Dilated (I Love It): You Are an Extraordinary Machine

It’s true: Your pupils dilate when you’re attracted to something. Like many mysterious biological responses, this fascinates me. I’m stuck on the awesomeness right now, so I’m going to elaborate far too much about my fascination.

Yes, the brilliance of the human body is amazing to me. I think about it on almost a daily basis. I sometimes stare at my wrists for a few minutes, wondering how in the world I’ve managed to not break or hurt them. I’ve fallen on them and they’ve effectively saved me, countless times, from what would have been much worse. They’re incredible little things, but whenever I think about how tiny they are, I feel very protective of them. They’re so fragile, exposed, skin so thin. I'm so pale, I can literally see veins almost all the way to my elbow. Am I the only one who marvels at wrists like that? Or any other awesome part of the body, for that matter…

My feet (or 26 bones, 33 joints and more than a hundred
muscles, tendons, and ligaments, times two).

I think about the same thing whenever I run. My ankles are tiny, and my feet are small. Yet I run, for miles, without stopping. And my lungs and my heart… they never, never, get a break. You always hear people say, “never say never”. But in this case, it really is never. Until you’re done with your life, there’s your body, working away. Thousands, millions of processes happen without you even knowing it, every single day. Do you feel like a living piece of art yet? Do you feel like a beautiful and unique and precious thing that will never come again? Because you should. 

Is it weird that I love looking at x-rays of people eating or drinking? I literally sit there, staring, thinking, “dude, that’s just amazing. Look at that!” I love seeing brainwaves and thought processes in colorful visual graphs. They look like sparkling, twinkling holiday lights; at any given second a constellation of brilliance is flickering inside your head. Yes, between your ears, there’s a whole lot of brightness going on, even when you’re sleeping (maybe even more when you’re sleeping).

The speed of our thoughts may actually exceed the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). And what a thought. If we could send our own thoughts anywhere, as if the human nerve reached as far as the edges of space, we could send an emotion or an idea to the sun in less than 8 minutes and 20 seconds. That sounds like an incredibly long time, doesn’t it? It gives us some perspective of the size of the universe. Imagine if it took more than 8 minutes to decide you want to move your foot, and actually move it. That would be one long day!

My eye. The term iris is Greek
for 'rainbow'.

There’s more, and the numbers just get bigger. You have roughly 45 miles of nerves in your skin, and (wait for it…) 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body. 60,000! That’s enough to circle the earth almost 2 and a half times! 10s of millions of bacteria are on every inch of your skin. Your eye can distinguish 10 million colors. If you live to be at least 70, your heart will probably have beaten over 2 billion times. And your brain? It can hold up to 1,000 terabytes of information. The Library of Congress, containing over 32 million books and 61 million manuscripts, holds some tens of petabytes (1,000 terabytes = 1 petabyte). Considering the amount of books, music and art that entails, you really have no excuse for not knowing (almost) everything. We wish it was that easy.

However you look at it, your body is an amazing thing. 206 bones, 640 muscles, all perfectly connected to function without a hiccup (most of the time). Lungs with little trees (okay, branches) inside them to feed oxygen throughout every inch of your skin. A heart that doesn’t quit, stomach acid that can dissolve metal (yes, really) and sneezes that push air out of you in excess of 100 mph. It all makes me feel like a dangerous time bomb. Tick tock, tick tock… boom. We're all extraordinary machines.