What do you think the most fascinating/amazing part/function of the human body is, and why?

Ooh, hard to choose. I think the eyeball/eyelid area is amazing. There’s a layer of fluid held together with insulin and also has tiny microbes living on it. Like waterworld but tiny and doesn’t suck. Then light is filtered, flipped and shipped off to the brain. Eyelashes to shade and protect the eye. Involuntary combined with voluntary movements. Eye color that can change based on mood…

I could go on and on.

The circulatory system is ridiculous. However, the brain is the clear winner to me. Just the way we interpret sounds and the way they are translated into electrical signals in the brain is amazing. Olfaction is definitely my favorite of the senses, and I think we are still light years away from understanding how humans can detect pheromones without a functional vomeronasal organ or an accessory olfactory bulb. So freaking cool.

The brain, without a doubt.

brain and heart.

Without a doubt, the brain. Highly adaptive biological supercomputers with, compared to today’s calculating machines, tiny dimensions, able to control equally complex biological machines through a nearly endlessly dynamic world.

I think the male and female reproductive systems are amazing. The fact two people can create another person is incredible. And not just the reproductive system, but the whole pregnancy process.. incredible..

Allergies. I’m thoroughly amazed at how much I’m sneezing this year. I go through a box of KleenX every half hour. You should buy stock. Where is all this liquid snot coming from? My Gawd I should be a shriveled up raisin by now with all the mucus I’ve lost. It is absolutely fascinating that the waterworks have so much to give. It’s a never ending flood.

Never had allergies of any kind until last year.

OH MY GOD THE BRAIN! Everything you experience relies on the brain, every moment of sorrow and beauty and the color of the sky and coffee ice cream and loss and exuberance and love and appreciation and community and running as fast as you can and remembering your first kiss and the smell of the ocean and juggling and having snowball fights and your most brilliant, creative idea and the worst thing you’ve ever done—all of that and infinity more is contained in that three pound gem.

OH MY GOD maybe my brain is dripping out of my nose! OH MY GOD!

Without a doubt, the human brain is the most fascinating to me.
@Violet agreed!

Yeah the heart is amazing, it actually has brain cells in it. We don’t know nearly enough about the heart. In our beginning fetal stages, we begin as a pumping heart with a tongue sticking out of it. (That would be a cool tattoo!...if done stylistically)

I effing love that exhibit. Been twice myself.
I’m gonna have to be boring and say the liver.
IT DOES SO MUCH SHIT!
And yet you can have half of it removed. It’s just this…structureless hunk.

The pituritary gland. Its amazing how something so tiny can have such a huge effect on the whole human body. It conrols every little bit of you. Its the motherboard and helps design you.

DNA

Ooh nice call @Pandora, the pituitary gland is the generator of all dreams, visions, imagination, and hallucinations. Without it we’d never navigate anything other than the 3D material plane.

The belly-button.
It’s a hole in your tummy.
And it doesn’t do anything but trap lent.
Fascinating.

Did you know that you actually have two brains. The first brain forms in the earliest stages of life and the heart grows out of it, then everything else from there. What we’re finding is that the first brain never goes away, and actually performs functions as a heart brain.

Neuroscientists have recently discovered exciting new information about the heart that makes us realize it’s far more complex than we’d ever imagined. Instead of simply pumping blood, it may actually direct and align many systems in the body so that they can function in harmony with one another. These scientists have found that the heart has its own independent nervous system – a complex system referred to as the brain in the heart. There are at least forty thousand neurons (nerve cells) in the heart – as many as are found in various subcortical centers of the brain.

That’s exactly what I was referring to @RealEyesRealizeRealLies!! So cool

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Interesting. (I’ll have to check it out later. Going to bed.)
@chamelopotamus Thanks! ;)

@chamelopotamus Sorry I missed your post in my mischief. The lurve should be yours! I can only give you one sorry!

@Vunessuh I heard that your belly button has little, hairy hooks in it and that’s why lint gert trapped in there.
I think the most fascinating thing are the fingers.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies lol no way man, Im pumped someone else knows just one tidbit of the same obscure fascinating esoteric knowledge as me

Brain. It’s the center of all organs management in your body.

I always get a kick out of the joints/ligaments/tendons.
Did you know that if you squeeze your Achilles tendon against your leg (juust above the heel), you can make your big toe move? Try it!

The brain just facinates me! It can do everything from regulate our breathing and hormone levels without us even having to think out it, to holding some of our most prescious stores: our memories. It makes us react to dangerous situations and then causes the production of adreneline to help us deal with it. Then it can totally mess with us from low self esteem to mental illness. Then there’s my brain! Totally male and oblivious to the fact that I was born with a female body. Amazing! I vote brain, hands down!

I’m a man…. so it’s the boobs, utterly fascinating!

Has to be the womb with a view.I mean to actually grow, nurture, & sustain a life,that’s pretty fantastic in it’s own right.Oh & not forgetting tits…ahh how could I forget the beauty of the firm pert beast. Sigh’s contentedly.

The brain looks just like the universe. This is creepy folks. You must see!

The brain and how much of it we don’t use.

@Leanne1986: Urban legend. You use the whole thing.

@nikipedia Wha?

Are you talking about For Thinking, or For Eating?

@Leanne1986 Indeed @nikipedia is right. It all gets used, just not all at the same time.

@nikipedia or @JeffVader Can you send me info on this I am googling as we speak.

@Leanne1986 Sorry to say there is no one study to cite… I admit my opinion is based on a consensus of information derived from numerous studies in the UK on a variety of different subject matters, mostly brain development.

@JeffVader I couldn’t find much on google other than forums with “facts” from the general public. Some say we use 100% at different times and some say we use 60, 70 or 80%. The only real fact I can find is that we don’t use just 10% like we were once lead to believe. If anyone can point me in the right direction of how much we use that would be great. I would imagine that different people use different amounts?!

@Leanne1986: I am not sure what to tell you. I can tell you the major divisions of the brain and what we use each part for (or at least our closest estimation of it). Or you could look at something like a PET scan to see that blood flow is going to the whole brain at all times, just in different relative amounts.

The brain can be roughly divided into the telencephalon (cortex), diencephalon (thalamus and hypothalamus), mesencephalon (midbrain), metencephalon (cerebellum and pons) and finally the myelencephalon (medulla oblongata). The last three structures I named are all involved in vital functions; if any of them are damaged, you die. So that seems like good evidence that they are constitutively active.

Moving backward, the thalamus is a relay station, so it almost doesn’t even make sense to say that it would ever be inactive. It sends incoming signals from all of your senses to the appropriate parts of the cortex, and it sends signals backward from the motor cortex to different parts of your body. So unless none of your senses or your motor system are receiving any input at all, the thalamus is active.

The hypothalamus is involved in regulating things in your body like hormone levels, sleep cycles, temperature, etc. So it also is constitutively active so it can control those things all the time.

The cortex is the really interesting part—this is where all the thinky stuff happens. We can continue subdividing the cortex into frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital regions. The occipital region is most associated with vision, so if you’re seeing, you’re using it. Interestingly, in people who are blind, other senses (especially hearing) take over the occipital cortex. So it never really turns off.

The outside (lateral) part of the temporal lobe is associated with speech, both understanding it and generating it. The inside (medial) part is involved with memory encoding and modulation and probably some spatial processing too (really there’s a lot that happens here!).

The parietal cortex is involved with higher-order visual processing, somatosensory information, and probably some other stuff I can’t think of. So as long as you are seeing something or feeling something, parietal cortex is active.

The last bit is the frontal cortex, the stuff immediately behind your forehead. This is involved with the stuff you formally recognize as “thinking.” Like, holding a phone number in your head (working memory), choosing courses of action, and probably storing long-term memories. Try to stop using it! Just try!

So your entire brain is active all the time. Individual cells are probably quiescent at any given moment, but no region of the brain is ever inactive… unless you have a stroke.

Does that answer your question or did I just ramble on pointlessly?

@nikipedia Thank you for that info. I admit there are plenty of words that I don’t understand in there (!) but you obviously know your stuff :)

Yes I think the myth is spread much like the myth of Junk DNA. When science says it’s junk, or unused, it really only means that we haven’t found the usage for it yet.

But Junk DNA has been found to be a very important part of our genome. It contains legacy information among other things. I would imagine the brain to be similar.

@Leanne1986: I hope so!!! I have been studying neuroscience in one form or another for about a decade now. So if you have more brain questions, nothing makes me happier than answering them :)

—@RealEyesRealizeRealLies and @chamelopotamus Wow, that was interesting. It makes sense now, why is it during extreme emotional upset (like death of someone close or near death of someone close) that you may feel like your heart is hurting as well. If its linked to your brain, I can see why it may affect its functioning at the moment of deep distress. Hummm..

Yes it implies new considerations for many things concerning the heart/mind connection. Could this research lead to discovering sadness or heart break as a source for heart disease? Will it shed light on cures for heart attacks? Makes me also consider the ancient proverbs such as “Out of the mouth speaks the heart”.

@nikipedia I’ll remember that :)

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies @Pandora well i do recall reading a little blurb the had on the wall at the museum about how happier people live longer. It seems that would be along the same lines of being able to die of heartbreak/sadness/grief…right?! Who knows. Not me. But it also said that pessimistic people were way more (don’t remember the number) likely to die of heart disease, or maybe it was heart attacks, and other serious health problems. So yeah! Makes sense!

Fact from fiction, truth from diction. The brain is quite fascinating but when I think of your question it comes back to nerves. I say “I want to move my fingers” and they move, because the nerves carried the signal from the brain to the muscle. The way nerves sense what is painful or cold ot hot I find quite amazing. If there ever was an android I can not see how they will ever give it the true sense of cool wind blowing across your arm or face or the heat of the sun on a sunny afternoon. Nerves are my nominee.

@Hypocrisy_Central
Nerves are just conductors or receptors. The decision/interpretation if it is pain, heat, or cold is made by the brain.

God made two wonderful organs the brain and the penis both work with blood but only enough blood to work one at a time.