6 curious facts about the human body

If you are very curious about everything that happens in your body, you will love reading some of the curiosities we have separated in this article. Here you will find out what causes your nose to drip in the cold, and understand the reason for so much pain on your first day at the gym. Ready for the list?

It's impossible to tickle yourself

It simply does not work. Your brain anticipates things, monitors your movements, and can differentiate between expected and unexpected sensations. This causes the body to completely discard the anticipated sensations, while paying more attention to unusual situations.

So, basically, your brain anticipates the touch sensations that you make yourself, and you set aside what you think is unimportant. Something similar happens while you are typing, for example. Your fingers are working, but it's so automatic that you don't even remember the feel of the keyboard touches.

The opposite happens when someone else touches your body: the brain turns its full attention to that, as you cannot predict those movements yourself. This generates the sensation of strangeness and automatically tickling.

The cause of muscle pain after exercise

Since the early 20th century, researchers have believed that the cause of muscle pain was linked to lactic acid poured into the muscles during exercise, but recent research shows that this is definitely not the cause of pain - on the contrary, lactic acid can even serve as fuel when oxygen levels are decreased.

Studies show that late muscle pain occurs by microfractures in muscle cells. This happens when you do some activity that your muscles do not do often, much more intensely than what you are used to doing.

This explains why some pains appear when you do some specific exercise, but they stop when you repeat that same movement or action. If you keep doing the same exercise on a regular basis, your body adapts to the activity and the pain stops.

85% of people exhale with just one nostril - and it affects the whole body

You might be surprised if you knew that you are possibly only exhaling with one nostril. But know that if this really happens, you are not alone. The fact is experienced by about 85% of the population.

But most interesting may not be the fact that you may be releasing air from only one side of your nose, but rather that the change in nostrils occurs in approximately four-hour cycles.

This time may vary and changes with body position and some nasal congestion. Typically, these changes occur based on an erectile tissue inside your nose. While on one side this fabric stretches, on the other side it shrinks, allowing air to pass on only one side.

Studies published in 1988 have shown that change can affect your body in many different ways. Breathing through the right nostril, for example, can significantly increase blood glucose levels, while breathing only through the left nostril has the opposite effect.

Another research, done in 1993, warns that by using your right nostril you will be using much more oxygen than using your left nostril. But most interesting of all was discovered the following year: the use of the nostril in breathing is inverse to the side of the brain that is most active. When breathing from the left side, for example, the right hemisphere of your brain shows greater activity.

The human gut contains about 100 trillion bacteria - and that's 10 times more than the cells in your body!

If you have cleansing obsessive-compulsive disorder and suffer from the thought of bacteria in your body, it is best to stop reading here. Research shows that a human gut carries about 100 trillion bacteria, and it's amazing: that number is 10 times the number of cells in your body. That is, most of what you carry around everyday is made up of bacteria.

In recent studies, a group of researchers from seven countries came together to analyze a common human gut and found more than 1, 000 species of bacteria there and found more than 3.3 million distinct genes.

But do not despair: these bacteria are not there by chance. They help us digest food, absorb vitamins and help protect against pathogens and disease.

The tongue has no different flavor zones

If you learned this at school, you may forget: your language has no distinct areas of sensitivity. The confusion began when Harvard psychologist Edwin G. Boring translated an article by German scientist DP Hanig, which made the theory famous.

Hanig claimed that there were four kinds of basic flavors (we now know there are five) that the human body could distinguish. He then mapped out spaces in the language where he could better understand each flavor.

However, any undamaged taste buds are able to taste any of the five flavors known today; then, “mapping” tongue zones actually depends on the density and location of healthy taste buds in an individual's mouth - and this changes from person to person and can also vary with age.

In the 1970s, scientists decided to confront the theory, as it did not seem to work according to the experience of, say, all the people on the planet. Although this has been considered a myth for over 40 years, not everyone knows that language mapping simply does not exist.

Why your nose runs in winter

On a normal day, a person's nose produces just under a liter of mucus (yuck!), And much of it goes through your throat and gets absorbed into your body without your noticing. However, when you are breathing in cold air, fluid production increases significantly and the excess goes out through your nose.

What happens is that with the cold, the amount of blood responsible for warming your nose increases as a response to the cold weather, and thus some veins dilate, allowing the flow of this greater blood flow.

This helps keep your nose warmer while you breathe, as well as warming the very air that enters it before it passes through the entire respiratory system. However, it is this same blood that invades the glands responsible for mucus production, which causes your body to work even harder to produce fluids.

When you enter a warm environment, the whole process is reversed: the blood in your nose returns to normal, fluid production too, and you stop feeling excessive mucus running inconveniently down your nose.

* Originally posted on 24/04/2013.

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