Introduction to Anatomy & Physiology: Crash Course Anatomy & Physiology #1

I’d like you to take a second and really look at yourself.

I don’t mean take stock of your life, which really isn't any of my business, but I mean just

look at your body.

Hold up a hand and wiggle it around. Take a sip of water. Hold your breath. Sniff the air.

These things are so simple for most of us that we don’t give them a moment’s thought.

But each one of those things is, oh, SO much more complex than it feels.

Every movement you make, every new day that you live to see, is the result of a

collection of systems working together to function properly.

In short, you, my friend, are a magnificent beast.

You are more convoluted and prolific and polymorphously awesome than you probably even

dare to think.

For instance, did you know that, if they were all stretched out, your intestines would be about as long

as a three story building is tall?

Or that by the time you reach old age, you’ll have produced enough saliva to fill more than

one swimming pool?

Or that you lose about two-thirds of a kilogram every year in dead skin cells? And you will

lose more than 50 kilograms of them in your lifetime? Just tiny, dried-up pieces of you, drifting

around your house, and settling on your bookshelves, feeding entire colonies of dust mites.

You’re your own little world.

And I’m here to help you get to know the body that you call a home, through the twin

disciplines of anatomy - the study of the structure and relationships between body parts,

and physiology - the science of how those parts come together to function, and keep

that body alive.

Anatomy is all about what your body is, physiology is about what it does. And together, they

comprise the science of us.

It’s a complicated science - I’m not gonna lie to you - and it draws on a lot of other

disciplines, like chemistry and even physics. And you’ll have to absorb a lot of new terms

- lots of Latin, gobs of Greek.

But this course isn't just gonna be an inventory of your

individual parts, or a diagram of how a slice of pizza gives you energy.

Because these disciplines are really about why you’re alive right now, how you came

to be alive, how disease harms you, and how your body recovers from illness and injury.

It's about the big-picture things that we either spend most of our time thinking about,

or trying not to think about: death, and sex, and eating, and sleeping, and even the act

of thinking itself.

They’re all processes that we can understand through anatomy and physiology.