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

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We are darn well amazing. We've all heard that rather gooey truth "We are all made of stardust..." but read this book, and you will learn even more extraordinary truths. We are phenomenal creatures. If you aren't filled with a fantastic sense of wonder whilst reading this then pinch yourself hard, because something is missing. If you’ve ever wondered why no one wants to kiss you first thing in the morning, it is possibly because your exhalations may contain up to 150 different chemical compounds” including “methyl mercaptan (which smells like very old cabbage), hydrogen sulphide (like rotten eggs), dimethyl sulphide (slimy seaweed)”, etc. 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. Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost. Most people in the Western world, by the time they reach adulthood, have received between five and twenty courses of antibiotics. The effects, it is feared, may be cumulative, with each generation passing on fewer microorganisms than the one before.

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.” The paradox of genetics is that we are all very different and yet genetically practically identical. All humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA. 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. When the book’s not enraging, it’s just dull. Bryson mostly elides his own narrative voice, which is his main strength as a writer, in favor of pretending to be an authority, so we get an endless dull recitation of facts that many readers already know. (And many of which we learned from more engaging books than this one.) My one big takeaway from The Body is that we know almost nothing about the body. We know so much more than we did a hundred years ago, and yet we still know almost nothing. I swear that about ten times in every chapter, there's a comment like "these cells do this, but nobody knows why" or "women are 10x more likely to get this disease than men, but why is anybody's guess". I mean, we spend a third of our lives asleep and no one even knows why we do that.

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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. Equally bewildering is that autoimmune diseases are grossly sexist..... Altogether, 80 per cent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Hormones are the presumed culprit but how exactly female hormones trip up the immune system when male hormones don't is not at all clear. 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.”

While reading, I imagined Alton Brown reading the text in the same manner he talks to the audience in Good Eats. Bill Nye would be a great narrator, too! 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.And yes, we did get a little bit of humour, but that wasn't because Bryson made fun of certain things, but was very good at pointing out the hilarity of history and us silly homo sapiens. With these two things in mind, proceed at your own risk! If you love trivia and don’t mind dumbed down science, this should be perfect for you. If you are a doctor, it may be too simple of an explanation to satisfy – or, maybe not??? If you are easily queasy when it comes to blood, vomit, and other bodily fluids and functions, I would suggest passing on this one. Most other mammals never suffer strokes, and for those that do it is a rare event. But for humans, it is the second most common cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organization. Why this should be is something of a mystery. For many, the stammering miraculously ceases when they sing their words, speak in a foreign language or talk to themselves. The majority of speakers recover from the condition by their teenage years and females seem to recover more easily than men . A neat thing to know about cold weather; it makes total sense, but had never occurred to me. “Incidentally, the reason your nose runs in chilly weather is the same reason your bathroom windows run with water in chilly weather. In the case of your nose, warm air from your lungs meets cold air coming into the nostrils and condenses, resulting in a drip.”

All the richness of life is created inside your head. What you see is not what is but what your brain tells you it is, and that's not the same thing at all. Bryson not only unearths unsung heroes, but surprising information. Bryson is a fun fact factory. Arguably, fun facts are the very definition of superficial knowledge; but Bryson’s curiosities are irresistible. There were so many things about the body—about digestion, sleep cycles, anatomy, disease—that I did not know, and so many things that surprised me. For example, I learned that our eyes do not only have rods and cones, but photoreceptive ganglion cells; these do not contribute to vision in any way, but tell us when it is light or dark. This is why some blind people instinctually know if it is day or night, or even if the light is on or off. It is a feat of narrative skill to bake so many facts into an entertaining and nutritious book..where Byrson really shines is in his imaginative glosses on the facts he has collected. Daily Telegraph There is disagreement over what precisely we do need. In America, the daily recommended dose of vitamin E is 15 milligrams, but in the UK it is 3 to 4 milligrams – a very considerable difference.

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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. 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. Bryson's deadpan wit existed side by side with some very gross descriptions of past medical research. So beware if you're squeamish or planning to eat. Bryson mentioned many scientists in the context of Nobel prize winners, both the worthy and the slighted, those robbed by unscrupulous bosses or by ignorant skepticism. Many of these stories were quite old, but they made me realize that our medical advances have been relatively recent, within the past 60 years or so. Bryson decided to explain anatomy to the reader as well as giving historical and practical context. 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.

According to one study, the number of bacteria on you actually rises after a bath or shower because they are flushed out from nooks and crannies. Many tests have been done to demonstrate how easily we are fooled with respect to flavour. In a blind taste test at the University of Bordeaux students in the Faculty of Oenology were given two glasses of wine, one red and one white. The wines were actually identical except that one had been made a rich red with an odourless and flavourless additive. The students without exception listed entirely different qualities for the two wines. That wasn't because they were inexperienced or naive. It was because their sight led them to have entirely different expectations, and this powerfully influenced what they sensed when they took a sip from either glass. In exactly the same way, if an orange-flavoured drink is coloured red, you cannot help but taste it as cherry. There is not an organ Bryson describes that is not illuminated by a fun fact or unlikely anecdote. Times 2 The most fascinating chapter to me was about the brain. Humans can truly be idiosyncratic as we don't all see or smell the world the same way. How can we when our individual collection of odorant receptors will lead to differing experiences of smell. And then because of the distance between our optic nerves and brains, the brain forecasts 1/5th of a second in advance. ... photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors. ...

Because we don´t understand, we should treat the body as good as possible with a diet of things and thoughts of which we know that they are not harmful 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. As with Bryson's 'A Short History of Almost Everything' I'm amazed by the breadth of research and interviewing he must have done for this book. Add to this his hallmark of being wonderfully readable - and you have a great book. Highly recommended. Like all of Bryson´s books, it an entertaining and great read, integrating history, medical science and vivid examples that stay in mind and easily find a way to a long term memory whose functioning we don´t understand to associate it with a brain we know nothing about and a mind that,... well, you get the meaning. If you like Bryson's previous books, you should like this one. It's pop science, and more fun than it is ground-breaking, but as long as you're not planning to use it as your handbook for experimental surgery, then I see nothing wrong with that.