4 More Fascinating Things I Learned In Anatomy Class

Every single hair strand has a muscle attached to it at an angle known as the arrector pili muscle.   Look at the picture to your right to help give you an idea.  When this muscle contracts (shortens), the muscle effectively makes your hair stand up, which happen when we get goose bumps.

Notice how goose bumps happen automatically and you can’t voluntarily make them happen?  That’s because this arrector pili muscle is smooth muscle and it’s activated by a nerve that comes from the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system.

The sympathetic branch is commonly referred to as the “Fight or Flight” response system, so your hairs stand up when it gets cold or you are full of fear and so forth.

Let’s suppose there’s a large protest occurring in the city and the  chief of police orders hundreds of officers to wear their riot gear and spectate the protesters to make sure everything stays in control.

Imagine the cops arrive, amped up by their riot gear, as if they are going to war, and the demonstrators are heckling them.  The cops have to hold their composure and remain calm even though their adrenaline may be surging.  Adrenaline is what prepares you physically and psychologically for a “fight” or “flight.”  This state of mind causes one to perceive almost everything in our world as a possible threat to our survival and as an enemy.

Cops cannot run away (flight), so they only have the option to fight.  The moment somebody gives the slightest reason for an officer to get physically violent, they will do so readily, especially when their partners are near.  That’s why it’s so common to see police brutality and officers going a bit haywire in a seemingly blind rage.  The rational mind is very much disengaged when the adrenaline is surging like mad.

Is it any wonder now that when police are ordered to dress in their riot gear and placed in a tense situation, that violence will erupt?  It’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy that keep police chiefs and mayors thinking they did the right thing.

The sternum is your breast bone. Attached to the sternum is your clavicle, aka your collar bone. There is a joint between the two called the sternoclavicular joint. You could feel these parts very easily, so go ahead and feel what I’m talking about!

The axial skeleton, that is to say, the skeleton along your axis, consists of your skull, spine and ribs.

The sternoclaviclar joint is the only joint that attaches your shoulders (and therefore arms) to the axial skeleton. No anatomical joint exists between the shoulder blades and the rib cage. In other words, the sternoclavicular joint is literally the only bony joint that is linking the bones of the arm and shoulders up. Isn’t that amazing? Well, it is to me!

Originally, ‘hypochondria’ referred to the general abdominal area, and is still used that way in clinical conditions. That’s because ‘hypo’ means under and ‘chondria’ means cartilage, and it refers to the space beneath the chest. So what does this have to do with the modern use of the word hypochondriac, in which one creates ailments out of thin air?

Hundreds of years ago, hypochondria was a blanket term doctors would give to any ailment relating to the abdominal area. The doctor would prescribe a treatment for the hypochondria but the treatment wouldn’t always work. When the patient would return over and over with the same ailment, the doctor’s egos were so big that they assumed that the patient must be making the ailment up.

With time, the meaning of the word shifted so that it came to mean, not an illness the physician had no other name for, but an illness that the physician didn’t believe was actually there and that the patient was making up.