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The Miraculous Human Body
5-30-2018
Ramadan magnifies the duality of human nature. For many, it is a time of heightened physical and spiritual awareness. Philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, stated it well, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Our brief time on Earth is spent enfolded in a physical body—one uniquely designed. While counting your many blessings, take a few moments to appreciate the miracle of your human body.
Brain
Your brain is the consistency of soft butter. It weighs about 1300-1400 gram (3 lbs) in an adult yet uses more than 20% of your oxygen. It contains about 10 billion nerve cells or neurons. Each neuron has the capacity of connecting to other neurons through about 10 thousand synapses totally over 1000 billion possible connections. Thinking is actually electrical and chemical transmissions between neurons and your thinking really does generates enough electricity to power a light bulb. Information/thoughts travel between neurons at 416 kh/h (260 mph). On average you create 70,000 thoughts every day—for comparison, the Quran has 77,701 words.
Circulatory System:
Imagine squeezing a tennis ball continuously all your life. This is about the same amount of force your heart uses to circulate your blood. Every year, your heart beats on average 36 million times, pumping the equivalency of over 2.5 million litres through nearly 100,000 kilometres of arteries, veins, and capillaries. In an average lifetime, three tankers full of flood will flow through you.
At any given time, you have about 2.5 trillion red blood cells. A blood cell leaving your heart can travel though your body and return to the heart in 20 seconds. Your average red blood cell lives for only 120 days. Every second your bone marrow is producing about 2 million new red blood cells to replace the ones constantly dying. That’s like re-populating greater Vancouver every second.
Your aorta, the largest artery in your body, is about the diameter of a garden hose. In contrast, capillaries, where the actual exchange of oxygen for waste gasses occurs, are so small it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of one human hair. If you could stitch all your arteries, veins, and capillaries into one long tube, the length would be close to 100,000 km and could wrap around the equator nearly two and a half times.
Skeletal System
You have more than 200 intricately architectured bones. Your smallest bone is the stapes in your ear, smaller than a match head, and your largest is your femur or thigh bone. Attached to your bones are 500 muscles—before feeling too smug, consider a caterpillar has nearly 4000 muscles. To synchronize movement, nearly 11 km of nerve fibers constantly send and receive messages to and from your brain doing their best to keep you coordinated.
Balance
Tiny calcium carbonate crystals in your ears are one of the keys to balance. These little rocks bump into nerve cells when we move our heads which sends signals to our brain that guide our sense of up and down. Vertigo can result when some of these crystals roll out of their normal position and into the ear canal, causing the brain to think the head is moving a lot more than it actually is.
Vision
Your eyes remain the same size from birth, unlike your nose and ears which continue to grow life-long. You have around 1,200,000 optic fibers in your eye. In addition, you have137 million light sensitive cells in your retina at the back of your eyeball. At birth, babies are colour blind, but adults can distinguish over 1 million subtle differences in colour including 500 shades of grey.
Your eyes capture upside down pictures of the world. It is your brain’s interpretation that makes you see the upside down image in normal orientation. Your eyes have the fastest reacting muscle in your whole body. Eye muscles contract in 1/100th of a second. The focusing muscles move around 100,000 times a day. To give your leg muscles the same workout, you would need to walk 80 km every day. You blink about 25 times a minute or 10 million times a year to clear your eyes of dust and keep them lubricated. Thankfully, your brain tends to ignore these fleeting blackouts.
These are just a few of the thousands of facts that show the human body truly is a miracle. Are you using your miraculous body to fulfill this life’s purpose?
Inspiration came from “The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps” by Tony Buzan.
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