The human body is bags, bags, and more bags.

Your brain may be like a computer, and your digestive system may be like a tube, but in the end, your entire body is just a bag full of bags.

The human body is bags

Your kidneys are like filters. Your brain is like a computer. Your digestive system is like a tube. Your hands are controlled in a way similar to puppets. These comparisons exist in part because doctors and scientists are striving to find ways to visualize our bodies, seeking means of understanding – with the bonus that it’s not a real experience.

The human body is nested bags

Our body is like tubes or levers or computers, but, above all, it is like bags. Bags stuffed into other bags, stuffed into more bags. Our body is like the nested bags, just like the used bags stuffed under your kitchen sink, with the added thumb and anxiety. This comparison gives me clarity – when I struggle to understand anatomy, I look for the bag. It gives me context – knowing how to repeat or access our various bags is a crucial part of modern medicine. And finally, it gives me comfort. Life isn’t complex after all. It’s just a series of bags that become more elaborate and specialized.

The bags in the human body

If this sounds like a thought that might come to someone suffering from sleep deprivation in the middle of the night, it is. I’ve had trouble sleeping since 2020, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Through trial and error, prescriptions, and meditation apps, I found the one thing that truly works for me – studying human anatomy. My reflux led to a hard and ongoing search for 18 months for boring and self-help books that should be read by the dim light of a lamp. After reviewing the classic literature, my eyes fell upon the Bible. A massive book containing 1153 pages and weighing six pounds. “Clinically Oriented Anatomy” by Moore, Dalley, and Agur, which is the anatomy book taught at Harvard Medical School in the “Human Physiology” course. Six months later, my book became as tattered as any first-year medical student’s, and I am obsessed. I share the most fascinating anatomy facts on Plosky, TikTok, and Instagram, in a series I call “The Anatomy Academy for Insomnia.”

The bags in the human body

In the many hours I wait for sleep to finally come, I discovered various exciting pieces of information – human anatomy can truly keep you up at night. Teeth are joints, and scientists are still learning about the ligaments that hold them in place. Some people have an extra set of ribs – coming from the last vertebrae in the neck. People who can breastfeed may have additional breast tissue forming and secreting milk – in their armpits. Every page offers a new strange fact that affirms our evolutionary history and our wild individual diversity.

The bags in the human body

I can hardly turn a page without encountering a bag. Your skin? A multi-layered bag that contains everything inside you. Inside, there are bags in the skin. It might be easy to think of the stomach, which is a tube, closed at the top and bottom by the esophageal muscles and gastric muscles, as a bag. Or the bladder, a temporary storage bag for urine.

The bags in the human body

That’s not all. The heart has not one bag, but two: the tough fibrous outer covering and the transparent tough covering, which protects the heart and firmly holds it in our constantly moving chest. The brain and spinal cord are wrapped three times, with three layers of membranes. These bags protect our most sensitive and important body parts. Inside, there’s another different bag – the blood-brain barrier connected with associated cells that prevents most infections from touching the brain. Even the uterus is a bag – it can be filled with a fetus. This fetus builds its own inner bag in cooperation with the parents, creating the placenta, layers of parental and fetal cells that protect and provide.

The bags

In the Human Body

Your muscles even have bags. Groups of muscles that perform the same function, along with the nerves and vessels that keep them working, are gathered in what are called tissue compartments. These bags are so tight that it might be better to describe them as cubes packed with meat. These bags are more than just packaging. They reduce friction and often merge into tendons. When one of these bags is injured or infected, blood or infection will first spread within the bag, allowing doctors to predict where it will go and intervene.

Bags in the Human Body

Nerves also spread through these bags, so the network of bags may be sensory as well as storage. Scientists are still trying to figure out how manipulating our muscle bundles can help with movement or pain.

Bags in the Human Body

The bags do not stop here. Joints are surrounded by joint capsules – double-sealed bags with thin layers of fluid that help our bones slide against each other smoothly, allowing us to rotate without pain.

Bags in the Human Body

The bags do not end with what we can see with the naked eye. Every cell is itself a bag, a membrane that separates its contents from the outside world. Inside those cellular bags, like particularly sticky matryoshka dolls, are organelles, small bags that separate their own unique chemistries. Organelles can have different pH levels and keep some molecules inside while keeping others out.

Bags in the Human Body

Cells even reuse and recycle some of their bags. The small bags called vesicles contain chemical messengers. Those bags empty their contents outside the cell, merge with the larger bag of the cell itself, only to divide and be reused again when more packing is needed. Life itself can be distilled to bags: the first cell wasn’t a cell until it split from the outside world – it had to have a bag.

Bags in the Human Body

Bags are not just a mental exercise for sleep-deprived people, but something our medical knowledge struggles with daily. Scientists and doctors continue to study and often try to replicate our many natural bags. Some are examining how to make artificial vesicles to release chemicals at the time and place we want. Others are trying to build an artificial placenta for premature babies. Some bags may be allies, while others may be worthy adversaries. It is an ongoing battle to obtain new drugs that get past the stubborn bags of the brain to treat our mental illnesses.

Bags in the Human Body

Sitting with an anatomy book, patiently waiting to sleep, I find my many bags fascinating and comforting. The world can seem endlessly complex, filled with things we need to know, things we did or didn’t do well enough. But human life, the very matter that makes us love, hate, judge, and care? It’s just bags all the way down.

This is an opinion and analysis piece, and the views expressed by the author or authors do not necessarily reflect those of “Scientific American.”

Copyright and Permissions: Bethany Brookshire is an award-winning science journalist and the author of “Pests: How Humans Create Evil Animals.” Her work has appeared in “Scientific American,” “The New York Times,” “The Washington Post,” “Atlas,” and other platforms.

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-body-is-bags-bags-and-more-bags/