5 Surprising Facts About the Human Body

What was the last surprising thing you learned about the human body? I'm not talking about your neighbor; you know the one who makes you feel like you've been doing Jell-O shots. I ‘m talking about your body, my body, the exquisite human body. I had a grandmother who was a surgical nurse. As a child, while visiting her, I would peruse her medical texts and found myself transfixed by the —sometimes with amazement other times abject horror. That sparked a lifelong interest in understandings the human body.

The popularity of TV personalities like Dr. Oz has profoundly increased society's interest and understanding of the human body and how it works. I believe the contribution that Dr. Oz and others like The Doctors make is dispelling miseducation and urban legends, such as the belief that is you shave, the hair that grows back will be thicker or more course. Despite what you think, there is no scientific evidence to support that wide-held belief. As much as I'd like to list others, you came here to learn what made my Top Ten list. So, let's begin.

1. Your tongue is like a snowflake

 No two snowflakes are alike. It is common knowledge that everyone's fingerprints, footprints, and retinas are unique. Well, if you didn't know it, your tongue is the newest member on that list.

1. Shape of the hair follicle determines hair texture

Except persons with Alopecia Areata (a condition where the immune system erroneously attacks the hair follicles), we are as hairy as chimpanzees, though, most of us do not appear covered by hair because the individual hairs covering our body are so thin they seem invisible.

The type of hair someone grows been a volatile topic in the country for over 100 years, particularly concerning women. For example, in 2014, the US Navy discharged an African-America sailor because of her "natural" hair—ridiculous.

According to LiveScience, there are four categories of hair growth: corkscrew curls, coils, stick straight, and wavy hair. For a considerable time, scientists believed that the individual hair shafts determined whether the person would have curly hair. However, new evidence indicates that the shape of the hair follicle (a part of the skin that grows hair) determines the form and angle of hair growth.

So, persons with curly hair have elongated oval shaped hair follicles causing hair growth at sharp angles—much like when one uses scissors to make ribbons coil when decorating a wrapped gift. The form of the hair follicle answers why curly hair tends to be much drier than straight hair.  When the scalp produces oils, that oil flows easily into hair follicles that do not contour. It is also the reason curly hair is often frizzy. Avoid the term, "nappy". Unfortunately, the history is directly linked to segregation and slavery and for that reason, many some members of society are justifiably sensitive to it even when there is no ethnic connotation intended.

1. A Blushing stomach

We've all heard of a blushing bride but were you aware that every time you blush the lining in your stomach blushes as well. According to the Britain's National Health Services, "blushing is caused by your sympathetic nervous system". That's the same system responsible for triggering the flight or fight response. A sudden and intense emotion, namely embarrassment or stress, causes that sympathetic nervous system to expand the blood vessels of the face thereby increasing the quantity of blood flowing through the skin. As a result, redness. The blood vessels in the stomach's lining also expand causing the stomach to appear ruddy.

1. You can read much faster than you realize

When the teacher called students randomly to read aloud, were you excited or did you want to slouch down in your chair to hide? I know many people with college degrees who quickly become nervous when they read aloud. Relax, there is no scientific correlation between how many words a person can read per minute and how smart that one is. According to Timothy Noah from Slate, very few of us read faster than 400 words per minute.

My sister and I have read several of the same books. We both have graduated degrees, but she appears to race through books much faster than I do. Here's an example, we both read William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. In an hour, I would read 20 pages but at the same time, my sister would read nearly 65 pages. That indicates that my sister can read a little more than three times more words a minute than I do; however, the querulous discipline of reading theorist unanimously disagree.

Reading is an extremely complex mechanical process. Factoring out the time used to ponder unfamiliar words and complex ideas, atypical when reading for pleasure. When reading, we periodically pause and look at a word or group of words. This act is "fixation" and the average amount of time we fixate is 0.25 seconds. Then, we "saccade" or move our eyes on to the next group of words requiring roughly an average of 0.1 seconds. Following a few cycles of fixation and saccade, we pause again to understand the sentence just read requiring an average of 0.3 and 0.5 seconds. If you add all the time we spend fixating, saccading, and understanding/reflecting the result is roughly 95% of all college-level readers read between 200 and 400 words a minute.

There are stories of John F. Kennedy (JFK) who claimed to read 1,200 words in a minute, or Evelyn Wood believed to read 2,500 words in a minute, or the gobsmacking 1963 Reading Research Quarterly study in which the researcher observed someone reading 17,040 words per minute. Well, according to Ronald Carver, a professor of education research and psychology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, they are all examples of bunk. Carver posits that JFK likely read between 500 and 600 words per minute, which is quite fast, and there is the possibility that JFK would skim 1,000 words within a minute. However, Carver believes the word "skim" is critically important in this conversation. Carver asserts that skimming is not reading. Unless familiar with the text in question, much will be missed when skimming. Courses advertised to teach speed-reading are teaching you how to "skim" over text. Carver questions the validity of 1963 because the times, word counts, and comprehension tests were all self-reports. It is quite easy for someone to make a mistake that would be to his or her advantage—shall we say.

There are different mechanisms at work when reading to one's self and while reading aloud. The elaborate combinations of phonemes (perceptually various parts of sound in a specified language used to distinguish one word from others) makes reading aloud far more mentally taxing and requires a lot of practice before achieving fluency and mastery. So, if you want to read aloud very well, you've got to practice reading aloud a lot!

1. You positively glow, but not because you're pregnant

Some skin products promise if used your skin will radiate. Well, to those who want radiant skin can save their money. According to Charles Q. Choi of Live Science, scientific data shows that the human body, particularly your face, literally glows in very low levels. Further, the quantity varies based on the time of day.

Research studies revealed that the body emits visible light that is 1,000 times less intense than what the human eye can detect. Further, all living creatures emit extremely low levels of visible light. Scientists believe the emitted is the byproduct of biochemical reactions associated with free radicals. The light emitted is not infrared radiation—a type of invisible light associated with body heat.

Japanese scientists use remarkably sensitive cameras that can detect a single photon. In one experiment, five male volunteers in their 20s and healthy were placed shirtless in front of those sensitive cameras. The room was completely dark in a room that was light-tight. The five men were in the room 20 minutes every three hours from 10:00 a.m. through 10:00 p.m. every day for three days.

Data analysis revealed that the body's glow rose and fell over the course each day.  The lowest point was at 10:00 a.m. and the highest occurred at 4:00 p.m. These results indicate that the light emitted by the human body is connected to our Circadian rhythm and likely our metabolic rhythms.

The five facts about the human body presented do not represent the tip of the iceberg. However, I selected five due to space limitations. Some of you may have known some or all of the top five facts presented. For that reason, I chose to have supplemental information rather than the traditional approach to this kind of article. If you learned something or if you found this content interesting "Like me" and share with your friends and family. Hope to hear from you.