill Bryson
"An interesting thing about touch is that the brain doesn’t just tell you how something feels, but how it ought to feel. That’s why the caress of a lover feels wonderful, but the same touch by a stranger would feel creepy or horrible." - Bill Bryson
"The great paradox of the brain is that everything you know about the world is provided to you by an organ that has itself never seen that world. The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner. It has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunshine or a soft breeze." - Bill Bryson
"In breathing, as in everything in life, the numbers are staggering – indeed fantastical. Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that’s 2.5 × 1022) molecules of oxygen – so many that with a day’s breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived." - Bill Bryson
"Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them." - Bill Bryson
"Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth. The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto." - Bill Bryson
"Altogether, according to RSC calculations, fifty-nine elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of these — carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus — account for 99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected. Who would have thought that we would be incomplete without some molybdenum inside us, or vanadium, manganese, tin, and copper?" - Bill Bryson
"Even when you do nearly everything wrong, your body maintains and preserves you. Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them. Think of that. A couple of dozen times a week, well over a thousand times a year, you get the most dreaded disease of our age, and each time your body saves you." - Bill Bryson
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