You Are Amazing

If you're reading this at work or on your commute home, you might not feel it at the moment - but,
actually, you're absolutely amazing!

Here are a few facts to help remind you just how utterly remarkable you really are...

Starting at the beginning: the atoms that make up your body are the same ones that formed during the Big Bang – 13.7 billion years ago. You may feel like you own these atoms, but really you only have them on loan…

If you laid out the 60,000 miles of blood vessels inside a human body, you could easily circumnavigate the Earth two and a half times! (Don’t try this though – or you’ll quickly be restrained under the Mental Health Act.)

The nerve impulses to your brain travel at speeds of up to 250 miles per hour. This depends on urgency of the impulse however – so, if you burn your fingers, your brain will tell you to withdraw your hand more quickly than if your hand accidentally collides with a blob of ice cream.

Your nose can remember 50,000 different smells.

Similar to fingerprints, human beings have unique tongue prints

As a human, you share about 95% of your DNA with a chimpanzee. Though, technically, since you are a type of ape, it’s probably not THAT astonishing. Perhaps more surprisingly, you also share about 50% of your DNA with a banana.

Humans are actually bioluminescent and glow in the dark. However, in a slightly weird quirk of nature, the light that your body emits is about 1000 times weaker than your eyes are able to detect.

Goose bumps are actually a remnant of our evolutionary predecessors. When humans had thick coverings of fur, this would fluff up our coats – creating a better insulator and making us look bigger to predators. Grrr.

In a lifetime, your brain's long-term memory can hold as many as 1 quadrillion (that’s one million billion) separate bits of information. In modern males, this tends to be filled with football statistics.

If the human brain were a computer, it would be able to perform 38 thousand-trillion operations per second. Blue Gene – IBM’s $100 million ‘supercomputer’ – can only manage 0.002% of that. Loser.

The way the neurons in the human brain are assembled seem to be extremely similar to the way the universe is arranged! It’s even possible our brains are modeled on the structure of the universe.

At the very least, it seems as though the same fundamental laws may govern the growth of systems large and small – from the electrical firing between brain cells to the expansion of galaxies.

Astrophysicists have considered if it’s possible that we actually exist inside a gigantic brain…

So here's some advice...

Don’t say: “There’s nothing interesting about me.”

Do say: “Every atom in my body is billions of years old – I’m created from stardust.”

Keep being EPIC in all that you do...