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The Body: A Guide for Occupants - THE SUNDAY TIMES NO.1 BESTSELLER

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Did you also know that it's 400 times more likely that a teenager is in an accident if said teenager is accompanied by another teenager?! And this isn't just limited to car accidents. It´s better and more informative than biology education and in my imagination I see books like this in a close future with much more data, pictures, animations, links of different grade of difficulty for each kind of reader, VR, AR and the integration of the reading audience, probably with a kinda collective reading live streams while using different kinds of technologies or just old school reading. We thus hear of the abominable Typhoid Mary, a women who, at one point, found out she was one of the rare carriers of typhoid without showing any symptoms, but decided to still work in kitchens (against a promise she had made to the authorities) and didn't even bother to wash her hands before preparing meals, thus spreading the disease until she was finally put under house arrest. The Body: A Guide for Occupants has you covered! For those of us who haven't had a biology class since we fulfilled some course requirement ages ago, Bryson gives an excellent overview of what doctors and scientists know about all our different body parts and bodily functions.

Bryson takes us on anatomical tour of the body, system by system, dropping sexy names like Pacinian corpuscles and Islets of Langerhans along the way while also giving a bit of history of medicine and medical discoveries (Typhoid Mary and discovery of antibiotics and insulin are a must, and my sheer horror at finally learning why “lithotomy” position which I’ve blissfully said countless times is actually called that, and not to forget Phineas Gage and his frontal lobe injury and the absolute horror of lobotomies and the sheer idiocy of bleeding people to cure all ailments 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️) and ultimately arrives at dangers of over-caloried sedentary lifestyle unsuited for the bodies evolved for hunter-gatherer needs, overtreated for often little to no benefit. I am joining a book club; unusual for me because I am not a hugely social animal. It is based at the university where I work for one day a week and it meets a lunch time, once every two months. This is the book for January; it’s not something I would have read in normal circumstances. This book was given to me as a Christmas present, and it was a great gift. As a fan of Bryson, I was surprised that I had not even heard of his new work of popular science. I am glad that it came to my attention, then, since this was my favorite Bryson book since A Short History of Nearly Everything. Structured as a tour of the human body, the book made me feel right at home. I didn't realise that the X-chromosome was called that because the person who discovered it didn’t know what it did – and so, like ‘planet X’, the letter was chosen due to this mystery rather than for the chromosome’s shape. And the Y-chromosome was likewise named following on from X in the alphabet. Your body is a universe of mystery. A very large part of what happens on and within it happens for reasons that we don’t know – very often, no doubt, because there are no reasons. Evolution is an accidental process, after all.”Altogether there are about seven thousand rare diseases – so many that about one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn’t very rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 per cent of rare diseases there are no effective treatments at all.” The book is full of other fascinating facts as well. Many of us know, for example, that damages to our frontal lobes result in personality changes, which was the reason lobotomy became popular at one point in human history (Rosemary Kennedy was lobotomized because her father considered her too willful, something Bryson mentions in this book, too).

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. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical pulses, like taps of Morse code. And out of this bare and neutral information it creates for you—quite literally creates—a vibrant, three-dimensional, sensually engaging universe. Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding.” Bill Bryson sets off to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts, astonishing stories and now fully illustrated for the first time, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up.To know that one does not know how not just even a tiny part of the body works is the first step to getting interested in exploring each fascinating, inner landscape. Unlike the rest of the body, the palms don't sweat in response to physical exertion or heat, but only from stress. Emotional sweating is what is measured in lie-detector tests. Later Add: Dr Abigail Zuger, who writes for The New York Times says that the book has several errors. I had particular concerns about his discussions of sex and sex chromosomes, which was so simplified and bad that it pretty much went directly to a TERF place. (The problems start with him saying everyone has two sex chromosomes, and that if you have XX you are always female and if you have XY you are always male, and then they sort of go on from there. Biology is more complicated than your fifth-grade-level overview suggests.) He also manages a neatly internally contradictory discussion of the Death Fat that spans over multiple chapters. (Especially enjoyed him explaining in one chapter some of the reasons humans are fatter today than previously, only to explain in another chapter that we all just eat too much and don’t exercise enough. Also there’s a good bit where he explains that fat is definitely killing everyone early, only to point out a bit later that some of the fattest populations on the planet are also the longest-lived. And so on.) There’s also a fun spot where he describes Alexis St. Martin, who was an intensively mistreated victim of constant unethical experimentation by a physician, as “not the most cooperative of subjects.” There’s a lot of stuff like that, that Bryson lightly glosses over and really, really should not.

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