Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (5 page)

It’s the
hyoid bone
, and it’s unique in that no other bone touches it. Located in the neck just above the larynx, the hyoid anchors the tongue muscles. This bone is well known to forensic investigators: If a deceased person’s hyoid is broken, it almost always means that the cause of death was strangulation.

About 2,000 gallons, if you’re average. The heart has to pump that much because most adults have about 60,000 miles of blood vessels through which the blood must continually flow. How far is 60,000 miles? More than two trips around the equator.

Inflamed tendons, dental injuries, erythema, scaling, cyst formation, scarring, and inflammatory pustules. These types of maladies are common among members of what profession?

Were you thinking football players? Cops? Deep-sea fishermen? How about pro wrestlers? Wrong. The answer is classical musicians, who are prone to painful, sometimes career-ending, afflictions similar to those suffered by athletes. This isn’t surprising, considering that professional musicians perform repetitive motions for as many as six hours every day—which is how much you have to practice to get that good.

Case in point: A cellist’s left hand, playing just the last movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, changes position on the strings roughly 6,400 times. Other examples of common injuries and maladies suffered by classical musicians:

• Violinists can develop skin cysts and pustules on their necks. (It’s called “fiddler’s neck.”)

• String players are also especially prone to chronic pain in their shoulders, arms, and neck.

• Keyboard and woodwind players can suffer from wrist injuries to the point of becoming unable to use silverware or turn doorknobs.

• Pressure from a brass instrument’s mouthpiece can cause dental, lip, and facial nerve damage.

• And no matter where the musician sits in an orchestra, he or she will most likely be exposed to more than enough loud noises to cause at least some hearing loss. A study of classical musicians by a group of Finnish researchers reported that 15 percent of the musicians suffered from permanent tinnitus—a constant ringing in the ears. In contrast, that condition only affects 2 percent of the general population.

If your body were a country, which organ would be considered the customs agent?

Nearly everyone experiences typical REM sleep, except for one specific group of people. Who are they?

Just like a customs agent who checks everything that enters a country, your liver checks the stuff that enters your body. That’s not all it does: The liver performs an estimated 500 different functions. Located just behind your rib cage, it’s is responsible for dealing with 99 percent of the chemicals you ingest, and it even manufactures chemicals of its own. Your liver also assists in digestion by converting most of the vitamins, carbohydrates, protein, and fat that you ingest into the nutrients your body needs. And as if that weren’t enough, it also works to keep all the toxins you ingest from spreading throughout your body, either by destroying them or sending them to the toilet.

The only people who don’t experience typical REM sleep are people who were blind from birth. Short for “Rapid Eye Movement,” REM is what your eyes do when you dream—basically, they’re “looking around” at images created by your brain. That doesn’t mean that blind people don’t dream—just that they don’t s
ee
anything. Instead, they smell, touch, and hear things in their dreams, just as they do in life. Sighted people who become blind will still “see” in their dreams, although most report that as the years go by, sight in dreams diminishes and is gradually replaced by other senses.

What smelly affliction did Benjamin Franklin believe could be cured by ingesting turpentine?

I am a part of your body whose job it is to receive something that enters you and then convert it into something else. Only then will you know what that thing is. I was fully grown when you were only two. What am I?

Franklin was attempting to cure smelly asparagus pee. “A few stems of asparagus,” he wrote, “shall give our urine a disagreeable odor; a pill of turpentine no bigger than a pea shall bestow upon it the pleasing smell of violets.” Franklin was right about the odor—eating asparagus does cause the body to produce sulfur compounds that are then released in urine. Not everyone can detect it, but to those who can (including, apparently, Franklin) the smell can be quite offensive. (Warning: Uncle John doesn’t recommend taking the bizarre medical advice of Benjamin Franklin or any other forefather.)

The retinas. Like the sensor in a camera, the retinas’ job is to convert light waves that enter your eyes into electrical impulses. The impulses are then sent to your brain, where they’re converted into visual images.

All mammalian eyes grow to full size faster than most of the rest of the body (which is why young mammals all look so cute—it’s those “big” eyes). The retinas, located in the back of the eyeballs, are the first to mature; the rest of the eyes become fully grown by puberty. In contrast, the brain doesn’t become fully mature until the late 30s to early 40s. (Or, in the case of some people we know, never.)

If you force your eyes to stay open when you sneeze, how far, in feet, will your eyeballs fly out of your head?

By the time you reach 70 years old, you will have lost more than 100 pounds of what?

As cool as that would be to witness, nobody’s eyes have ever popped out of their sockets during an open-eye sneeze. The pressure of a sneeze is confined to your nasal passages, not your eyes. So why do you close your eyes when you sneeze? Like the sneeze itself—a reaction to rid the nasal passages of irritants—closing your eyes is an involuntary reflex.

But unlike sneezing, it’s still a medical mystery as to exactly why this eye-closing reflex occurs. The two prevailing theories: 1) Closing the eyes keeps nasty sneeze projectiles from spraying into the eyes and then reentering the body; and 2) sneezing forces air backward from the nose through the tear ducts, creating a puff of air that causes the eyes to close.

Although some people claim to have trained themselves to sneeze with their eyes open, for most of us, if we try to force our eyes to stay open, the sneeze reflex simply diminishes.