The Body

Two of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of The Body pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.

1. Built from scratch, you are cheap and improbable: the Royal Society of Chemistry once priced the elements in a human body at roughly 96,000 pounds, yet you are mostly oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen, the same commonplace atoms as the air and a lump of coal, arranged into something that reads this sentence.
2. You are not one organism but a colony. Your gut and skin host trillions of microbes, bacteria, viruses, fungi, that outnumber or roughly equal your own cells and do essential work you never authorized, from digesting food to training your immune system.

The other 5 — and the full 12-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 9 chapters

The whole summary runs about 12 minutes, read or listened to.

1. Building a Human From Scratch
2. The Outside: Skin, Hair, and the Microbial You
3. Inside the Skull: The Brain and the Invented World
4. The Beating Heart and the River of Blood
5. The Chemistry Department: Hormones and the Immune System
6. Breathing, Eating, and the Long Dark Guts
7. The Machinery of Motion: Skeleton and the Cost of Standing Up
8. When Things Go Wrong: Disease, and Medicine's Messy Triumphs
9. Sleep, Aging, and The End