The human body is an amazing machine.
The nerve impulses to and from the brain travel 170 miles per hour. This enables you to know instantly that you just burned your finger on the hot stove! Your brain uses 20% of the oxygen you breathe in, yet only makes up 2% of your body mass. Your brain is more active at night than during the day, processing all the input that you took in during the day. 80% of the brain is water and the brain can not feel pain.
Facial hair grows faster than any other hair on the human body. You lose 60 to 100 strands of hair each day. A single strand of hair can support 3.5 ounces. Blondes have more hair with 146,000 hair follicles compared to the average human of 100,000.
The human heart produces enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet. The acid in your stomach in strong enough to dissolve a razor blade. Your stomach produces a new lining every three to four days.
You have over 60,000 miles of blood vessels. Enough to reach around the world twice and have 10,000 miles left over. Your liver can do over 500 different functions.
You could remove a large part of your internal organs and survive. The human body may appear fragile but it’s possible to survive even with the removal of the stomach, (called a jejunostomy) the spleen, 75 percent of the liver, 80 percent of the intestines, one kidney, one lung, and virtually every organ from the pelvic and groin area. You might not feel too great, but the missing organs wouldn’t kill you.
Your teeth start growing six months before you are born. A fetus has fingerprints at at 3 months.
If saliva can’t dissolve something, then you can not taste it. Your nose can remember 50,000 different scents. Every human has a unique smell, except for identical twins.
A baby’s head is one-quarter of its total length, but by age 25 will be one-eighth of its total length.
You use 200 muscles to take one step. The tooth is the only part of the human body that can not heal itself.
These are just a few of the wonders of the human body. David said that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
We take for granted the fragility of the body. Think about the temperature. The internal temperature has to be maintained somewhere between 98 and 100 degrees. 80% of the energy generated from the food you eat goes to maintaining the temperature of the body. The brain reads the temperature and responds by constricting the extremities of the body if it is too cold. It can also signal the contraction of a large number of muscles which result in what we call ‘shivering’.
If our bodies are too hot, it disperses the heat, but it can not do this if the temperature of the air close to our body is too warm. Humidity complicates this process of cooling the body down.
If we get too cold, we can suffer frostbite, and even freezing to death, literally. If we get too hot, we have heat stroke, and die.
As we age, we become more susceptible to the drop or rise in temperatures. I have to make sure that my chest is well protected when the temp drops into the 40s and below. I have had Bronchitis at least five times in the past 10 years, and each time it seems to be worse. I have to be very careful with drafts, even though it is said you can’t catch a cold from a draft, and sleep with a thermal undershirt on, and with the ceiling fan off. (The wife likes it on, because she gets hot. I think the real truth is she likes to say those words.)lol
This past summer I had heat exhaustion from working in temperatures of 92 degrees inside a house doing a rehab project, with the temp outside in the high 90s. (There was no air conditioning-the thieves had stolen it and the copper pipe.)
The five senses of the body, smell, sight, hearing, touch, and taste, all influence the mind, and the emotions. The mind and emotions are part of the soul. Over 90% of diseases are caused by stress.
Five Senses:
Smell: I was six years old on a farm outside of Athens, Ohio. Dad and Mom raised chickens for eggs and for dinner. I even got to behead a chicken with an hatchet at the tender age of six, while Mom held it with the neck across a block of wood in the backyard. It was always fun and kind of weird to watch the chicken run around the yard with its head missing.
Mom would clean the chicken by dunking the whole thing in scalding water to loosen the feathers. She then would pluck the feathers from the chicken. Of course I got to help. I hated that chore. The smell of scalded chicken feathers has never left me. I dislike anything to do with chicken to this day, although I had to eat plenty of it during my years of ministry! But, now that I am of retirement age, I refuse to touch it! I’ve put my foot down. Anytime I see or smell chicken my stomach starts to churn, and I have the picture of the back porch of the farm house, plucking those dang feathers!
Sight: I have had to wear glasses since I was in the fourth grade of school. I didn’t start to wear bi-focals until just this past year. The eye doc thought it remarkable that I could still read without bi-focals at my age. I still do not need them to read, but they do come in handy when driving my truck, as I can see the speedometer without tilting my head up to be able to look out from below my glasses!
David said I will set no evil thing before my eyes. Jesus said he that looks on a woman to lust after her beauty in his heart has already committed adultery. He also said the light of the body is the eye, and if our eye be single than our body would be full of light.
80% of what we perceive comes through the eyes. The eye can detect 10 million color hues. The eyes are composed of over 2 million working parts. They can process 36,000 bits of information per hour. You can discern the light of a candle at a distance of 14 miles. You process over 24 million images of the world around you in one lifetime. Eyes utilize 65% of the pathways to the brain.
Taste: As I age my taste buds change. Things I use to be crazy about, I now do not care whether I have it or not. You have around 9,000 taste buds that can tell the difference between salty, sour, sweet, and bitter. The taste buds begin to decrease after the age of 40 in women and 50 in men. You begin to lose sensitivity after the age of 60. You also produce less saliva in your elder years, and this changes the way you taste food. You can’t taste anything without saliva. Medications dry up the mouth and changes the way food tastes. This explains why your appetite decreases and your desire for those Brownies and Steak, you once craved, no longer hold any appeal for you.
Hearing: I had a lot of severe ear aches when I was a young child. Mom would blow cigarette smoke into my ears to help soothe the pain. Lol..I don’t remember it helping anything, but Mom’s gentle attention always was nice. Most of my Mom’s brothers had hearing issues. So with the genetics and the earaches, I have 80% loss in my right ear and 30% in my left ear. Now that I am aging, the issue has gotten worse. Helen Keller noted that blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people. I have tried a couple of different hearing aids, and all they do is magnify the noise level, without clarifying the enunciation of the words, even though they advertise otherwise. I miss one word, (they said slack, I hear shack) and I am busy trying to figure out that one word, and they have gone on and said three more sentences, and in turn I have missed part of what else they have said. So, you will see me giving an answer to things that people had never asked, and they are scratching their heads…”What the hey, is he talking about?!”
Touch: According to the book, “Five Love Languages” by Dr. Gary Chapman, I personally, rate ‘touch’ as the number one language for myself. My Dad never knew his real Father, and his Mother was very German and very non-hugging. My Mom and her Parents on the other-hand were very warm and hugging. Dad would scold me with a loud harsh voice and Mom would hug me while whispering in a soft loving voice telling me that Dad didn’t mean anything. I in turn grew up very unsure of myself until I had my experience with Christ. Touch is important for babies to grow into healthy adults.
In Conclusion, the body is a miraculous machine able to heal itself under normal conditions. But, when Stress continually invades one or more of our five senses, it causes Distress. Distress then takes a toll on the body and the soul, causing anything from heart attacks, sleep problems, ulcers, depression and many other mental problems.
Tomorrow I will look more at how our natural world, through the five senses of the body, influences our souls for the good or the bad.