• What secrets are you hiding from yourself?
And which of those are still a medical mystery too?
Here’s the top 15 unsolved mysteries about our own bodies.
15 – Appendix • The appendix is often described as a vestigial
organ; something that has stuck around from our evolutionary ancestors, even though we
no longer need it.
Your tail bone, at the bottom of your back, is similar, it used to connect the tail to
the body but now it’s useless.
• However, recently scientist think they have come a step closer to finding out its
purpose.
Dr Heather Smith found that an appendix had evolved independently in over 30 species and
seems to help replace some bacteria in the intestines if you lost it through diarrhoea,
for example.
We’re still very vague on the details though.
14 – Aging • No matter how many creams and treatments
you buy, aging is only ever a one-way street.
But what exactly is the cause of this wrinkling of the skin and weakening of the muscles and
joints?
• Are we programmed like this to free up food sources and living space for the next
generation?
Or is that our DNA just gets damaged over time so parts can’t be repaired?
The DNA damage looks like it can be reduced if you eat only the exact calories that you
need, so it’s certainly a factor but how everything combines to create aging is unknown.
13 – Weakest Apes • When you compare humans to our fellow
apes, and even our ancient ancestors, we may come out on top when it comes to making iphones
and doing the crossword.
But put us in a ring together and we would get our asses handed to us.
• The weakness of modern humans is down to our more sedentary life style, we have
no need to be particularly strong thanks to tools and domesticating animals.
But we don’t know why it was in our benefit to lose strength over a long period of evolution.
12 – Gut bacteria • Around 1% of your body mass is made up
of the various bacteria passengers you carry around all day.
Some of them are helpful, some are harmful and others are just up to their own mysterious
business.
• It’s in your gut where they really play a major role, helping you to break down certain
food types, as well as absorbing elements like carbon and nitrogen.
However, there are thousands of different types, so there’s whole ecosystem going
on in your intestines, one we’ve only just started to uncover.
11 – Dominant hand • About 90% of people are right handed and
this is super weird when you think about it.
Firstly, what is the use of having a dominant hand at all?
Perhaps it’s our brains way of helping us train.
If you kept doing a fiddly task, like writing, with a different hand, it might take you longer
to learn it.
• But even if we solve that mystery, that still leaves us with the right-handed issue.
It’s not like nature is better suited to “rightness”.
There’s no right-handed trees or fruit so why did we pick sides?
10 – Sleep • It seems like sleep must be a natural
part of all life; you do stuff, you get tired, it’s just the way things work.
But sleep is very different across species.
Bacteria are too simple to sleep exactly but they do have a kind of rhythm that matches
the passing of the day.
• Even within mammals, there’s a big variety.
Giraffes only sleep for about 30 minutes a day, often in little power naps of a few minutes,
standing up.
Dolphins and orcas sleep half a brain at a time so they don’t drown or get attacked.
• So maybe humans are just genetically lazy, with our 8 hours a night.
9 – Male Nipples • When we’re developing in the womb, we
all start out as basically female for the first few weeks.
When men switch and the male genitals start to develop, they’ve already been given nipples.
• But in most mammals, the hormones seriously limit nipple development but human men get
full sensitive connected nipples that are completely useless, well, outside of an S&M
dungeon of course.
8 – Autism • Although the anti-vaccination movement
would have you believe that vaccines cause autism, this is completely untrue and the
sad reality is that we’re still really unclear on how this disorder works.
• We don’t even know if it’s caused by genetics, environmental factors or something
else.
• To make it even more confusing, we should really talk about autisms rather than autism
since its effects are so varied.
7 – How do we track time • When people talk about their body clock,
they normally relate this to sleep patterns.
But you actually have a number of different clocks that monitor hugely different scales
of time.
You can sense hours passing through the day, a feel for the years gone by and you measure
milliseconds to coordinate your actions like catching a ball or jumping a gap.
• Most impressive is hearing.
If you hear a loud bang, you can tell the direction it came from.
This is because the sound wave has to travel slightly further to reach one ear, due to
your big fat head being in the middle.
This difference in time is only millionths of a second, but you measure it and calculate
in an instant, turning towards the sound.
• But where these clocks are and how they work, that’s a complete mystery.
6 – Pregnant smelling power • Apart from giving you the magic power
of being able to squeeze a little human out of you, pregnancy also messes with your senses,
specifically your sense of smell.
• We used to think that the sense was boosted, and that pregnant women could pick out subtle
odours better than when no bun was in the oven.
Research has disproven this but it hasn’t found a reason why many expecting mothers
notice that they react very differently to smells, often being much more sensitive to
them in how they react.
5 – Yawning • We used to think that yawning was caused
when you were tired so your breathing had slowed down.
This meant the level of oxygen in your blood was lower so the yawn was an attempt to take
in a big extra does.
But research has proven this idea to be incorrect.
They found yawning was just as frequent if you were well oxygenated.
• We also don’t know why it’s contagious.
It seems to be linked to empathy in some way since people with autism and psychopaths are
much less likely to catch a yawn. 4 – Blushing
• The biology of blushing is pretty simple.
You get a sudden dose of adrenaline and this makes the capillaries widen and carry more
blood, making it especially visible near the skin’s surface.
But this kind of fast reaction must be related to your ancient fight or flight response so
why is it caused by having a sexy teacher or ripping your pants in public?
What does our weird little subconscious think is about to happen?
3 – Hypnic jerk • A hypnic jerk sounds like someone who
does crystal healing and sells vegan breast milk.
But it’s actually that weird thing some people do as their falling asleep; they suddenly
have a spasm, normally jerking their head upright.
It feels like your falling and then you suddenly snap awake.
• Why would your brain play this awful practical joke on you?
Some people believe it is a hangover from our monkey past, to make sure we didn’t
drop out of the trees while snoozing.
But, you’re not actually falling so the reasons behind it are still unknown.
2 – Bright light sneeze • Staring at the sun is very bad for your
eyes but for around 20-30% of us, it’s also an irritation for our noses as well.
Looking up into a bright light, typically the sun, causes many people to sneeze.
• It’s not caused by any specific light wavelength, it’s only related to the intensity.
But that’s about the limit of our knowledge on it.
1 – Memory • We store a huge amount of data in our
heads; names, faces, skills and, for some reason, all the mean things our ex said to
us.
But where is all this information going, how is it stored and how is it accessed?
For over a century, we thought the memories where stored in the synapses, the connections
between brain cells.
But research in the last few years shows that even this may not be true so we might know
even less than we thought, which wasn’t much anyway.
• One thing we have learned though is that the reason you forget things when you are
drunk is because you don’t actually make a memory, it’s like you’ve just turned
the camera off.