When you first fall in love with reading you can be somewhat childlike. You know how kids explain things to adults that the adults already know, but this never occurs to the kid because they’re just finding these things out for the first time? And they think it’s so wondrous and magical that they must be the only one that knows this information, otherwise some other wide eyed person would have explained it to them already. Basically, everything of interest that you read comes spewing out at the people around you with no care for whether or not they’d like to hear it. Breakfast? Walk on the mountain? Dinner party? No matter the time or place, if the conversation veers anywhere near a topic you’ve recently read about, the conversation is over. It is now an occasion for you to deliver your thesis because, having read a generally well rated book on the topic, you know things people, you know things.

The body by Bill BrysonOver time, as you get more used to constantly being surprised, excited and enthralled by the things that you read, you begin to pick and choose what you share with a bit more consideration for whether the audience of the day cares to know. Some books, however, set you back. Two examples that immediately come to mind are Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (which I just finished on Audiobook and will do a post about – not my favourite book but interesting in that wait ’till you’ve heard of this kind of way) – and Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker which, honestly, created some friction. The experience of reading Why We Sleep caused me to seriously backslide into the information-spewing state of my younger years. I also hadn’t quite accounted for just how contentious sleep is as a dinner table topic. Coincidentally, it was at a dinner party discussing Matthew Walker’s work that The Body by Bill Bryson was recommended to me. I tarried for three years and one pandemic and recently picked up my first Bryson book.

I learned some things which I’ll share here instead of on the street corner with every passer by. These are my 5 takeaways.

1. There’s so much we still don’t know

One of the sentences you’ll read in The Body on numerous occasions (with growing concern) is “we don’t know”.

What? We don’t know? This is 2022. The age of information & artificial intelligence. Elon Musk is basically moonwalking rockets back onto the earth’s surface. How can we (the global, medical fraternity we) not know something. So many things. So many important things about our biology? Take for instance yawning and hiccups. These are prevalent, everyday things for the human race that are still largely mysteries to medicine. Who cares? You might ask, and that would be the right question. One of the undercurrents of The Body is a general rundown of how medical research works. What guides it. What causes some branches of medicine to dam up like beaver city whilst others flow freely into an ocean of researchers: Economics, of course. Research requires budget. Budget requires investment and investment requires return. Yawing simply doesn’t create enough problems for the human race to help get even a Kickstarter off the ground. You might say the same for hiccups but, having read the story of Charles Osborne, a man who hiccuped for 68 years, I’m freshly cautious of reaching for the chilli poppers (they always, always give me hiccups which always, always annoys my wife).

That’s not to say that medical mysteries exist for economic reasons alone. In actuality, the primary reason for so much still being a mystery to the world is that our bodies are so immensely and mystically complex. You could take just one tiny part of your physiological makeup and spend a lifetime trying to fully understand it (many researchers do) and still not come close. There are parts of the body that doctors somewhat understand but not fully, like smell and then there are parts that are still complete mysteries, like why we yawn. As a believer in intelligent design (the fancy, studious word that’s more palatable to scientists than the big G-o-d), the complexity of the smallest parts of ourselves was confirmation to me that we must have been put together, intelligently. Take the wrist for example, it is a maze of tiny bones, nerves, veins, muscles and blood vessels and yet has to be totally fluid in its movements for us to be able to carry out even the simplest daily tasks.

the wrist is just a thing of beauty quote by bill bryson

I was consistently surprised then at how vehemently and upright mockingly Bryson spoke about the idea of intelligent design whilst simultaneously detailing hundreds of complex and intelligent parts of the body. At times even unbelievably complex and intelligent. His evidence to the fact that we are most definitely not intelligently designed were the strange or seemingly poorly designed parts of our bodies like the tiny blind spot we have in our visual field (yep, I tested it and you can too, it’s there!) or the fact that our food and air intake happens through the same tube. Bryson also often details how little we actually understand about the body, which tempted me to flag these arguments for preservation, to be held under the light of future findings.

Whatever your stance, the fact is there is indeed still a lot to be found out about our bodies, despite the immense work of the heroes of medicine past.

2. Pain and what we make of it

My wife was an absolute hero through her breast cancer treatment. Honestly, she complained less through three surgeries, sixteen rounds of chemotherapy and 20 rounds of radiation than I complain of my bi-monthly migraines. Through her treatments I had many heartbreaking opportunities to reflect on her strength in the face of so much pain. She’s always had a higher pain threshold than me. As though she was born with the tools she needed to get through the past two years. It was deeper than that though. She made a decision at the outset of her treatment about who she wanted to be through her cancer journey. I think she spent only two full days in bed through chemo. It’s important that I be clear that while I hold my wife up as an absolute hero for how she got through her treatment, she and I both know and talk about the fact that she tried to be “too strong”. That there were times she put the picture of who she wanted to be through her journey ahead of what her body, and her mind, really needed. That her healing and her life were held in the arms of Grace and while she had to do her part and make it through, she could rest. Miss that dinner. Flip, even miss that birthday and it wouldn’t mean she was any less of a warrior. She is a warrior. My belief though was that the warrior mindset she had may even have physically allowed her body to feel less pain. This is backed by Bryson’s explanation of how the mind experiences and manages pain. As Bryson puts it, “we feel the pain we expect to feel” which was shown by an experiment where the effects of morphine were greatly reduced when patients weren’t told that they were being given morphine.

In less serious settings, we’ve all seen the boy at the party experience something painful in front of a group of girls and swear it doesn’t hurt. Truth is, it probably does hurt a lot less than if he were alone and indulged his pain. That being said, there are obviously limits to mind over matter. My personal experience was also at an adolescent party filled with girls where I was running from a freakishly scary husky and tripped into a tent and broke my arm. I then ugly-snot-cried for 45 minutes straight, until my mom fetched me. Stay cool Nicky boy. Stay cool.

The fact that pain is still largely a mystery to us was a big surprise to me. Because, well, Doctors always seem like they know things. Which I think is a helpful perspective for communities at large. It reminds me of flight attendants showing you the safety card and what to do in the event of a loss of cabin pressure. Everyone on the plane knows if something really went wrong we’d all be breathing on the sweet oxygen of the afterlife, but at least some of us still pretend to listen to the safety briefing, and it even makes us feel better. They have a plan if things go wrong. That’s good.

I think of the ritual of a doctor’s office. The stern politeness of the self-important receptionist. The grandeur of the words ‘The Doctor will see you now’. Like the good Lord himself has made time in his busy schedule saving the world to see you about your irritable bowel. The terminology used. The tone and prose of the practitioners. The reassuring skeleton on the windowsill in front of the qualification that’s framed with a wood frame that was popular in 1978. Sometimes it can all feel a little like the Wizard of Oz, but instead of the Emerald City it’s walking three kilometres from the last parking on the corner. The truth of the matter is that if certain things go wrong in our wondrous bodies, like if we experience phantom pain – the pain in a limb that’s been amputated – the pain can’t be stopped. We just don’t understand it well enough.

3. The heroes of medicine

I’m flat on my stomach, on a board about one and a half times the length of my body. There are angry looking rolling mounds of white water heading my way in what seems like an endless train of torture. From the beach these angry water creatures looked like ripples in a gentle pond. The kind that might cool and tickle your ankles on a sunset stroll by the lagoon on a summer’s evening. Now, at eye level, they look like they’d like to drown me. Repeatedly.

One of the painful rights of passage about learning to surf is that you start out on boards too big and buoyant to duck under the white water. Incidentally, even if you had a light and short board, you don’t know exactly how you’re supposed to maneuver this awkward log in such a way that you and the board should neatly dip under the wall of doom-water trying to pin you to the ocean floor. This, combined with the fact that my local beginners surf spot – Muizenberg beach in Cape Town – is a beach break with more often than not lots and lots of paddling required to get to the backline, created quite an obstacle to really getting into surfing.

It’s like the sport was designed this way to make sure that any weak willed ‘kooks’ (as they’re known in the not-so-welcoming hardcore surf culture) would quit. A weeding out of the weak-armed and trend hopping hobbyists who saw a wetsuit on sale, read an Instagram post about the backline at sunrise and decided surfing might be their quarter life crisis of choice. Many surf sessions as a beginner are really just paddle sessions. Five meters paddling forward, encounter a wave and you’re pushed 4.99m backwards again. I remember it was on one morning paddle session that it struck me how remarkable it is that I can do this at all. The left side of my body is what I like to call the impact zone. Starting from my foot I’ve torn my left ankle ligaments and had operations on my left knee, left thumb (twice), and had a fairly big operation on my left shoulder. Yet, despite nearly a decade of giving my orthopedic surgeon his Christmas bonuses, here I am, paddling hard against the current with my shoulders. Gripping the rails through the white water with that thumb of mine. Standing up, off balance and awkwardly as the wave pushes me forward with the ankle and knee I trust, despite their injuries. It’s nothing short of a miracle. A miracle that’s possible because of a mixture of providence and the heroes of medical research.

The Body is filled with stories of medical heroes. People willing to put their own health, and it must be said, those of their colleagues and students, on the line in the name of scientific and biological advancement. People such as Werner Forssmann who fed a catheter through his arm and into his heart simply to see what would happen; Charles Blagden who was studying how the human body adapted to heat and so built a chamber (Bryson describes it as a walk in oven) and stood in it for ten minutes at 92.2 degrees Celsius and Michel Siffre, a French scientist who isolated himself for eight full weeks in a mountain in the alps with zero light to see what effect it would have, and in the process proved that our circadian rhythms could be confused. The list goes on and on.

One can’t help but feel a growing respect for the medical field as a whole as you read about the generations of heroes of medical research that dedicated life and quite literally limb to try to better understand the body, to all of our collective benefits. Of course, this wasn’t an entirely philanthropic pursuit. The status and financial reward of becoming a well known and widely respected Doctor through a meaningful discovery or powerful body of research was definitely a motivating force. Intentions aside, the outcome of this relentless forward push by generation after generation of Doctors and Researchers has led to yard after yard of progress in helping us live longer, better lives.

4. The myths that persist

Do we lose most of our body heat through the top of our heads? Do we only use 10% of our brains? Do our hair and fingernails continue to grow after death? The answer to all of these questions is no. There are a host of myths about our bodies and minds revealed in The Body. Many that I had always believed.

As rational, wise and competent adults, how is it that we continually believe things that simply aren’t true? The answer is something that Annie Duke deals with in her book Thinking In Bets through a distillation of the same idea in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast And Slow and it all comes down to how we form beliefs. Most of the time when we hear information we subconsciously judge whether or not we believe the information that’s being shared based on things other than the actual information being shared. For instance who is sharing the information is more important to our snap judgements than what we’re hearing. This means that we hear things, believe them and require evidence to refute the information rather than hear things, vet them and then decide whether or not to believe it based on our vetting processes. This is one of the reasons that misinformation spreads so easily in a peer to peer fashion. When a trusted family member shares a link with us we tend to believe that article (and share it onward) despite its scientific or medical grounds, simply because we trust the person that sent it to us.

And so, in this way, myths about our biology and physiology have made their way through the centuries as generation after generation hear them from trusted sources like grandparents, uncles or even family practitioners believe them without question and, in an expression of that trust, pass them onto their own children. The medical myths that persist aren’t an indictment on the medical field as such, it’s not even an indictment on how we form beliefs (there are reasons even for this), it’s just a reminder to not believe everything you hear, read or watch.

5. The superior amble

In the late 1940s there lived a Doctor named Jeremy Morris. Jeremy was a researcher and was interested in the links between standing and walking and heart disease. He was looking for ways to study these links whilst taking a double-decker bus to work every morning when he realised that the bus driver, who sat all day, and the conductor, who mostly stood all day and climbed about 600 steps a day, were perfect groups of people to study and compare.

going for regular walks reduces the risk of heart attach

What he found was the first link between standing, walking and heart disease. After studying 35,000 drivers and conductors for two years he found that drivers were twice as likely to have a heart attack as conductors, even when adjusting for other factors and regardless of how healthily the bus drivers lived. This initial link discovered by Morris has been built upon by study after study. There’s a reason your medical insurance company is willing to pay you money (or in my case, throw endless smoothies at me) for walking 5,000 steps a day. And man, for those peanut butter bomb smoothies… and I would walk faayv hondred miles.

There are professional benefits to walking too. If you believe in the idea that form follows function, there are some great examples of deep thinkers and problem solvers who walked as a way to think. They didn’t do so haphazardly but it was their primary channel for getting their thinking work done. In Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism he talks about this quite a lot in regards to Walden by Thoreau but also stretches examples back to the great Greek and Roman philosophers – Seneca, Aurelius and the like – who thought by moving their sandalled feet. In a charming book called The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis tells the story of arguably two of the greatest modern minds, Kahneman and Tversky, and how they worked together for decades by simply walking and talking through highly complex problems.

Perhaps you can walk yourself into the halls of wildly impactful thinkers in your own streets.

Books featured in this article

Author

10,354 Comments