Bill Bryson’s The Body: Mind-opening study into what we’re made of

The Body

Author: Bill Bryson

ISBN-13: 978-0857522405

Publisher: Doubleday

Guideline Price: £25

Before I review Bill Bryson’s new book, a science experiment. No, don’t just read the rest of this paragraph and skim on – I did this the other night, and boggled myself and a niece and nephew.

Close your left eye and stare straight ahead with the other one, then hold up the pointing finger (that’s a technical term) from your right hand as far out in front of you as you can. If you slowly move it from left to right while still staring straight ahead with your right eye at some stage the finger will disappear. Tah dah! Your blind spot.

You’ll find a lot of that in The Body – A Guide For Occupants as it wanders across the vehicle we all drive around for life that is both bag of meat and the most complex machine that humanity has ever known. Bryson takes us apart section by section looking at everything from the brain, head and heart to sleep and the endocrine system.

If I have any problems with The Body (they are few), more than once he starts to delve into a subject area that seems like it could be fascinating only to jump straight out again

Sometimes it’s in meanderings that the book is at its best. It looks at why bipedalism made us who we are yet gives us so much back pain and finds out how your memory is a bit like a Wikipedia page because you can go in and edit it, but so can other people. The section on the human brain alone is, pardon the pun, mind-opening. His account of the long documented studies on people’s faulty memories about where they were and what they were doing on 9/11 is even more fascinating when he admits that his own recollection years later involved being in the same room as one of his children who was on the far side of the world that day. It even touches briefly on peripheral topics such as the lack of gender balance in almost every medical trial in history; a subject covered at length and with brilliance recently in Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women.

The Body also gives you tonnes of things you can read aloud to amaze and irritate your loved ones (yes, of course I did) like the fact that cartilage has a friction coefficient five times that of ice. And there’s the story of how Isambard Kingdom Brunel accidentally swallowed a sovereign while doing a magic trick for his children, lodging it at the base of his trachea and eventually getting it out weeks later by swinging himself upside down on a contraption of his own invention. It even analyses how much it would cost you to buy the chemicals to replicate Benedict Cumberbatch.

‘Nobody knows’

Bryson isn’t a scientist, which makes his achievement in corralling so much diverse information here even more impressive. As someone who crashed out of college ingloriously at 19, I’ve spent the intervening decades trying to patch up the holes in my knowledge about pretty much everything and I read a fair amount of popular science books. In every chapter of The Body I came across dozens of facts and details of research that were all new to me. His page on epilepsy, a condition I’ve had for life, is probably the best single one I’ve ever read in a mainstream science book.

If I have any problems with The Body (they are few), more than once he starts to delve into a subject area that seems like it could be fascinating only to jump straight out again. Frustrating I suppose, but part of the nature of trying to cram so much into such a relatively small and accessible book.

It's the perfect seasonal present (I know it's too early to use the C word) for the autodidact in your life

My only other qualm is with the frequency that subjects set off a response only too familiar to you if you’ve ever watched QI – a large klaxon sounding and the booking voice of “nobody knows”. It seems as if, terrifyingly for those of us who occupy one, there are huge areas of knowledge about the human body that simply fall into this category. Hardly Bryson’s fault though to be fair.

Ultimately, The Body is 464 pages of sometimes breathtaking information held together by a familiarly cosy storytelling style you’ll know if you’ve read A Short History Of Nearly Everything or any of his earlier travelogues. It’s the perfect seasonal present (I know it’s too early to use the C word) for the autodidact in your life or even a curious teenager reading up on their own time. They just need to be the type who won’t mind having a few of their existing preconceptions shattered.

The one about us only using 10 per cent of our brains? Untrue. Same goes for men thinking every seven seconds about sex. Nonsense. It’s roughly once an hour.