The Body

The Body helps you become smarter about how to take care of and use this mechanism that lets you have life by explaining how it’s put together, what happens on the inside, and how it works.

Most of us probably don’t like to think about the trillions of microbes living inside and on the outside of us. But really, we should be grateful for them. After all, we not only need them to function but to exist.

One place they are particularly invaluable is in our digestive system. They not only help us break down food to make energy, but they make the vast majority of our digestive enzymes. In truth, microbes in our bodies are basically another organ.

In addition to bacteria, we also have viruses. It’s okay though, because of the hundreds of thousands of viruses we know of, only 263 of them make us sick. We also are home to archaea, fungi, and protists, other microscopic organisms that do us little to no harm.

With the advances of medicine in the last century, we have the ability to fight microbes with antibiotics. Unfortunately, antibiotics come with a weakness: they kill our good bacteria too. Also problematic is the fact that the more they are used, the less effective they get due to bacteria’s ability to develop resistance to them.

Because of this, we are essentially in a crisis in modern medicine where antibiotics are prescribed too widely, leading to the rise of antibiotic-resistant “super-bugs.” Combine this with the problem of people not taking them as directed and the rise of antibiotics in farm animals we consume, and it is becoming a mounting threat for society.

The whole body is really brilliant in its design, but one particularly remarkable component is your brain. It’s also a strange and isolated organ that is sealed off from the outside world. Around 75 percent of it is water, making it a soft, spongy ball that somehow makes us who we are. There is a myth you often hear that we only use a small portion of our brain’s capacity. This isn’t even a little bit true. We use the whole thing, and it takes 20 percent of our energy to do so. But it’s also really efficient and only needs as many calories as a muffin to function every day. It’s composed of 86 billion neurons with trillions of connections between them. In short, there are three main sections: the cerebrum, cerebellum, the brainstem. The cerebrum is the two hemispheres that are responsible for personality, sensory processing, and emotions. This is where three of our key senses are based including hearing, sight, and smell. The cerebellum helps us balance and move.…