This logo of my friend Dr. Louis Papia of the Nederland’s inspired me to borrow it, with his permission and now I am forced to write some thoughts about how magnificent the human spine is.
Most text books will say it is for us to be mobile and that it protects the spinal cord. That is kind of boring compared to the following:
The human spine is innervated with the largest, fastest, most powerful nerves in the human body. They do more than carry pain signals. In fact, these nerves have nothing to do with pain at all. Pain is transmitted by the smallest of the nerves in our body.
While the spinal cord is 20 percent of our brain, 90 percent of what goes into our brains is coming from the spinal nerves that innervate the spinal joints which travels up the spinal cord along with information from our viscera. Only 10 percent of the remaining information about our environment is coming from our eyes, ears, nose and mouth. That is just how our brains are mapped.
Much of that information is proprioceptive. That means it is vital that our brain knows exactly where every body part is in space and time. Every muscle is being constantly monitored to know exactly how much stress is on it and its position. If not, we’d constantly be falling down. Actually, we would never be able to stand up.
More importantly the brain needs constant stimulus for us to remain human and that stimulus is gravity. These large nerves in our spinal joints transduce the earth’s gravitational field into electricity and that electricity is going north to our brain. Said another way, it is recharging our brilliant battery that resides inside our skulls. When the spinal joints are working correctly, the brain has better quality information to work with.
The miracle of being human is occurring because our spines are designed the way they are.
