The Body: A Guide for Occupants QUOTES

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

142 " Irvine, Elizabeth Loftus, discovered that it is possible through suggestion to implant entirely false memories "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

143 " antibiotics, the more opportunity they have to develop resistance. What you are left with after a course of antibiotics, after all, are the most resistant microbes. By attacking a broad spectrum of bacteria, you stimulate lots of defensive action. At the same time, you inflict unnecessary collateral damage. 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. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

144 " Even at rest we sweat steadily, if inconspicuously, but if you add in vigorous activity and challenging conditions, we drain off our water supplies very quickly. According to Peter Stark in Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance, a man who weighs 155 pounds will contain a little over forty-two quarts of water. If he does nothing at all but sit and breathe, he will lose about one and a half quarts of water per day through a combination of sweat, respiration, and urination. But if he exerts himself, that rate of loss can shoot up to one and a half quarts per hour. That can quickly become dangerous. In grueling conditions—walking under a hot sun, say—you can easily sweat away ten and a half to twelve and a half quarts of water in a day. No wonder we need to keep hydrated when the weather is hot. Unless the loss is halted or replenished, the victim will begin to suffer headaches and lethargy after losing just three to five quarts of fluid. After six or seven quarts of unrestored loss, mental impairment starts to become likely. (That is when dehydrated hikers leave a trail and wander into the wilderness.) If the loss gets much above ten and a half quarts for a 155-pound man, the victim will go into shock and die. During World War II, scientists studied how long soldiers could walk in a desert without water (assuming they were adequately hydrated at the outset) and concluded that they could go forty-five miles in 80-degree heat, fifteen miles in 100-degree heat, and just seven miles in 120-degree heat. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

145 " One of the most severe and challenging of all pains is said to be phantom limb pain, when the sufferer perceives agonies in a part of the body that has been lost to accident or amputation. It is an obvious irony that one of the greatest pains we feel can be in a part of us that is no longer there. Worse, unlike normal pain, which usually abates as a wound heals, phantom pain may go on for a lifetime. No one can yet explain why. One theory is that in the absence of receiving any signal from the nerve fibers in the missing body part, the brain interprets this as an injury so severe that the cells have died, and so sends out an unending call of distress, like a burglar alarm that won’t turn off. If surgeons know they are going to amputate a limb, they now often numb the nerves in the affected limb over a period of days beforehand to prepare the brain for the oncoming loss of feeling. The practice has been found to greatly reduce phantom limb pain. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

146 " Even more appallingly, in the United States 80 percent of antibiotics are fed to farm animals , mostly to fatten them. Fruit growers can also use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops. In consequence, most Americans consume secondhand antibiotics in their food (including even some foods labeled as organic) without knowing "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

147 " We now know that selenium makes two vital enzymes, deficiency in which has been linked to hypertension, arthritis, anemia, some cancers, and even, possibly, reduced sperm counts. So, clearly it is a good idea to get some selenium inside you (it is found particularly in nuts, whole wheat bread, and fish), but at the same time if you take in too much you can irremediably poison your liver. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

148 " Adults in the West produce about 200 grams of feces a day—a little under half a pound, about 180 pounds a year, 14,000 pounds in a lifetime. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

149 " What nearly everyone agrees is that we need a more targeted approach. One interesting possibility would be to disrupt bacteria’s lines of communication. Bacteria never mount an attack until they have assembled sufficient numbers—what is known as a quorum—to make it worthwhile to do so. The idea would be to produce quorum-sensing drugs that wouldn’t kill all bacteria but would just keep their numbers permanently below the threshold, the quorum, that triggers an attack. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

150 " When you describe a chili as hot, you are being more literal than you might suppose. Your brain interprets it as being actually burned. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

151 " What nearly everyone agrees is that we need a more targeted approach. One interesting possibility would be to disrupt bacteria’s lines of communication. Bacteria never mount an attack until they have assembled sufficient numbers—what is known as a quorum—to make it worthwhile to do so. The idea would be to produce quorum-sensing drugs that wouldn’t kill all bacteria but would just keep their numbers permanently below the threshold, the quorum, that triggers an attack. Another possibility is to enlist bacteriophages, a kind of virus, to hunt down and kill harmful bacteria for us. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

152 " The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

153 " It is in all that complex synaptic entanglement that our intelligence lies, not in the number of neurons , as was once thought. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

154 " effects were horrific – Evans needed a kidney transplant and all members of the party suffered lasting damage – yet nothing in the taste alerted anyone to the perils "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

155 " The main thing to bear in mind is that carbohydrate, upon being digested, is just more sugar – often quite a lot more. That means that a 150g serving of white rice or a small bowl of cornflakes will have the same effect on your blood glucose levels as nine teaspoons of sugar. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

156 " DNA molecule, as you will almost certainly remember from countless television programs if not school biology, is made up of two strands, connected by rungs to form the celebrated twisted ladder known as a double helix. Your DNA is simply an instruction manual for making you. A length of DNA is divided into segments called chromosomes and shorter individual units called genes. The sum of all your genes is the genome. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

157 " One of the reasons the Mona Lisa looks enigmatic is that she has no eyebrows. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

158 " The question is important because if fever is a defense mechanism, then any effort to suppress or eliminate it may be counterproductive. Allowing a fever to run its course (within limits, needless to say) could be the wisest thing. An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred—an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

159 " The idea was to help women produce babies of genius by giving them the very best sperm modern science could provide. Some two hundred children were born as a result of the bank’s efforts, though none, it seems, proved to be an outstanding genius or even an accomplished eyeglass engineer. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

160 " No one knows, because it is essentially impossible to determine, to what extent environmental factors contribute to cancers now. More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants