Body Trivia

I have always been fascinated with the human body and how it works. So I just had to buy “The Odd Body” by Dr. Stephen Juan (no relation) when I stumbled across it in a bookstore last year.

Juan, a behavioral scientist, anthropologist, and professor at the University of Sydney, answers more than just the usual questions about the body. His book is about the “weird” stuff like why can’t I tickle myself, why do we yawn, or why do we blush.

He also provides bizarre information about how headhunters shrink heads, how mummies are made, and what turned Michael Jackson’s skin white.

His book is filled with fascinating trivia. Here is a small sampling of interesting facts about your body.

Brain
A single human brain generates more electrical impulses in one day than all the telephones in the world.

If you could harness the power used by your brain, you could power a ten-watt light bulb

When we touch something, we send a message to our brain at 124 miles an hour.

The average human brain has about one hundred billion nerve cells.

Women’s brains are smaller than men’s brains by an average of 12 percent.

On an average day, the human brain produces seventy thousand thoughts.

Eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.
True black eyes are not known in humans. Eye color varies from very light blue to very dark brown.

The human eye is capable of differentiating ten million colors.

One-quarter of the human brain is used to control the eyes.

It is impossible to keep your eyes open while sneezing.

Of the five senses, the one that is less sharp after you eat too much is hearing.

Smell is the sense that is most closely linked to memory.

The average life span of the human taste bud is seven to ten days. By age sixty, most people will have lost half their taste buds.

The average talker sprays about three hundred microscopic saliva droplets a minute. This is about two and a half droplets per word.

A sneeze can exceed a speed of one hundred miles an hour.

When you laugh, you expel short bursts of air up to seventy miles an hour.

Our nose and ears never stop growing but our eyes stay the same size from infancy.

The sound of a snore can be as loud as a pneumatic drill.

The average mouth produces 1.8 pints (3.6 cups) of saliva per day.

Skin, hair, and nails.
Your belly button increases and decreases in size as you gain or lose weight.

By the age of seventy, the average person will have shed 105 pounds of skin.

If you ate too many carrots, you would actually turn orange.

In one square inch of your hand you have nine feet of blood vessels, six hundred pain sensors, nine thousand nerve endings, thirty-six heat sensors, ad seventy-six pressure sensors.

The length of the finger dictates how fast the fingernail grows, so the nail on your middle finger grows the fastest. The nail on the thumb grows slowest.

Fingernails grow almost four times faster than toenails.

Hair grows fastest in the morning than at any other time of the day.

The average human hair can support nearly four and a half pounds of weight. If a human hair were as thick as a nylon rope, it could support a train engine.

Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

Men lose about forty hairs a day. Women lose about seventy hairs a day.

Skeleton, bones, and teeth.
Tooth enamel is the hardest substance manufactured by the human body.

The most sensitive finger is the index finger.

The femur or thighbone is the strongest bone.

The hardest bone is the jawbone.

The knee is the most easily injured joint. Babies are born without kneecaps. Kneecaps don’t appear until the child reaches two to six years of age.

The length from your wrist to your elbow is the same as the length of your foot.

Heart, liver, and other organs.
The average adult has between forty billion and fifty billion fat cells.

If laid out in a straight line, the average adult’s circulatory system would be nearly sixty thousand miles long – enough to circle the earth two and a half times.

It takes sixty seconds for the blood to make one complete circuit of the body.

The human heart beats about 70 times a minute. That’s about three billion times in an average lifetime. The heart creates enough pressure when it pumps blood out of the body to squirt blood thirty feet. It can pump forty million gallons of blood in a lifetime.

The liver is the largest gland in the body. It is also the largest of the body’s internal organs.

The right lung takes in more air than the left lung. That’s because to make room for the heart, the left lung is smaller than the right lung.

Every second, the body’s bone marrow creates three million blood cells. During that same second, it destroys the same number.

The stomach produces a new layer of mucus every two weeks so that stomach acid will not devour the stomach lining. Stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve a nail.

Blood is thicker than fresh water but about the same thickness as seawater.

If you took all the urine the world produces in one day, it would take a full twenty minutes to flow over Niagara Falls.

The daily heat output of the average person would boil eight gallons of freezing water.

My Favorite.
My favorite body trivia from Juan’s book is “ If you could remove all the spaces from the atoms that make up your body, you would be small enough to pass through the eye of a needle.” Kind of mind-blowing, isn’t it?