Strategy Boffins

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Human body is made from around forty trillion cells

Idea Almanac

“The average human body is made from around forty trillion cells. Trillion! Forty trillion is 40,000,000,000,000. A truly impressive number. If we want your cells to be represented by individual people, then we need more than one hundred times as many people as have lived in the 250,000-year-long history of humanity. Let’s try to visualize this a bit. Right now around 7.8 billion people are alive. If we put them shoulder to shoulder, they surprisingly would only cover an area of around 700 square miles (1,800 square kilometers). Which is a little bit more than the surface area of London. To get forty trillion people we need to multiply this by 120”

Excerpt From: Dettmer, Philipp. “Immune : A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive”

Brain is a master of deception

Idea Almanac

“The human brain is a master of deception. It creates experiences and directs actions with a magician’s skill, never revealing how it does so, all the while giving us a false sense of confidence that its products—our day-to-day experiences—reveal its inner workings. Joy, sadness, surprise, fear, and other emotions seem so distinct and feel so built-in that we assume they have separate causes inside us. When you have a brain that essentializes, it’s easy to come up with a wrong theory of the mind. We are, after all, a bunch of brains trying to figure out how brains work.”

Excerpt From: Lisa Feldman Barrett. “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.”

If the human brain were so simple

Idea Almanac

“There’s a famous quote that says, ‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.’ If you look into the science of the brain and how it relates to intelligence, there’s a strong element of truth in this aphorism. Our brains make us intelligent enough to recognise that we are intelligent, observant enough to realise this isn’t typical in the world, and curious enough to wonder why this is the case. But we don’t yet seem to be intelligent enough to grasp easily where our intelligence comes from and how it works. So we have to fall back on studies of the brain and psychology to get any idea of how the whole process comes about. Science itself exists thanks to our intelligence, and now we use science to figure out how our intelligence works? This is either very efficient or circular reasoning, I’m not smart enough to tell.”

Excerpt From: Dean Burnett. “The Idiot Brain.”

The Puzzled Centipede

Idea Almanac

“You are not consciously aware of the vast majority of your brain’s ongoing activities, and nor would you want to be—it would interfere with the brain’s well-oiled processes. The best way to mess up your piano piece is to concentrate on your fingers; the best way to get out of breath is to think about your breathing; the best way to miss the golf ball is to analyze your swing. This wisdom is apparent even to children, and we find it immortalized in poems such as “The Puzzled Centipede”:
A centipede was happy quite,
Until a frog in fun
Said, “Pray tell which leg comes after which?”
This raised her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.”

Excerpt From: Eagleman, David. “Incognito.”

Body’s Defense network

Idea Almanac

“As a newborn, in the birthing ward, you are given an injection. The needle punctures your skin, the very first line of your defense network. The threat didn’t even come through the line at the party’s velvet rope—not through your mouth or nose. It was sliced in through the roof. The steel invades the tissue. It will likely be clean of bacteria. Regardless, it will cause a localized response, a virtual panic among your cells. Months later, you might get scratched by the family cat. The cat may carry a microbe. So might the mosquito that landed on your crib and punctured your skin. Mobilization again, within an instant, the most sophisticated defense network in the known world explodes into action.”

Excerpt From: Matt Richtel. “An Elegant Defense.” –  Amazon Link

Edit our Species

Idea Almanac

“Our newfound ability to make edits to our genes raises some fascinating questions. Should we edit our species to make us less susceptible to deadly viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! Right? Should we use gene editing to eliminate dreaded disorders, such as Huntington’s, sickle-cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis? That sounds good, too. And what about deafness or blindness? Or being short? Or depressed? Hmmm… How should we think about that? A few decades from now, if it becomes possible and safe, should we allow parents to enhance the IQ and muscles of their kids? Should we let them decide eye color? Skin color? Height?”

Excerpt From: Walter Isaacson. “The Code Breaker.”

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