4 Famous Statistics About the Body That Turned Out to Be Fake
Some of the first fascinating facts we learn are related to the body and involve some crazy numbers. Did you know that your lungs have a surface area of some 750 square feet, enough to cover a tennis court? And that there are a hundred times as many cells in your body as there are stars in the Milky Way? Those facts are true. But at some point, you become curious about how anyone figured all that out.
Often, the answer involves peering closely at human bodies, by cutting open cadavers. Occasionally, however, it turns out that no one figured it out at all, and the stat was just a lie everyone believed.
Myth: ‘The Clitoris Has Twice the Nerve Endings of the Penis’
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Around a decade ago, one statistic spread widely in articles online about sexual health. It said that the clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings, while the penis has just 4,000. “How amazing,” these articles said, “that one part of the body that’s so often ignored could have twice the nerves of this other organ with which our entire culture is obsessed!”
At the time, however, no one had ever actually counted the nerves in question. The first time scientists really did get around to counting the nerves in the clitoris was 2022, and the average they came up from the samples they studied was 10,280. Hey, that’s even more than the stat people had been passing around. The nerves in a penis, though, from a study that same year, beat the common stat even harder (pun unavoidable), as they average out to 8,290.
The clitoris numbers (both the real ones and the earlier 8,000 one) refer exclusively to the glans clitoris. That’s the tiny exposed portion, rather than the larger internal organ. So, you can still be impressed that it has more nerves than the entire penis, but these numbers don't say it has twice as many, no.
Now, that might not tell the full story. There may be further nerves unaccounted for, or nerves we did count but shouldn’t have, once we consider something called myelination. But the part you should really be curious about is where those original 8,000 and 4,000 figures came from. No one had ever genuinely counted them, by dissecting human genital dorsal nerves, so who thought up those numbers?
His name was Thomas Lowry. He was born in 1932 and is still alive today. He did some sexual research in the 1970s, which he himself downplays, and due to some unrelated research of his, he permanently has the reputation of a fraud. In 1998, he was writing a book about Abraham Lincoln, and he wanted to share an exclusive scoop about having found the last document Lincoln signed. So, he slipped into the National Archives and used a pen to change the date on one of Lincoln’s original pardons. Forgery is a crime, but by the time agents got him to confess, the statute of limitations had passed.
In 1976, he wrote a book called The Clitoris, in which he shared that 8,000-nerve stat with the world. But he wasn’t describing the number of nerves in a human clitoris. He was describing the clitoris of a cow. Then, everyone just gladly accepted it as a universal truth we can apply to people as well. We aren’t even sure if he measured the cow clitoris properly, as Lowry just put a single line about it the book rather than publishing a full paper describing how he did it.
The 4,000-nerve penis, meanwhile belonged to a sheep. We should never have assumed that those animals have the same number of nerves as humans, and we should never have compared the two numbers to each other.
So, what does all this mean for how you approach life and sex? Not much. The clitoris and penis are exactly as sensitive as you thought they were yesterday. And the basic message of those sexual health articles (“Don’t ignore the clit!”) is still sound. They just never should have been using a made-up stat to make that point, and they actually never needed to.
The number of nerve endings in each part of the body is of paramount importance to neurosurgeons but doesn’t really matter to you. When it comes to deciding what to do with various parts of the body, dissecting tissue isn’t nearly as instructive as the far more fun process of trying different stuff and asking how much someone likes it.
If we went solely by numbers, we’d see each hand has 150,000 receptors. Then we’d do nothing but rub each other’s palms, and we’d never satisfy anyone.
Myth: ‘You Lose 80 Percent of Your Body Heat Through the Head’
The exact percentage varies in the telling, but a lot of people are convinced that the head is responsible for a disproportionate amount of heat loss. During winter, a hat is therefore the most important article of protective clothing you can wear. The way some parents tell it, scientists have done experiments where people went out in the snow naked, wearing just a hat, and they were fine due to the armor on their head.
The thing is, we can find no record of such an experiment.
What we did find was the exact opposite, which was the real experiment that birthed the myth. These were a series of military experiments in the 1950s, in which subjects wore Arctic survival suits over their bodies but nothing on their heads. In cold conditions, nearly half of the heat subjects lost did leave their bodies through their heads. But that wasn’t because heads are inherently vulnerable. It’s because in that experiment, every part of the body other than the head was expertly insulated.
If they were completely naked in the snow (inadvisable), those shivering guinea pigs would have lost about 10 percent of their heat through their heads, which is roughly proportional to the surface area the head makes up. But army field manuals in the 1970s responded to the study by saying that “40 to 45 percent of body heat” is lost through the head, and the myth mutated from there.
Incidentally, the head does produce a disproportionate amount of heat. Your brain alone produces 20 percent of the heat in your body, and it makes up just 2 percent of the body’s mass. But that heat travels through the body thanks to the circulatory system. It leaves through whatever parts have enough surface area to work as radiators. It’s why some of the best parts of the body for losing heat are your feet.
Myth: ‘Your Circulatory System Is Long Enough to Circle the Globe Twice’
That circulatory system runs very long, once you add up all the tiny capillaries that wind their way through your entire body. The common statistic, which everyone repeats, is that these blood vessels total 60,000 miles in length, which is more than enough to circle the Earth twice at the equator.
But who came up with that number? That’s surprisingly hard to track down. Any source that mentions it will think there’s no need for a citation because everyone’s been repeating the fact so long, it has to be true. One YouTube channel spent a year contacting authors about their books and working backward through time to track down where it came from.
The answer: It originated from a Danish professor named August Krogh back in 1919. Overall, his studies of the circulatory system deserve plenty of praise and won him the 1920 Nobel Prize. But for this estimate, he made some bad assumptions. To start with, he imagined that a person weighs 315 pounds and has 110 pounds of muscle. That isn’t typical — either in 1919 or today. Then he factored in how dense capillaries are in muscles, and he overestimated that by a factor of five.
In 2021, scientists with an additional century of tech and knowledge did their own analysis of the body. They found that the circulatory system really adds up to more like 8,000 miles or might be as low as 6,000 miles. That’s enough to go around the country twice but not the world.
Krogh overestimated by some 900 percent. And next up, we have one more example of an experiment that made an overestimation just as big...
Myth: ‘You Have 10 Times as Many Bacterial Cells in Your Body as Human Cells’
In the last decade, we’ve become increasingly aware of the human microbiome, which relates to all the bacteria living inside you. These aren’t pathogens that your body fights but organisms that live alongside your own cells and that are essential for you to go on living. As for just how essential these bacteria are, scientists offered a stunning fact: You own body consists of a trillion human cells, but you also have 10 trillion bacteria in you. Bacteria have you outnumbered, and it’s no contest.
The first thing you should know about your trillions of gut bacteria is that they aren’t all permanent residents of your body that nestle deep in your tissues. The figure includes the bacteria that make up the bulk of your feces, and your body continually chucks those out.
As for how many bacteria are in your feces, our estimate of that goes back to 1972 and a microbiologist named Thomas Luckey. He calculated how many bacteria are in one fecal gram, and then he scaled that up to account for feces filling up the entire alimentary canal. But the alimentary canal runs right from your mouth all the way to your anus. Only the final bit at the end, the large intestine, is filled with feces.
A more recent estimate from 2016 says an average person might have 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacterial cells, and you might have twice or half as many bacteria as that, depending on your last meal or bathroom trip.
Of course, if you’d never heard about the original stat we’re debunking here, “you have as many bacteria in your body as human cells” still sounds like a hell of a lot. But it’s not 10 times the number of your own body cells. Luckey was nuts to make his estimate using the entire alimentary canal. People aren’t completely full of shit.
Well, some people are.
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