Here are the common misconceptions about the human body
The human body is a complex thing that needs intense studying to fully understand and at times, there are still aspects that many people don’t understand.
Based on the article in Mental Floss, there are quite a lot of misconceptions about the body of a human. Some of these beliefs are found to be just myths but unfortunately, there are a lot of people who believed in these for many years.
One of the misconceptions is that you lose most of your body heat through your head. This is the reason why most people believe that you should wear a hat when you go out during winter or the cold season.
The truth is you don’t actually lose a disproportionate amount of body heat through your head. This myth was traced back to a concept that circulated in 1970. It came from a U.S. Army survival manual issued that year and it recommended wearing hats in cold weather because “40 to 45 percent of body heat” is lost through the head.
A 2006 study stated that “the head does not contribute relatively more than the rest of the body to surface heat loss.”
Another misconception is that a person’s normal body temperature is 98.6°F. It is believed by many that anything hotter than this temperature means that you have a fever. For the past 25 years, this has been what most people believe.
It was stated in a 2020 paper that the body temperature databases from the Civil War era to 2017 had a drop of .03°C per decade. With this, the New Scientist stated that there is a possibility that “modern people have fewer infections, thanks to vaccines and antibiotics, so our immune systems are less active and our body tissues less inflamed.”
It is also a misconception that all humans have 206 bones in their bodies. For many years, experts have been counting how many bones a human body has but they haven’t agreed on what the total number is.
In medieval times, people believed that the body of a human had 248 bones. The Padua surgeon Andreas Vesalius in 1953 revised this information and made it a little over 300. In 1732, it was estimated that it was 245. When1858 came, the modern belief states that the body has 206 bones.
Infants are born with more than 300 soft bones. These are mostly made of cartilage, connected by a tissue of cells called osteoblasts. However, not all adults have the exact 206 bones.
It is also a misconception that we have five senses, namely sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch. One delightful way of pleasing your sense of sight is watching amazing makeup transformations.
This idea came from Aristotle. Nowadays, experts believe that there are more than five senses a human has. An example of this is the Proprioception. It means that can run without looking at your feet because you have the sense of knowing where your body parts are and what they’re doing.