After a couple of hundred thousand years of walking around this big blue ball in decrepit meat shells, we have figured out quite a lot about what it means to be human. We know from which side food needs to be eaten, and from which side it comes out later, and this, by and large, is all that matters.
Not? Need more? Did you think that in our time we know everything about the human body, thanks to amazing science? Of course, we know a lot, but there are some simple questions to which there are still no convincing answers. There are guesses, theories, hypotheses, but when it comes down to it, they don't explain anything.
1. What is pain?
Pain is an unpleasant but universal human experience. This is one of the first things we encounter in life, and it is also likely to be one of the last.
But what exactly is pain? How does it work? Do you really feel the same as your neighbor? If you both feel it the same way, isn't it dishonest since he deserves much worse? If you find it difficult to answer these questions, don't worry - science cannot either. All these wise scientists who are developing medicines for pain and prescribing them for you cannot even agree on what it is.
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is to look at fibromyalgia, a condition that can be described as "Everything hurts." There are no physical tests that can confirm the presence of this disease in you - neither a brain scan, nor a blood test, nor a spiritualist session are effective. How do doctors diagnose it? Well, you fill out a questionnaire: "Do you have pains in different parts of the body that doctors cannot explain?" Yes? Boom: you have fibromyalgia. Or perhaps demonic possession. Or aliens.
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Doctors say that patients with fibromealgia have differences in brain scans, but they are not the same for different patients - no doctor can look into your skull and say for sure whether you have this disease or not. To be clear, they've only recently started taking their first steps in learning how to detect pain in a person's brain.
Tohru Wager, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder: "There is no clinically acceptable way to measure pain and other emotions right now, other than asking a person how they are feeling."
A great way actually. And very scientific.
2. Why does anesthesia work?
Anesthesiology is truly a miracle of modern science, but think about what a terrible thing it is: with the help of several chemicals, anesthesiologists take on and turn off certain parts of the brain.
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Too much and you will never wake up. Not enough - and you will be like going through a past life as a soldier of the First World War in a hacksaw operation. But what are these chemicals doing? How do they interact with your body exactly in such a way to achieve that necessary balance? Here's an honest answer: Science doesn't know this.
Basically, anesthesia has been developed over hundreds of years in a simple way: “Here, pump this guy up with this, and see what happens. Is she still screaming? Okay, try some of this. " Trial and error has given us a clear picture of what we can use to achieve the desired effect - anything from complex steroids to full light xenon. But there is no clear answer to the question of why these substances send your consciousness into sleep mode without completely turning it off and the inscription "died" next to the name.
The main reason for this is that science does not know what “consciousness” is and how it works. There is no definitive test to show that the person is currently aware of anything - the best anesthesiologists can do is look at the presence of certain brain waves, physical reactions and … wait … sensitivity to pain. But, as we've discussed, science has no way to tell if you're feeling pain, so it's entirely up to you to show them that you're not anesthetized enough.
And if you do it wrong, don't worry: you will have several hours to think about how else you might respond while you will be trapped inside your motionless body throughout the operation. Joke.
3. Why are we laughing?
Some scientists believe that laughter is a signal that the perceived threat poses no real danger, while others argue that it is a reaction to an unexpected result. And still others think that this is because Jim Carrey talks with his fifth point, and this, as a rule, no one does.
All of them are right to some extent, because no one knows for sure why we laugh. However, it is known that laughter more than any other emotional response affects all areas of the brain, including the motor. Even more surprising is the fact that most of the laughter has nothing to do with comic situations at all.
Research has shown that less than 20% of laughter comes from something funny. Much more often we laugh to accentuate harmless statements, fill pauses in conversation, or because an insidious plan to take over the universe has finally begun to bear fruit.
One thing we (probably) know is how laughter originated: it originated in a situation where primates gasped during intense tickling. This, of course, leads to the inevitable question, "But why are we ticklish?" Which leads to the inevitable answer, "The dog knows him."
4. Why do we treat each other well?
If, in the days of hunter-gatherers, when the main thing was to survive, you found a huge layer cake in the middle of the forest, the last thing you would think about is to share with others, because it goes against the survival instinct. This is your cake, and you would slap in the face of anyone who tried to reach it with your thieves' fingers.
Photo: odessa-life.od.ua
Selfless acts of kindness were completely unprofitable: in order to pass on their genes, people looked for partners capable of surviving, while altruism put the stamp of an evolutionary dead end on a person, like gills or tails.
So how did altruism survive? You guessed it: unknown.
Scientists have been trying to uncover the secret of altruism for most of the last century. In the 1960s, George Price even developed a complex mathematical equation for how altruism could survive. Price was so absorbed in his research that he invited strangers in need to live in his apartment while he fixated on his theorem in his own office.
5. Why are some of us left-handed?
About 90% of the population of our planet is right-handed, the remaining 10%, respectively, are left-handed. This skewness is observed only in humans, while other creatures in the animal kingdom are divided approximately equally, if at all, show any preference.
Why are we so different? It is obvious that everything is in order with the brain of left-handers - their speech is controlled by the left hemisphere, like in right-handers. In addition, right-handers often have a dominant left leg and vice versa, indicating that the preference does not extend to the rest of the body. Scientists have been trying to find an answer ever since they first noticed left-handed people, but this remains a mystery to this day.
We know that left-handedness is a genetic trait, which means that the genes responsible for it must have some advantage in order to spread further. However, it is completely unclear what kind of advantage this might be. Since the overall percentage of left-handers is quite low, one would assume that we are seeing the last representatives with a trait gradually disappearing from the gene pool, but this is completely wrong: studies of prehistoric human settlements have shown that the percentage of left-handers has always been almost the same.
Going beyond left-handedness, the fact that we have a dominant hand at all also remains largely a mystery. In addition, guys in white coats have long puzzled over the general asymmetry of human anatomy: our heart on the one hand, our lungs are located differently relative to each other (the left hangs lower than the right).
While this phenomenon is also seen in great apes, the human brain is most remarkable - it is wildly asymmetric, and some scientists believe that this asymmetry may be the defining trait that makes us human.