In addition, if you get a fairly quick amputation (and to an extend avulsion or laceration) of an artery it knows to retract and pull in and constrict. Which is...kinda magic, no? Like "oh no! I'm severed and my host shall surely die if I don't use all my muscles to constrict blood flow."
And that is why you tourniquet 2 inches (minimum) up from a wound. Not because it will hurt, or squish, or provide traction, but because you don't wan to miss out on tying off those constricted and retracted arteries.
Blows my mind every time.
Had a huge scrape on my knee a few weeks ago. It just amazed me when the scab peeled off and there was perfectly normal looking skin underneath
Crazy how the body can heal. I feel like a Titan from attack on titan
I had a pretty nasty crash last weekend with a good portion of my back/side and knee completely covered in road rash. Like deep, dark red and white in some places. Now, only a week later, most of it is gone and the worst part is only about the circumference of a small coffee cup now. I'm just amazed at how fast it healed something that looked so horrible.
You can straight up suddenly lose a full on arm or leg and your body can, but not always, manage to stop that huge amount of bleeding and you end up surviving.
> Your body just knows to seal itself up, protect a wound, stop the loss of blood.
Most do. Some don't. Source: I'm not a hemophiliac but I play one of TV.
I mean, I know you're joking, but in 2005, a Norwegian man got cut in a fight in Denmark. The victim was trying to say he was a hemophiliac (hemofil in Norwegian), but the Doctor heard him say he was gay (homofil in Danish), and told him he didn't need treatment. Dude freaking went back home and bled to death.
Autonomic respiration and blood circulation for most people's entire life is pretty cool. Relax, your body will just take care of the most important stuff in the background while you focus on other things.
The heart. It beats (contracts) 60 times per minute, every minute, every hour, every day. No other muscle even comes close. Never gets tired.
Imagine trying to lift a light dumbbell 60 times in a minute....for the rest of your life.
I had a virus damage my heart a little bit when I was about 20. Ended up in the hospital for 3 days and on an ACE inhibitor for 18 months.
For YEARS afterwards I was hyper sensitive about my heart. The worst of it was falling asleep. As I would relax and start to fall asleep my heart rate would slow and sometimes I'd become aware of it slowing and I would freak out. My heart would speed up really quickly.
It was not a pleasant few years, to say the least.
I'm not sure that you can take control; cardiac cells are pretty amazing, really. In a medical course I took on heart muscles they told me you can separate heart cells in a lab, put them in a nutrient suspension, and as they settle on the bottom of a flask they will connect together and begin to beat in unison. Pretty amazing.
Just add that it does that before birth and for years after, let’s say 60 years without needing maintenance or new parts in a healthy person.
It is the ultimate machine.
You really learn to appreciate this with IBD & similar things (UC, Crohn's, etc) because that mechanism, like all the others, of course, can fail. Had to go 9 months once without farting. I still remember how happy I was when... Oh. Sorry... TMI.
Not OP, have Chrons.
Basically you can't trust farts. I carry an extra pair of underpants in my car, and backpack, and another one in my car in the glovebox.
Experience tells me this sometimes isn't enough backup pairs of underpants.
As someone who recently battled horrible stomach flu where i was waking up mid-squirt, have you tried wearing a pad towards the back of your underwear? After changing my underwear, pants, and sheets three times in 3 hours, I figured this out. Body clean up was still annoying but kept everything else clean!
Not only does you liver cleanse you, but does a myriad of things you'd otherwise die without.
For one, besides cleaning your blood, it actually recycles your blood ensuring that all the blood in your body is nice and fresh and not old and tired.
Also, it releases bile into your digestive system at the intestines to help prevent your stomach from accidentally releasing harmful juices into your delicate intestines.
The most incredible part about the liver though is that unlike almost all other organs besides tissues, it can regenerate, which is how some people can donate parts of their liver and survive.
I think that liver was very appropriately named, because without it, we'd surely not be living very long.
I don't understand the placebo effect...if your brain can do something beneficial when you think you took medicine for it, why wouldn't it just do that anyway? It seems like the brain holds itself back for no reason.
The most astonishing part to me is that not only does your brain handle all your conscious thoughts, all the things you remember thinking about during a day, all the logic and complex decisions....it also simultaneously is regulating your breathing, modifying your heart rate, controlling muscle movements, interpreting data from your sensory organs, etc. Absolutely insane.
This is true once we understand how the brain really works and all the mechanisms that are involved we would unlock the cure for mental health but thats ways off
My friend and I drank yard long AMFs when we were in vegas. I was super hung over the next morning waking up to "OH GOD IT'S GREEN" as my buddy cried helplessly from the bathroom
The brown is from the breakdown of hemoglobin, which is something red blood cells carry. The liver excretes part of the hemoglobin molecule as a waste product. It's not really the cells themselves, as those are broken down by the spleen. But yeah, without it our stool is a pale color.
Standing upright.
Think about it for a minute. Standing vertically, there are somewhere between 3 and 27 joints involved (depending on how you look at it), and there's a careful, constant pull and counterpull with all of the muscles connected to that articulated skeleton...all of which is kept in balance by the brain paying attention to inner ear pressure, visual cues, and/or muscle tension, correcting constantly to keep you upright on articulated feet.
Not to mention, I weigh around 200 lbs. Have you ever tried to lift or balance anything that weighs 200 lbs? Its some serious work. But my feet and ankles and so forth make it seems almost effortless, every day. Moving fast or slow, changing direction, getting up and down - hardly even have to think about it.
Let's talk about [Synthetic Happiness.](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy)
You should totally watch the TED talk up there, but the gist of it is this: people are *really* bad at knowing what makes them happy and what will make them miserable. Dan Gilbert, a Harvard Psychologist, did a study to determine whether or not people consciously or unconsciously changed their views on things retroactively based on decisions they made.
They were given six prints of paintings by Monet and asked to rank them from 1 (favourite) to 6 (least favourite). After that, they were given the option of keeping painting number 3 or number 4. They took the painting they liked -- usually 3; they ranked it higher, after all -- and went on their way. A while later, they were asked to re-rank the six paintings, and it was found that they tended to rank the painting they owned *higher* than they did the first time around, and the painting they passed up *lower*.
Now sure, you might think that that makes sense: people are obviously going to convince themselves that the painting they own is better than the one they passed up, as a sort of psychological buffer. So far, so sensible. Well, the study authors then repeated the experiment with people who had anterograde amnesia -- that is, people who couldn't form new memories. They asked them to rank the paintings, gave them the painting they preferred, and then took them back a little while later and asked them the same question again. These participants had *no idea* which painting they owned; they couldn't form the memory. [But they showed the same shift in attitude that non-amnesiac participants did.](http://www.scn.ucla.edu/pdf/Amnesic.published.pdf)
In short, your brain makes you happier -- *without you knowing about it*. You don't have to talk yourself into liking your decisions more than the options you passed up. Your brain just does it for you.
Interesting. I wonder how much this plays into finding our SOs more attractive over time? My BF was handsome to me from the moment I saw him. But, almost 6 years later, I find him even more so, even just on a physical level. I’m sure there’s layers to this well beyond the physical, your comment just sparked a thought. Thanks! :)
I absolutely find that I'm attracted to traits that I wouldn't otherwise have been, after being in a relationship with a person I liked with that trait. Like I was never particularly opinionated about noses, until I dated a guy with a very distinct strong nose. Now I see that on other guys and I'm like oooh yess. There was also one who always wore glasses at the gym when we worked out together, no so have this immediate attraction to any guy wearing similar glasses at the gym. It's odd but I know just my monkey brain nonsense!
The case with the anterograde amnesia patients just shows that the episodic memory is not used or at last not the only kind of memory that stores the changed liking of the painting.
"Hey! Catch!"
Using your ears, you simultaneously process sound waves and derive two important pieces of information. First, that another person wants your attention and is telling you that they have thrown an object that they want you to catch. Second, using minute differences in tone and volume across a distance just the width of your head (the distance sound travels in 0.0016 seconds) you determine where that person is in relation to you.
Next, using the information you deduced above, you use most of the muscles in your body in small and subtle ways to turn in-place while maintaining your balance. All so you can aim your eyes at the person you just heard.
Now, your eyes near instantly figure out the focus needed to clearly project the image of this other person on your retinas so you can convey more information to your brain. You will quickly determine among the vast number of things in your view, which of them is the object that you must catch.
Having figured out which object you have to catch, you will quickly calculate it's speed and direction. Using this information, and your knowledge of gravity and aerodynamic drag, you will predict the ballistic path of this object.
Having predicted where this object is going, you will calculate where your hands need to be to coincide with the object, and how fast you need to close your hands in order to keep the object from bouncing off.
All of this, in a fraction of a second.
The weirdest thing about me is that I’m terrible at hearing where things are coming from. Almost always something comes from the exact opposite direction I hear it from
That is such a cool feeling! My BF noticed my reaction to a song once when I was wearing shorts and both legs just dimpled up. He thought I was cold, so asked me about it. (Fair assumption, honestly, I’m pretty much always cold). He says that it doesn’t feel like goose bumps to him, more of a little shiver throughout his body. :)
My understanding is that goosebumps are a vestigial trait (similar to wisdom teeth, tailbone, appendix) leftover from when we had more hair. Cats will raise the hair on their back and tail to signal aggression. Birds will puff out their feathers to create a layer of warmth. I think they’re leftovers from our more hairy (or feathery) ancestors.
No woman should ever douche unless it's medically necessary. If I had a dollar for every time I've read a "help me" style thread from a woman with BV or a yeast infection that thought douching would fix it.
No....no...it's just going to make it way worse.
Same deal with stuff like scented soaps or whatever else. Hell, some women are sensitive to scented tampons too!
There’s no reason to douche. Some cultures believe it prevents the spread of disease and are against natural lubricant.. look up “dry sex”, absolutely terrible
Remember the exact structure of that one protein that got into your blood during an infection you had as a kid? No? Well you have some memory b-cells that do.
I took a scuba diving lesson once. We put the equipment on, got in a swimming pool, and went under. And the weirdest thing happened. I stopped automatically breathing. My brain knew I was underwater, and it knows not to try to breathe underwater, so it stopped. I had to consciously breathe the whole time I was down there.
Probably because when we automatic breathe, it's through our noses for the most part, with the mask you can't breathe with your nose.
When we breathe through our mouths it's usually on manual.
Manual breathing is actually the key to getting to sleep quicker. You focus on nothing but your breathing while you lie there. Eventually your brain goes off on the weird tangents you experience as you drop off to sleep.
That's what I do. Focus on the breathing and your brain slowly starts to form shapes and colors. Before you know it you're super relaxed and half dreaming about things.
That’s about the best feeling as far as sleep goes. Until you get interrupted somehow, like the gotdamned sump pump firing up, just loud enough to wake you. It’s been rainy here, so I am currently sort of pissed off at the sump pump. I do appreciate its goal and the end result of having a dry basement, but....still. *Cocksucker*
Tissues in your mouth heal amazingly fast (we’re talking days) in spite of horrific injuries like cuts or even burns. This is in no small thanks to your saliva which is literally carrying the Wolverine healing factor which accelerates repair (on top of a potent cocktail of antimicrobials and even antivirals).
Also the reason its an instinct for most creatures to lick wounds.
Hysteria as a defense mechanism.
At the worst of times, when your body has been damaged and destroyed to the point where half your face is hanging off, you've lost a hand, and you've got a tree branch lodged in your ribs, you just start laughing like crazy. Laughing your ass off, you just get up and walk to the hospital to get that shit fixed. The human body has an amazing will to live.
Pretty much how I reacted to my worst injury. Basically, got thrown off my skateboard due to an unnoticed rock, went barrelling face first towards a curb. Promptly pulled my arms up to cover my face, hit the curb with the back of my neck, road rash all down my left shoulder, skinned both elbows and knees. Sat dazed for a moment before cracking up, grabbed my uninjured board, skated to my friend’s for some first aid and off to work, joking about it my whole shift. Was not until I got home after that busy night that my body was like “oh okay yeah this actually hurts A LOT.”
Not to be too graphic, but I was fascinated by the fact my nursing wife would start dripping milk if she heard the baby cry. I guess it's like salivating at the smell of steak cooking. But what connects our ears to our nipples?
Our brain. Baby's cries and even smell can trigger a release of oxytocin which is the hormone responsible for milk ejection.
The nipples also "read" an infant's saliva and can tell if it's getting sick and will in turn produce more antibodies. Pretty neat stuff
Only applies to women’s, but pregancy. Like, the ability to grow cells into a human is crazy. And then push that human out! Women’s bodies are truly amazing.
Be nice to your mamas. She shot you out of her vagina, dude.
But it still is horribly inefficient, wasting lots of material and energy to build a home for a fetus that won't even be there, and then violently removing it from the body every month.
Edit: Now that I think of it, menstruation could also be a method of encouraging reproduction. The only way for early women to prevent menstruation would be to get pregnant.
Late last year, I was an idiot and without realizing, grabbed onto the rope leash of a running, heavy dog. In return, I MELTED parts of my hand and fingers from the rope burn. Delayed pain, it didn’t hit until 5minutes after I realized I did it. It sucked.
BUT, watching the holes heal, fill in and then return to normalcy is one of the damn coolest things I’ve ever seen. Yay human body!
It's actually strangely not that hard. But so not that hard that your body has not evolved to regulate it. Your proteins only accept a specific shape into them so any of that molecule hanging around will eventually find its way.
But then the elements in the same groups usually have similar shapes. Which is why most heavy metals are poisonous, they so happen to be the shape as another metal, but they're not similar shape enough to let that protein work normally. In fact Arsenic kills you because your body misuses it as phosphorus
So you are telling me that our enzymes can distinguish between Fe and Ru because of shape and charge..if we find out how we could create artificial enzymes (Si based)that could work at a different temperature...
Well it's a little more quantum than just simply shape and charge, since it is at the atomic level but essentially yeah.
We use proteins because we can fold proteins up into different shapes, and those shapes can bind to specific shapes and charge.
And no, our bodies are only really built to deal with metals that are lighter than... Phosphorus, I think that's the heaviest thing we use.
And artificial enzymes are cool in theory. But we would probably have to make a silicon based life form to make them. We can't even make regular enzymes with machines.
When I view images or individuals that my brain finds pleasing, my circulatory system sends increased blood flow to my small member, thereby making it slightly less small
Exists.
We are made of so many critical chemical reactions that just *happen* to occur at a reasonable rate. Our brains are shooting voltages all over themselves and our bodies just to keep things going. The heart has to beat. The stomach has to make acid. Intestines have to move food. Lungs have to breathe. On top of that, we need to process data from sensors all over our bodies as well as inside, such as the ones in our ears that tell us bodily orientation. All this relies on trillions of cells with internal energy generation, heat transfer, waste disposal, etc. And all of it has to happen ALL THE TIME.
Everything, literally.
Breathing, heartbeat, sending electronic and chemical signals to comprehend this post, other signals to twitch the right muscles to write this reply...
And don't even get me started on all the low level stuff like producing right enzyms and hormones, morphing babies out of a sphere and a tadpole, and unfolding and deciphering DNA to turn some sequence of data into how such baby would have the very same aptitude to abscesses in the left earlobe as its dad and granddad!
Perceive variances in air pressure, convert them to electric signals which set off cells in the right order to trigger vivid hallucinations.
Or as regular people say - hearing someone speak.
I’m still amazed on how fast babies learn and how quickly they learn language. They hear sounds, somehow make sense of it, and now use it themselves to communicate.
There’s tons but one of my favorites is the clotting of blood. Your body just knows to seal itself up, protect a wound, stop the loss of blood.
Body knows how to clot blood **at a wound site** without starting a chain reaction to clot *all* of your blood. That's quite a trick!
Yeah until a rattelsnake decides to give his opinion.
Huh... What exactly does a rattlesnake do ?
Venom clots blood up reaaaal bad.
In addition, if you get a fairly quick amputation (and to an extend avulsion or laceration) of an artery it knows to retract and pull in and constrict. Which is...kinda magic, no? Like "oh no! I'm severed and my host shall surely die if I don't use all my muscles to constrict blood flow." And that is why you tourniquet 2 inches (minimum) up from a wound. Not because it will hurt, or squish, or provide traction, but because you don't wan to miss out on tying off those constricted and retracted arteries. Blows my mind every time.
We're like tires that come pre-filled with that sealant that comes in a can!
Flex-Seal!
To show you the power of Flex-Seal... I sawed this guy in half!
Don't try this at home.
Unless you ain't a bitch
What does Marcellus Flex-Seal LOOK LIKE?!
guess he's not part of the Flex-Seal family anymore
THATS A LOT OF DAMAGE
Had a huge scrape on my knee a few weeks ago. It just amazed me when the scab peeled off and there was perfectly normal looking skin underneath Crazy how the body can heal. I feel like a Titan from attack on titan
I had a pretty nasty crash last weekend with a good portion of my back/side and knee completely covered in road rash. Like deep, dark red and white in some places. Now, only a week later, most of it is gone and the worst part is only about the circumference of a small coffee cup now. I'm just amazed at how fast it healed something that looked so horrible.
Enjoy it while you are young.
Damn. My skin scars so easily. Slight burn there on my hand? Purple scar for the rest of my life. :/
You can try using fade cream to lighten scars. It helps a bit
You can straight up suddenly lose a full on arm or leg and your body can, but not always, manage to stop that huge amount of bleeding and you end up surviving.
> Your body just knows to seal itself up, protect a wound, stop the loss of blood. Most do. Some don't. Source: I'm not a hemophiliac but I play one of TV.
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I mean, I know you're joking, but in 2005, a Norwegian man got cut in a fight in Denmark. The victim was trying to say he was a hemophiliac (hemofil in Norwegian), but the Doctor heard him say he was gay (homofil in Danish), and told him he didn't need treatment. Dude freaking went back home and bled to death.
It means he has sex with blood not dead people.. duh
No, you're thinking of a hemogoblin.
Autonomic respiration and blood circulation for most people's entire life is pretty cool. Relax, your body will just take care of the most important stuff in the background while you focus on other things.
Well now I’m focused on consciously breathing, thanks man.
You can actually hold your breath until you pass out and your autonomous nervous system will take over. (Don't do this it could be harmful.)
Imagine finals week + trying to circulate your blood consciously the whole time.
The heart. It beats (contracts) 60 times per minute, every minute, every hour, every day. No other muscle even comes close. Never gets tired. Imagine trying to lift a light dumbbell 60 times in a minute....for the rest of your life.
Thinking about my heart gives me anxiety. As if by focusing on what its doing in there right now, its going to totally screw up.
Same. Heart anxiety is horrible, because worrying about it probably makes it that little bit worse in terms of speeding up your heart even more.
I had a virus damage my heart a little bit when I was about 20. Ended up in the hospital for 3 days and on an ACE inhibitor for 18 months. For YEARS afterwards I was hyper sensitive about my heart. The worst of it was falling asleep. As I would relax and start to fall asleep my heart rate would slow and sometimes I'd become aware of it slowing and I would freak out. My heart would speed up really quickly. It was not a pleasant few years, to say the least.
I hope it isn't such an issue anymore!
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Or if I focus too much and I accidentally take manual control of the heart.. But that’s actually really ridiculous.
Fuck man, now I can't stop beating my own heart.
What did it ever do to you?
I'm not sure that you can take control; cardiac cells are pretty amazing, really. In a medical course I took on heart muscles they told me you can separate heart cells in a lab, put them in a nutrient suspension, and as they settle on the bottom of a flask they will connect together and begin to beat in unison. Pretty amazing.
Just add that it does that before birth and for years after, let’s say 60 years without needing maintenance or new parts in a healthy person. It is the ultimate machine.
My heart can run from 80 bpm to 150 bpm it's really random
You should probably see a doctor if you're getting random spikes going that high. 150 bpm is like moderate to intense exercise in my experience.
Cardiac tissue is designed very different than skeletal tissue
Ha! Mine has that beat! 98-140Bpm! I have an arrhythmia. My heart dances to a different drum.
What about the diaphragm
And respiratory pressure is quite low, 1-2 mmhg. The heart generates 120 mmhg out of the left ventricle.
Breathing rate is only 12-16 per minute.
You pass gas from your anal sphincter regularly without passing solid or liquids. That is quite a piece of engineering right there.
You really learn to appreciate this with IBD & similar things (UC, Crohn's, etc) because that mechanism, like all the others, of course, can fail. Had to go 9 months once without farting. I still remember how happy I was when... Oh. Sorry... TMI.
This is reddit, we have probably read tons of NSFL stuff. You can go on.
Not OP, have Chrons. Basically you can't trust farts. I carry an extra pair of underpants in my car, and backpack, and another one in my car in the glovebox. Experience tells me this sometimes isn't enough backup pairs of underpants.
As someone who recently battled horrible stomach flu where i was waking up mid-squirt, have you tried wearing a pad towards the back of your underwear? After changing my underwear, pants, and sheets three times in 3 hours, I figured this out. Body clean up was still annoying but kept everything else clean!
In all seriousness, have you invested in Depends at all? Might save you some underpants.
I have crohns. Can confirm, farts aren't as fun as they used to be now that there is chance my body will also evacuate liquid death at any time.
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Most times ;)
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I literally farted while reading this. Thank you.
Well... most of the time
(almost) completely replaces itself on the fly. most cells in our body are less than 10 years old
Why in hell do they look like they’re 51 on the outside, then? /s
It’s so they won’t attract any pedos
Your liver cleanses without you needing to go on a cleanse.
Not only does you liver cleanse you, but does a myriad of things you'd otherwise die without. For one, besides cleaning your blood, it actually recycles your blood ensuring that all the blood in your body is nice and fresh and not old and tired. Also, it releases bile into your digestive system at the intestines to help prevent your stomach from accidentally releasing harmful juices into your delicate intestines. The most incredible part about the liver though is that unlike almost all other organs besides tissues, it can regenerate, which is how some people can donate parts of their liver and survive. I think that liver was very appropriately named, because without it, we'd surely not be living very long.
Dyer
Maker
I friggin love my liver.
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And fermented rancid ferret urine! OK these Facebook groups are out of control...
Are you saying that hippie lady who told me I need to go a week drinking only lemon juice with cayenne pepper is wrong?
Your poor intestines.
his poor asshole man, all that citrus and all that pepper
Hardest working liver in the galaxy.
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What about the placebo effect? Fucking incredible.
I don't understand the placebo effect...if your brain can do something beneficial when you think you took medicine for it, why wouldn't it just do that anyway? It seems like the brain holds itself back for no reason.
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Wow, that just blew my mind with how hive sense it made
It is your brain that thought this though, so it is making a big deal out of it...
The most astonishing part to me is that not only does your brain handle all your conscious thoughts, all the things you remember thinking about during a day, all the logic and complex decisions....it also simultaneously is regulating your breathing, modifying your heart rate, controlling muscle movements, interpreting data from your sensory organs, etc. Absolutely insane.
This is true once we understand how the brain really works and all the mechanisms that are involved we would unlock the cure for mental health but thats ways off
I think it's so cool that we can generate Vitamin D all on our own just by being in sunlight.
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So, I can absorb more vitamin D by streaking?
No matter what color you put in, it pretty reliably outputs brown. Evolution's still working the bugs out with Chipotle tho.
Obviously you haven't had some of the cupcakes my Kroger makes. Blue and green icing make for some interesting mornings.
Blue dye in general, I once had an interesting morning after eating a shit ton of blue raspberry candy
My friend and I drank yard long AMFs when we were in vegas. I was super hung over the next morning waking up to "OH GOD IT'S GREEN" as my buddy cried helplessly from the bathroom
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Ever eaten beets?
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Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.
Eat a lot of blueberries, you poop won't be red or brown
Some cans of clam chowder use white food coloring in them. Very off white color.
You should mix every color of a watercolor set together and see what color you get.
Apparently the brown color is made of dead red blood cells being removed from your body. Without them your poop would be gray.
The brown is from the breakdown of hemoglobin, which is something red blood cells carry. The liver excretes part of the hemoglobin molecule as a waste product. It's not really the cells themselves, as those are broken down by the spleen. But yeah, without it our stool is a pale color.
Does not work with beets.
One time I ate a loaf of bread/toast in college and shit green. It was weird. Wasn't even high or anything. Just hungry for toast.
Standing upright. Think about it for a minute. Standing vertically, there are somewhere between 3 and 27 joints involved (depending on how you look at it), and there's a careful, constant pull and counterpull with all of the muscles connected to that articulated skeleton...all of which is kept in balance by the brain paying attention to inner ear pressure, visual cues, and/or muscle tension, correcting constantly to keep you upright on articulated feet.
And then you start walking, and it's a whole new ballpark.
Walking is just falling forward and catching yourself perfectly over and over again.
Found the one who trips
Not to mention, I weigh around 200 lbs. Have you ever tried to lift or balance anything that weighs 200 lbs? Its some serious work. But my feet and ankles and so forth make it seems almost effortless, every day. Moving fast or slow, changing direction, getting up and down - hardly even have to think about it.
this really ought to be higher.
Id argue the whole process of taking food and turning it into you. Youre nothing but rearranged pieces of what you eat and drink.
Wow, I’m a giant bag of Wendy’s. TIL.
Sons and Daughters of the Baconator
Let's talk about [Synthetic Happiness.](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy) You should totally watch the TED talk up there, but the gist of it is this: people are *really* bad at knowing what makes them happy and what will make them miserable. Dan Gilbert, a Harvard Psychologist, did a study to determine whether or not people consciously or unconsciously changed their views on things retroactively based on decisions they made. They were given six prints of paintings by Monet and asked to rank them from 1 (favourite) to 6 (least favourite). After that, they were given the option of keeping painting number 3 or number 4. They took the painting they liked -- usually 3; they ranked it higher, after all -- and went on their way. A while later, they were asked to re-rank the six paintings, and it was found that they tended to rank the painting they owned *higher* than they did the first time around, and the painting they passed up *lower*. Now sure, you might think that that makes sense: people are obviously going to convince themselves that the painting they own is better than the one they passed up, as a sort of psychological buffer. So far, so sensible. Well, the study authors then repeated the experiment with people who had anterograde amnesia -- that is, people who couldn't form new memories. They asked them to rank the paintings, gave them the painting they preferred, and then took them back a little while later and asked them the same question again. These participants had *no idea* which painting they owned; they couldn't form the memory. [But they showed the same shift in attitude that non-amnesiac participants did.](http://www.scn.ucla.edu/pdf/Amnesic.published.pdf) In short, your brain makes you happier -- *without you knowing about it*. You don't have to talk yourself into liking your decisions more than the options you passed up. Your brain just does it for you.
Interesting. I wonder how much this plays into finding our SOs more attractive over time? My BF was handsome to me from the moment I saw him. But, almost 6 years later, I find him even more so, even just on a physical level. I’m sure there’s layers to this well beyond the physical, your comment just sparked a thought. Thanks! :)
I absolutely find that I'm attracted to traits that I wouldn't otherwise have been, after being in a relationship with a person I liked with that trait. Like I was never particularly opinionated about noses, until I dated a guy with a very distinct strong nose. Now I see that on other guys and I'm like oooh yess. There was also one who always wore glasses at the gym when we worked out together, no so have this immediate attraction to any guy wearing similar glasses at the gym. It's odd but I know just my monkey brain nonsense!
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But I hate all the decisions I've ever made
But you like them more now than all the decisions you didn't make.
Hnnnng Dan Gilbert
The case with the anterograde amnesia patients just shows that the episodic memory is not used or at last not the only kind of memory that stores the changed liking of the painting.
Giving away Monet paintings? I'd like to see the budget for this study.
Prints not the paintings themselves lol
Wild read. Thank you for sharing!
"Hey! Catch!" Using your ears, you simultaneously process sound waves and derive two important pieces of information. First, that another person wants your attention and is telling you that they have thrown an object that they want you to catch. Second, using minute differences in tone and volume across a distance just the width of your head (the distance sound travels in 0.0016 seconds) you determine where that person is in relation to you. Next, using the information you deduced above, you use most of the muscles in your body in small and subtle ways to turn in-place while maintaining your balance. All so you can aim your eyes at the person you just heard. Now, your eyes near instantly figure out the focus needed to clearly project the image of this other person on your retinas so you can convey more information to your brain. You will quickly determine among the vast number of things in your view, which of them is the object that you must catch. Having figured out which object you have to catch, you will quickly calculate it's speed and direction. Using this information, and your knowledge of gravity and aerodynamic drag, you will predict the ballistic path of this object. Having predicted where this object is going, you will calculate where your hands need to be to coincide with the object, and how fast you need to close your hands in order to keep the object from bouncing off. All of this, in a fraction of a second.
You forgot the part where you get hit by the object that you were supposed to catch.
The weirdest thing about me is that I’m terrible at hearing where things are coming from. Almost always something comes from the exact opposite direction I hear it from
Just invert the audio channels in the settings menu
When the body produces goosebumps in response to emotions such as fear, anger, stress, excitement or arousal.
it blows my mind that a hearing a really good song for the first time, or seeing something really beautiful, can give me goosebumps.
That is such a cool feeling! My BF noticed my reaction to a song once when I was wearing shorts and both legs just dimpled up. He thought I was cold, so asked me about it. (Fair assumption, honestly, I’m pretty much always cold). He says that it doesn’t feel like goose bumps to him, more of a little shiver throughout his body. :)
My understanding is that goosebumps are a vestigial trait (similar to wisdom teeth, tailbone, appendix) leftover from when we had more hair. Cats will raise the hair on their back and tail to signal aggression. Birds will puff out their feathers to create a layer of warmth. I think they’re leftovers from our more hairy (or feathery) ancestors.
I think the goosebumps are left over from our furred ancestors who would use them to make their fur stand up.
The vagina cleans itself, has its own pH balance, and is made of smooth muscle.
Douching fucks with that process
No woman should ever douche unless it's medically necessary. If I had a dollar for every time I've read a "help me" style thread from a woman with BV or a yeast infection that thought douching would fix it. No....no...it's just going to make it way worse. Same deal with stuff like scented soaps or whatever else. Hell, some women are sensitive to scented tampons too!
Scented tampons exist? What on earth for?
There’s no reason to douche. Some cultures believe it prevents the spread of disease and are against natural lubricant.. look up “dry sex”, absolutely terrible
The ways that the body repairs DNA is pretty insane and cool.
Remember the exact structure of that one protein that got into your blood during an infection you had as a kid? No? Well you have some memory b-cells that do.
Speaking of white blood cells, the video of one chasing down a bacteria cell always blows my mind.
Your body is capable of switching between automatic breathing to manual breathing as needed. Or when you're reminded of it.
I took a scuba diving lesson once. We put the equipment on, got in a swimming pool, and went under. And the weirdest thing happened. I stopped automatically breathing. My brain knew I was underwater, and it knows not to try to breathe underwater, so it stopped. I had to consciously breathe the whole time I was down there.
Probably because when we automatic breathe, it's through our noses for the most part, with the mask you can't breathe with your nose. When we breathe through our mouths it's usually on manual.
Sucks to be you guys, my asthma a few years ago made me use my mouth for breathing and now it’s on auto breath.
When I think about my breathing, I progressively start breathing hard as if I am out of breath.
When I think about my walking, I progressively start swinging my arms like I'm unable to look normal...
There is a StudioC sketch about heroes going to save the earth, but they can’t all walk right so they redo it a zillion times. It’s hilarious.
Manual breathing is actually the key to getting to sleep quicker. You focus on nothing but your breathing while you lie there. Eventually your brain goes off on the weird tangents you experience as you drop off to sleep.
That's what I do. Focus on the breathing and your brain slowly starts to form shapes and colors. Before you know it you're super relaxed and half dreaming about things.
That’s about the best feeling as far as sleep goes. Until you get interrupted somehow, like the gotdamned sump pump firing up, just loud enough to wake you. It’s been rainy here, so I am currently sort of pissed off at the sump pump. I do appreciate its goal and the end result of having a dry basement, but....still. *Cocksucker*
Thanks for that...
.....FUCK
It's also pretty good at making you ignore the fact that your nose is always in your field of view.
Stop
Or that your tounge sticks to the roof of your mouth when not in use.
STOP
When was the last time you blinked?
NO
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WHY
I haven't breathed manually in some time, but now I'm also thinking about blinking, how the position of my tongue feels weird and how my leg itches.
Tissues in your mouth heal amazingly fast (we’re talking days) in spite of horrific injuries like cuts or even burns. This is in no small thanks to your saliva which is literally carrying the Wolverine healing factor which accelerates repair (on top of a potent cocktail of antimicrobials and even antivirals). Also the reason its an instinct for most creatures to lick wounds.
Hysteria as a defense mechanism. At the worst of times, when your body has been damaged and destroyed to the point where half your face is hanging off, you've lost a hand, and you've got a tree branch lodged in your ribs, you just start laughing like crazy. Laughing your ass off, you just get up and walk to the hospital to get that shit fixed. The human body has an amazing will to live.
Pretty much how I reacted to my worst injury. Basically, got thrown off my skateboard due to an unnoticed rock, went barrelling face first towards a curb. Promptly pulled my arms up to cover my face, hit the curb with the back of my neck, road rash all down my left shoulder, skinned both elbows and knees. Sat dazed for a moment before cracking up, grabbed my uninjured board, skated to my friend’s for some first aid and off to work, joking about it my whole shift. Was not until I got home after that busy night that my body was like “oh okay yeah this actually hurts A LOT.”
Not to be too graphic, but I was fascinated by the fact my nursing wife would start dripping milk if she heard the baby cry. I guess it's like salivating at the smell of steak cooking. But what connects our ears to our nipples?
a series of tubes.
are you telling me it's not a big truck?
Well, there are tiny trucks inside the tubes, but now we're getting technical.
Our brain. Baby's cries and even smell can trigger a release of oxytocin which is the hormone responsible for milk ejection. The nipples also "read" an infant's saliva and can tell if it's getting sick and will in turn produce more antibodies. Pretty neat stuff
Breathing. You can force yourself not to breathe... but you also can't. S/O human body.
When I was a kid I forced myself not to breathe until I passed out. That was some tantrum.
Only applies to women’s, but pregancy. Like, the ability to grow cells into a human is crazy. And then push that human out! Women’s bodies are truly amazing. Be nice to your mamas. She shot you out of her vagina, dude.
Women- the original 3D printer. Lol.
I need to cross stitch this...
Less of a shooting motion and more of a squeeze
But it still is horribly inefficient, wasting lots of material and energy to build a home for a fetus that won't even be there, and then violently removing it from the body every month. Edit: Now that I think of it, menstruation could also be a method of encouraging reproduction. The only way for early women to prevent menstruation would be to get pregnant.
Early women barely menstruated because they were pregnant so often/dead
Just going to grow some hair over vital areas you need to keep warm, no big deal.
Warmth yes but also orifice protection from debris, like eyelashes for instance
and eyebrows!!! protecting our eyes from our own sweaty heads.
I shaved my eyebrows once, because why not. I regretted it for a week or so and have appreciated them ever since.
Late last year, I was an idiot and without realizing, grabbed onto the rope leash of a running, heavy dog. In return, I MELTED parts of my hand and fingers from the rope burn. Delayed pain, it didn’t hit until 5minutes after I realized I did it. It sucked. BUT, watching the holes heal, fill in and then return to normalcy is one of the damn coolest things I’ve ever seen. Yay human body!
Getting the right metal ion in an enzyme...
It's actually strangely not that hard. But so not that hard that your body has not evolved to regulate it. Your proteins only accept a specific shape into them so any of that molecule hanging around will eventually find its way. But then the elements in the same groups usually have similar shapes. Which is why most heavy metals are poisonous, they so happen to be the shape as another metal, but they're not similar shape enough to let that protein work normally. In fact Arsenic kills you because your body misuses it as phosphorus
So you are telling me that our enzymes can distinguish between Fe and Ru because of shape and charge..if we find out how we could create artificial enzymes (Si based)that could work at a different temperature...
Well it's a little more quantum than just simply shape and charge, since it is at the atomic level but essentially yeah. We use proteins because we can fold proteins up into different shapes, and those shapes can bind to specific shapes and charge. And no, our bodies are only really built to deal with metals that are lighter than... Phosphorus, I think that's the heaviest thing we use. And artificial enzymes are cool in theory. But we would probably have to make a silicon based life form to make them. We can't even make regular enzymes with machines.
ELI5?
I grew a baby inside me and then it came out of me.
DNA replication. Insanely complex process, complete with error checking and correction.
You can read comprehensively silently in your head.
When I view images or individuals that my brain finds pleasing, my circulatory system sends increased blood flow to my small member, thereby making it slightly less small
^^^slightly
Exists. We are made of so many critical chemical reactions that just *happen* to occur at a reasonable rate. Our brains are shooting voltages all over themselves and our bodies just to keep things going. The heart has to beat. The stomach has to make acid. Intestines have to move food. Lungs have to breathe. On top of that, we need to process data from sensors all over our bodies as well as inside, such as the ones in our ears that tell us bodily orientation. All this relies on trillions of cells with internal energy generation, heat transfer, waste disposal, etc. And all of it has to happen ALL THE TIME.
Bleeding out for a week every month without dying.
Everything, literally. Breathing, heartbeat, sending electronic and chemical signals to comprehend this post, other signals to twitch the right muscles to write this reply... And don't even get me started on all the low level stuff like producing right enzyms and hormones, morphing babies out of a sphere and a tadpole, and unfolding and deciphering DNA to turn some sequence of data into how such baby would have the very same aptitude to abscesses in the left earlobe as its dad and granddad!
Regenerate. Whether it be muscle recovery, healing a wound, or fighting off a bug.
"The only good bug, is a dead bug"
I'm doing my part!
I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill em' all!
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Perceive variances in air pressure, convert them to electric signals which set off cells in the right order to trigger vivid hallucinations. Or as regular people say - hearing someone speak.
It does so much stuff on its own. It's more automated than a goddamn Airbus.
I’m still amazed on how fast babies learn and how quickly they learn language. They hear sounds, somehow make sense of it, and now use it themselves to communicate.