Theresa Alan's Reviews > The Body: A Guide for Occupants

I learned so much from this book. One of the things I learned was that continuing to learn and keeping my brain active will help me avoid dementia, so you should read this book, too. I highlighted many pages, so I’ll just offer a few highlights here.

The thing I found fascinating was reading about our skin, the tiny layer that we makes us white or black or brown. Bryson watched a surgeon incise and peel back a sliver of skin a millimeter thick from the arm of cadaver. It was so thin it was translucent. That’s what race is. Which is why it’s so ridiculous that such a small facet of our composition should be given so much importance when it’s merely a reaction to sunlight. “Biologically, there is no such thing as race—nothing in terms of skin color, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples.”

Skin gets its color from a variety of pigments, the best known is a molecule we know as melanin. It’s also responsible for the color of birds’ feathers and gives fish the texture and luminescence of the their scales. Our skin evolved based on our geography.

A lot of myths I grew up with are not true. Like the fact we only use ten percent of our brain--false. I was taught as a kid that different parts of the tongue were attuned to different tastes like salty, sweet, sour. Nope. Also, like the movie the Matrix, apparently when I eat a brownie straight from the oven, it doesn’t actually taste good, my brain just reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and makes me think they’re pleasurable.

In one of the studies he talks about, a man was given an injection of a harmless liquid to mimic snot. It couldn’t be seen by the naked eye, but under those blue lights detectives use. The test subject went into a room with other folks, and when they turned the overhead lights off and the blue lights on, every single person, doorknob, and bowl of nuts had the pretend snot on it, which is how the common cold passes from person to person so easily—through touch, apparently not by making out with someone (although presumably at some point you might touch that person).

Antibiotics
• Almost 3/4ths of prescriptions written each year are for conditions that can’t be cured with antibiotics (like bronchitis).
• 80 percent of antibiotics are fed to farm animals to fatten them up, which meat eaters then consume, which is one of the reasons antibiotics aren’t as effective as they used to be.
• Fruit growers use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops, sometimes even of produce marked “organic.” This means we humans are unwittingly eating antibiotics, rendering them ineffective when we need them for a real disease/infection.

There’s a lot more interesting stuff in here. Thanks so much to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book, which RELEASES OCTOBER 15, 2019.