|
Don't hate your body too much, it's the most amazing machine on the planet
Thursday, 14 December 2006
We live in a society fixated on machines and gadgets. The media obsesses over iPods, BMWs, laptops and phones. And we consumers gobble up every titbit of information available on those topics.
Yet all of these appliances are mere toys compared to the most amazing machine on the planet - your own body. Just spending a few moments thinking about what an astonishing piece of equipment it actually is can be a worthwhile exercise.
The human body is a machine that builds itself. At the point of conception, little exists of it except an instruction-set contained in genetic material. This instruction-set grabs resources from its environment, and starts building a machine from them. It takes years to finalize itself into an adult human body, but is still an astonishing process.
And what a machine!
Consider just one part of it - the heart. It's a device which generally operates 3600 seconds an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 70 years or more without stopping to rest for even one minute. Or think of the liver, a chemical factory which deals with all sorts of inputs as they arrive and turns them into the complex outputs the body requires.
Each of your hands are manipulating devices with a versatility that engineers have never come close to equaling. They can punch, lift, type, play the piano, thread a needle and communicate (thumbs up!).They can maneuver objects with amazing accuracy and grace. Our hands have built the human world we live in, either directly or by creating and operating the machines that do so.
Your arms and legs are amazing transport devices. Sure, a car or a train may be faster, but they're also much less flexible. There aren't many environments that get the better of our legs. They can walk on ice, plains, mountains or boulders. Combined with our arms we can climb a tree, swim a river, or crawl through a tunnel.
Our brains are the most powerful computers in the world. They can't add as fast as a silicon chip, but they can write poetry, compose music, design bridges and invent games. All the products in our human world - from the space shuttle, to the chair, to the English language - are the products of our minds. Our brains and hands built everything you see out of nothing but the rocks, water, fire and other basic parts nature provided us with. Tasks that our brains consider trivial have baffled computer scientist for decades.
As well as having the ability to combine all these incredible parts into one living, thinking whole, our bodies also have a remarkable ability to heal themselves. Medicine may have advanced greatly in the last thousand years, but its ability to fight injury and disease pale in comparison to the mechanisms the body already has in place. Indeed, most medicine merely leverages these existing systems.
The body has the ability to filter poisons from the blood, fight diseases, and heal broken parts of itself - often without any outside help. What man-made machine comes close to having such amazing self-defense systems?
For all our remarkable engineering achievements, we've never come close to producing machines as elegant, flexible and useful as many of those in our bodies. We're also a long way from machines that can build and heal themselves.
Yet despite all these things, many people hate their bodies. They think they're the wrong shape, the wrong height, the wrong color or have hair in the wrong places. They obsess over the minutia of their body's imperfections instead of appreciating the genius of its design.
This is a shame, because your body is the most amazing machine on the planet. Take some time to appreciate it every now and again.
 | For proof of your own potential genius, just look around you | | What is the difference between you and a person struggling to scratch out a living from nature 50,000 years ago? Biologically, nothing. You are essentially identical. You just got lucky in the draw of history and were born into the modern world. But how this modern world was built must be the greatest story ever told. There we were a few thousand generations back, dropped naked in the dust. And he we are now, flying into space, building the internet and destroying deadly microbes. |  | Too much self-belief can be expensive | | We are often told about how important self-belief is. We're told to be optimistic, think positive and view ourselves as born special and unique. This is all well and good, but at times it can also be damaging. Too much self-belief can actually limit your potential. | | Take lots of small losses for some big wins | | Poker strategy contains many good lessons about dealing with the world. The best of all is that you have to be willing to take lots of small losses in order to hunt out a few big gains. |  | Taking charge of your eating habits | | Many people have trouble controlling their eating habits. You can see it in the rapidly expanding waistlines of the world's population. But what we decide to take into our bodies is something we can take charge of. |  | The world is an amazing place | | "Man is born free, yet everywhere he lies in chains," Voltaire said. He could just as easily have been talking about internal chains as external ones. | | Shaping the behavior of others | | We all have people in our lives who we wish would behave differently. It may be the person who cuts us off when we're driving, or the work-mate who's abusive, or the child who's too rebellious. What can we do to make these people act in the way we want them to? |  | 101 suggestions for squeezing more fun out of life | | Life can sometimes seem like a real drag. The work, worry, stress, chores and general boredom can really get you down. Going to the gym, watching TV and surfing the web are all okay, but often when it comes to having real fun they just don't cut it. | | Become expert at identifying your own weaknesses | | We live in a society that promotes the cult of self-esteem. Anything goes as long as we feel great about ourselves, or so we're led to think. Believing we may have flaws is a big no-no and certain to have a negative impact on our success. |  | The best way to influence the behavior of others | | We are all dependent on one another. We need other people and they need us in order to live the best lives we can. But other people are generally outside of our control. So one of the biggest problem anyone faces is how to get others to behave in the way we want them to. | | Is it better to read fiction or non-fiction? | | One of the most popular articles I’ve written on this site so far has been Five excellent mind habits to develop. It’s been generally well received, but I have come in for some criticism for my belief that it’s a better mind habit to read non-fiction than fiction. |
New articles are being added all the time, so make sure you bookmark Paul's Tips and come back.
|
|