Many car manufacturers boast in their advertisements of how well made their cars are; how infrequently they need servicing. Many cars now require servicing once a year, or every 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) ‘whichever comes first’. A famous battery maker advertises on television how many more lives their batteries have, compared with the opposition. Wristwatch batteries require to be changed about every three years, and batteries for pacemakers put in the heart to regulate its beating, and similar devices can now last for up to five or more years before they need changing.
These are all examples of our technological advancement, but none of these comes close to the performance of the human heart. It starts beating from about the age of six weeks (after conception) when the person is still in the womb and continues after birth up till about the age of 70, or 80, or now into the 90s and 100s as people are now living longer. Ignoring the faster heart beats of the foetus and infants, that means about 70 beats per minute x 60 x 24 X 365 x 70 or whatever age the person lives to, all without pausing to rest, or recharging, or overhaul, or changing. That’s approximately 2.6 billion (2,575,440,000) beats during a lifetime. What an incredible battery our hearts have!
And what about our brains? The brain works non-stop for all those years we live. Its incredible feat is in a different way. It rests when we sleep – it virtually dies, but then when we wake up, it more or less resurrects from death and continues life from where we stopped. It remembers what we did not only yesterday, or last week, but last year and years before down to when we were little tots aged about five or six. And then when we travel to different locations or country, it puts away very carefully all the information from our home environment and begins to relate to our new place. This continues until we are about to return to our base, when it carefully shelves our new location information, and brings out the old ones. Incredible!
When this process is disturbed as in people who have dementia of which there are several types, then we notice how amazing our brains are. People with the commonest type of dementia have difficulty learning new things and remembering all but the events in the distant past. It is as if the ‘older’ information is more entrenched and more difficult to disrupt whereas the new do not embed sufficiently and are easily forgotten. This can even extend to failure to recognise close family members in severe cases.
So next time you claim not to believe in miracles, pause and think. Consider how amazing your body is. And how special you are. There may be 6 or 7 billion people in our world, but there is no one else on the planet exactly like you. You are unique!
Do the maths.
