Reading this introduction will likely take you close to a minute. You'll blink, scratch an itch, and maybe think, "What's wrong with this guy who started the article like this?" Within that minute, your body will have executed a series of actions on a scale and speed that are extremely hard to visualize. Your well-being depends on these actions, and the most impressive part is that they repeat every minute, demonstrating beyond any doubt the capacity and complexity of the human body.
Studying the human body is something we can do fairly easily from our computers, even if we aren't interested in pursuing a medical career. For example, with Zygote Body or Anatomy Learning!. Another unique way to understand our body better is by identifying the value of each part, including eyes, kidneys, and plasma.
Beyond general characteristics or price, what matters most is understanding how it works. Though it may seem unbelievable, the human body performs a massive number of adjustments and corrections. To better visualize them, it's a good idea to break them down by the minute.
One Minute Inside Your Body
Over the next 60 seconds, you will inhale an average of 16 times, bringing between 7 and 8 liters of air into your lungs. From that volume, your lungs will transfer about 400 milliliters of oxygen into your blood, which will help create around 120 million red blood cells, and when you exhale, you'll release about six milliliters of carbon dioxide.
Your heart will pump blood about 69 times (depending on your activity), and roughly 1.2 liters will pass through your kidneys. The movement of the heart muscles will generate the equivalent of 1.3 watts, and combined with the rest of the body, that power rises to 100 watts.
A portion of that energy will be consumed by your brain, which creates about 50 unique thoughts, processes some 600 million bits of visual information, and fires 86 billion electrical signals in neurons.
But there's more: your skin will shed between 30 and 50 thousand dead cells, your hair will grow 0.02 millimeters, and you'll blink about 15 to 20 times. Your mouth will produce 0.85 grams of saliva, and each cell, exhausted by such a workload, will suffer thousands of small errors in its DNA, most of which will be corrected.
