đ What Book is Blowing My Mind
The Body - A Guide for Occupants- Bill Bryson
This book had my eyes peeled from the start. A full dissective fact studded tour of our bodies- inside and out. One of those reads where the highlighter is out and ready at all times.. so much so that when you look back you see that youâve highlighted just about every sentence in the entire book. Bryson has a truly remarkable writing style that weaves humor into the writings of the most complex system on planet earth- the human body. A must read in my opinion!
A Few Parts (pun intended) to Highlight:
You Blink 14,000 times a day.
Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast.
DNA is extremely stable. It can last for tens of thousands of years. Nothing you own right nowâ no letter or piece of jewelry ortreasuredd heirloomâ will exist a thousand years from now, but your DNA will almost certainly still be around and recoverable. Itâs a slightly humbling thought that the genes you carry are immensely ancient..You will die and fade away, but your genes will go on and on. And it is surely astounding to reflect that not once in three billion years since life began has your personal line of descent been broken. For you to be here now, every one of your ancestors had to successfully pass on itâs genetic material to a new generation before being snuffed out.. Donât forget that your genes come from ancestors who most of the time werenât even human. Some of them were fish. Lots more were tiny and furry and lived in burrows. These are the beings from which you have inherited your body plan. You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks.
The paradox of genetics is that we are all very different and yet genetically practically identical. All humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA, and yet no two humans are like.
Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turns cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them. A couple of dozen times a week, you get the most dreaded disease of our age, and each time your body saves you.
Passionate kissing results in the transfer of up to one billion bacteria from one mouth to another, along with about 0.7 mg of protein, 0.45 mg of salt, and 0.7 mg of fat.. But as soon as the party is over, the host microorganisms in both participants will begin a kind of giant sweeping out process, and within only a day the microbial profile for both parties will be more or less fully restored to what it was before.
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. Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something on the order of two hundred exabytes of information, roughly equal to âthe entire digital content of todayâs world.â
The brain continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesnât quite exist yet.
While we have the overwhelming impression that the greenness of the trees and the blueness of the sky are streaming through our eyes as through an open window, yet the particles of light impacting on the retina are colourless, just as the waves of sound impacting an eardrum are silent and scent molecules have no smell.. They are all invisible, weightless, subatomic particles of matter traveling through space.. All the richness of life is created inside your head. What you see it not what is but what your brain tells you it is, and thatâs not the same thing at all.
Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter, and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12% of Earthâs land area and just 4% of the total surface area if you include the seas. 96% of our planet is off limits to us.
The most universal expression of all is a smile.. no society has ever been found that doesnât respond to smiles in the same way. đ
đď¸ What Podcast Episode Has Got Me Thinking
Unlocking Us - BrenĂŠ Brown w/ Glennon Doyle (Author of Untamed)
These names speak for themselves - Doyle/Brown = EQ POWER Duo.
There is no such thing as one way liberation.. when we free ourselves we automatically free everyone around us. When we grant ourselves permission to live as our truest selves, we automatically grant permission to everyone around us to do the same⌠because freedom is contagious. So the most loving motherly nurturing life-saving thing a woman can do is be true to her herself, trust herself and go for what she wants unapologetically.
This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they've never been.
If you are uncomfortable â in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused â you don't have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.
There is no one way to live, love, raise children, arrange a family, run a school, a community, a nation. The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal.
In my thirties, I learned that there is a type of pain in life that I want to feel. It's the inevitable, excruciating, necessary pain of losing beautiful things: trust, dreams, health, animals, relationships, people. This kind of pain is the price of love, the cost of living a brave, openhearted life â and I'll pay it. There is another kind of pain that comes not from losing beautiful things but from never even trying for them.
I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths.
đ What Talk Has My Attention
Ted Talk â> How to Live to be 100+ - The Blue Zones- Dan Buettner
The Blue Zone regions are home to some of the oldest and healthiest people in the world. To make it to age 100, you have to have won the genetic lottery. But most of us have the capacity to make it well into our early 90âs and largely without chronic disease. As the Adventists demonstrate, the average personâs life expectancy could increase by 10-12 years by adopting a Blue Zones lifestyle.
*Get your Zac Efron fix while learning all about Sardinia on his new series - Down to Earth*
These 11 simple guidelines reflect how the worldâs longest-lived people ate for most of their lives.
95-100% Plant Based.
Retreat from Meat.
Go Easy on Fish.
Reduce Dairy.
Eliminate Eggs.
Daily Dose of Beans.
Slash Sugar.
Snack on Nuts.
Sour on Bread.
Go Wholly Whole.
Drink Mostly Water.
Blue Zones Power 9: Lifestyle Habits of the Worldâs Healthiest, Longest-Lived People
Move Naturally
Purpose
Down Shift
80% Rule
Plant Slant
Wine @ 5 (I can get on board with this.. Guess it being â5 a clock somewhereâ is no joke!)
Belong
Loved Ones First
Right Tribe
đ What Product I Love
When everything hurtsâŚ
My Review: âWeâve been co-pilots for years and never once let me down.â
â¤ď¸ What Quote I Love
đś What Songs Are Moving Me
Latest Quarantine Shower Thoughts:
Why do I get chills up and down my body to certain songs and not others?
Fact That Blew My Mind:Â
Every hour your heart dispenses around 70 gallons of blood. Thatâs 1,689 gallons in a dayâ more gallons pushed through you in a day than you are likely to put in your car in a full year.
A crazy thing about the human body is the way your brain understands how you look. There are two major sulci, prrimary motor cortex and primary somatosensory cortex, and these are where your body processes movement and sensory inputs respectively. Each section reserves specific areas to your brain, for example 20% of somatosensory area represent your hands. If you draw out the human being in relation to how much space it takes in those regions, you get what they refer to homunculi. Itâs weird to see what your brain sees as important, but insane at the same time.
- Makan