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

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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.

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. We thus hear of the abominable Typhoid Mary, a women who, at one point, found out she was one of the rare carriers of typhoid without showing any symptoms, but decided to still work in kitchens (against a promise she had made to the authorities) and didn't even bother to wash her hands before preparing meals, thus spreading the disease until she was finally put under house arrest. 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.

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Or did you know that we always say "our 5 senses" but that there are many more? Like the sense that tells us if we're lying down or standing upright even when our eyes are closed? It's called proprioception (our sense of where we are in relation to the space around us). Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12 per cent of Earth’s land area” 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. 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.

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. Until now, I only knew Bill Bryson for his snarky travelogues. My buddy-reader, however, informed me that his non-fiction book was very good indeed. Besides, many biology books suffer from the fact that their authors are great scientists but horrible writers. So I wanted to read something that had the potential to be entertaining as well as educational. And with this elegant turn of sentiment, Bryson embarked on a journey of the human body, from top to bottom and from outside in. Despite its subtitle and seeming breadth, it appeared to me to offer limited value as a user's personal handbook. The bulk of The Body instead was evenly divided between being an idiosyncratic assortment of medical characters and scientists and a brief introductory course to anatomy and physiology. As well as conveying a huge bundle of facts in a fascinating fashion, Bryson also makes his readers laugh. I love this guy's sense of humour. That eased off a bit towards the end as he started talking about the body in old age. I possess a 69-year-old body, and I quaked a bit when I learnt the degree to which us older folk are more prone to problems. I presumed that I knew that already, but to see it so clearly laid out in print is daunting. For instance "An eighty-year-old person is a thousand times more likely than a teenager to develop cancer." Whaaaaaat? Although he doesn't dwell overly on the negatives of being elderly, the book nevertheless brings home to you with a thump some of the downsides of ageing.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). Do I recommend reading this? Absolutely. Everyone ought to have a primer on themselves. The benefit here is much more than meets the eye, though. So many new discoveries and outright debunking of myths have made it in this text. Recent ones, too.