Part 44

If you are asking the question intelligently, you must know that to think means to concentrate, and in that sense we can only think of one thing at a time, because it takes all of that part of the brain which is used for thinking for just one thing. To give close attention to any one subject means to turn the entire brain force practically in one direction. To let other things pass through the mind at the same time may appear not to interfere with the one thought, but they do, and our conclusions suffer accordingly.

You can be doing something with one part of your body, while engaged in thinking of one thing, but only such things as are more or less mechanical as the result of habit, such as walking, or moving the arms--things which the parts have done so often that actual attention by the brain is not absolutely essential. Take for instance, the fact that a man in deep thought on one subject will sometimes walk up and down the room or along the sidewalk. He can do this walking and still think concentratedly, but if he stubs his toe on the leg of a chair or on a rough place in the walk, his thought is broken, because the brain immediately takes itself out of the thought and pays its attention to the toe that was stubbed.

Why Do I Turn White When Scared?

Simply because, when you are scared or frightened, the blood almost leaves your face entirely. Under normal conditions, the red blood which is flowing through the arteries of your face, gives the face a reddish tinge, and your face becomes white when you are frightened, because then the blood leaves the face. It is quite singular, but when you are really frightened, whatever the cause may be, the human system receives such a shock that the heart just about stops beating all together. When your heart stops beating of course the flow of the blood from the heart stops and then there is no supply of fresh red blood coming through the arteries under the skin of your face. Therefore you look white--the color your face would be if no blood ever flowed through your arteries and veins. Some people have faces so white they look as though they were scared all the time. This is not because they have no blood flowing through the veins and arteries in their faces, but because their supply of blood is less than other peoples, and sometimes because the walls of their arteries and veins are much thicker than the average that the color of the blood does not show through. There are also many people who have so much blood in their systems all the time, and the walls of whose arteries are so thin, that they look at all times as though they might be blushing.

What Makes Me Blush?

Anything that will make your heart send an extra supply of blood into the arteries and veins which supply your face with blood, will make you blush. Embarrassment will do this. So will anger generally, although sometimes people get so angry that the blood is driven out of their faces. In this case they are so angry that their heart has stopped beating, practically.

What Occurs When We Think?

When we think the mind is acting on sensations; it is receiving, in conjunction with memories of sensations it has previously received. Sensations as they reach the mind arouse the mind to activity and, as soon as the sensation is received, the mind begins to compare the new sensation with sensations received at previous times, and by putting things together reaches a conclusion.

When you are thinking you are really trying to call upon memory to help you. You know the thought of one thing calls up another, and this leads to something else. This association of ideas is the faculty which enables us to think consecutively and accurately. It is the business of the mind to receive the sensations that enter it and arrange them in their proper places. That memory of past sensations is the important part of thinking, is proven by the fact that when we have forgotten a thing we are unable to think what it was.

Can Animals Think?

For this reason if animals have memory they should be able to think. It is now believed that many animals have to a certain extent the power to remember.

A dog will recognize his master even though he has not seen him for years. We might think he does this by his highly developed power of smell, but if his master has come from a direction opposite to that from which the dog first sees him, he could not have tracked him by his smell. A dog will recognize his master from quite a distance, so he must have to a certain extent the ability to remember or the power of association of ideas, which amounts to the same thing. Again, a horse that once belonged to the fire department, even though now hitched to a milk wagon, will have the impulse to run to the fire when he hears the fire gong. And an old war horse will prick up his ears as he used to when he hears the bugle call.

Why Do I Sneeze?

You sneeze sometimes when you look up at the sun or at a bright light. There does not seem to be any real good explanation of why looking at a bright light should make you sneeze. It is due to the connection there is between the nerves of the eyes and the nose. You generally blink if you look at a bright light suddenly, and the blinking process stirs the nerves inside of the nose to make you sneeze.

You know, of course, that the start of the sneeze is inside of your nose. The nose is, besides being the organ of smell, the channel through which we take air into the lungs, when we breathe properly. The nose is lined with membranes, back of which are a net of very small nerves which are extremely sensitive. The membranes are placed there to catch and hold the impure particles of matter which come into the nose when we take in a breath of air, and sneezing is only one effective way of cleaning out the nose. It is brought on only when some particularly difficult job of nose-cleaning has to be done. Pepper up the nose will make you sneeze quickly, because pepper produces a very great irritation inside the nose, and the nose goes to work at once to get rid of it in the quickest possible manner as soon as the pepper comes in. Other things have the same effect. Sometimes a cold in the head causes you to sneeze. The sneeze in that event is merely nature’s effort to clean out the nose when other efforts have failed.

There are many suggestions for stopping a sneeze before it takes place, after you feel it coming on, such as putting the finger on each side of the nose, and many others. But a half sneeze does not remove the cause of the sneeze, so it is much better to sneeze it out, and many people enjoy the after effects of sneezing so much that they take snuff into the nose to produce it.

What Happens When I Swallow?

The muscles of your throat act in the form of a ring when food passes into your throat. The food does not drop directly into your stomach. In other words, the action is not quite the same as when you drop a stone out of the window. When you do the latter, the stone hits the sidewalk or whatever is below at the time, with a smash. It would hardly do to have our food drop into the stomach, so the muscles of the throat are arranged to contract in rings which push or squeeze the food downward, and the food is passed from one ring of muscles to the other. It is just like pushing a ball down into the foot of a stocking that is apparently too small for it to drop down. You put the ball in the top of the stocking and then by making a ring of your fingers around the stocking you can push the ball down. When you swallow, you start the muscles of your throat to making these rings. The upper ring squeezes the food on to the ring below it and so on down to the stomach.

What Makes the Lump Come In My Throat When I Cry?

The “lump” which comes up into your throat when you cry is caused by a sort of paralysis of the rings of muscles in your throat. The muscles of your throat can make these rings or waves upward also, but it is more difficult upward than downward--probably because of lack of practice, as we say. When you have put something into your stomach that makes you sick and causes you to vomit, the throat muscles take the matter from your stomach and bring it back to the mouth in the same way, except, of course, that this action begins at the bottom.

Sometimes when you cry, or lose control of yourself in some other way (you know, of course, that in crying you always lose control of yourself, don’t you) practically the same effect is produced as when you have something in your stomach that should come out. Crying, or the thing that happens sometimes when we cry, makes the throat muscles act just as if we were vomiting, and as the action is an unnatural one, when the ring or wave reaches the top of the throat, we feel the lump or ball as we call it. We feel the lump because the throat has been made to go through the motion of eliminating something in an unnatural way, just as your arm will hurt if you pretend to have a ball or a stone in it, and in throwing the imaginary ball or stone, you put the same force into your movements as you would if you had an actual ball or stone in your hand and were seeing how far you could throw it.

Why Do We Stop Growing?

We eventually stop growing because certain of the cells of the body lose their ability of increasing in size and producing other cells. It is one of the marvels of the construction of the human body that this is so and one of the wisest provisions also. At first the cells of the body crave lots of food and increase in size, divide and then the parts go on growing until they become of a certain size, when they again divide and each part goes on growing, etc., and thus we grow. A growing boy needs more fond than a mature man, because he needs some of it to grow with, while the man only has to keep what growth he has going, i. e., alive.

We say this limit of growth is a wise provision of nature because if there were no limit to the size we might become, we would not know how large to build houses, barns, etc., or else we would have to build them so large to start with that we would be lost in them for a long time. We would constantly be forced to change these things and there would be no basis to reckon from. Dogs might be as big as elephants and then they would be of no use to us, or of what use would a dog as big as an elephant be to a boy of five years. You see it would not do at all to have this rule changed.

Why Do We Grow Aged?

We age directly in accordance with the lives we lead. You can bend a wire back and forth a number of times at the same point without breaking it, but eventually it will break. Just so with the human body. You can use each part of it for its own purposes a number of times, but eventually the break will come. Or, you can fail to make a part of it perform its regular functions, and it will die--the break will come. The human body is the most wonderful machine in the world, but even it will eventually wear out. Every time you move your arm, leg or some other part of your body, you destroy some tissues. The body replenishes and builds up those tissues again for a certain time. When you bend a joint in your body, the body oils the joint naturally, but as you grow older, or rather, as you use the different parts of your body more and more, it brings nearer always the time, when the body cannot, of its own accord, build up again the tissues you have destroyed. That is why some people become very old at forty and others are still comparatively young at seventy. It requires a great deal of care and attention and the elimination of all abuse of the body to keep us young when we are old. The use of drink, lack of sufficient sleep and other abuses prevent the body from restoring the tissues which have been destroyed. Worry and sorrow age us very rapidly, because these things affect the nerves. If the nerves are not quiet we cannot get any rest and without rest we grow old very rapidly.

What Causes Wrinkles?

Wrinkles come to us in several ways. An easy way to cause wrinkles is to scowl and frown and get into the habit of doing this. When you scowl or frown you pucker up the skin on your forehead into wrinkles and if you continue the habit the skin on your forehead makes the wrinkles permanent. You have given your skin the wrinkle habit. This acts just the same way as your arm would, if you tied it up in a sling and held it close to your side for a very long time--a number of weeks. When you took the sling off you would find your arm useless--a dead arm. It had developed the habit of doing nothing.