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Depending on where you live, you can keep your home secure in many ways. Some apartment buildings use doormen. Some houses have fences. Got a castle? One moat and an arrow-flinging army, please. Or you can choose other typical home-defense mechanisms, like deadbolts, electronic security systems, or a frothing pit bull named Rocco. No matter what your barrier method, there’s a reason why you punch in a pass code, chain the door, or opt against neutering Rocco. You want a top-notch security system to protect all the valuables inside your home—from photo albums and stereo equipment to heirlooms and children.
All throughout your body, you also have your own security systems to defend your body against intruders. Skin and bones protect your internal organs in car accidents and from errant golf balls, hair protects your scalp from UV rays, and eyelids protect your eyeballs from finger-poking friends. But the most important security system in your body is the stealth one—the one that you can’t see or feel, but the one most responsible for protecting you from invading illnesses and for helping you recover from them.

You use your immune system every day, though you may not even know that it’s working or how it works. Your immune response kicks in when it senses something evil lurking around your body, like bacteria or viruses. When you consider the fact that your hand alone may contain germs numbering 200 million (the U.S. population in the late 1960s), it’s likely that your body is infected with bacteria right now, and the cells in your immune system are currently working their little fannies off to fight them.
Perhaps the reason why immune diseases are so complicated is that there’s such a wide range of things that can cause infections in our bodies, so many ways our bodies respond to them, and such difficulty figuring out how to beat them. While it’s easy to know when to stitch a cut or place a cast to stabilize a broken bone, immune problems have a wide range of solutions (medications work for some and not for others, for example). And that makes your immune system one of the more complex ones in your body.

Your body’s cells are a little like your taste buds in that they know exactly what they like and what they don’t. When it encounters staphylococcus, your body recognizes it as a foreign substance, just as a guard would notice an unwanted intruder on a surveillance camera. When your body spots the intruder, a type of white blood cell—called a macrophage—finds the bacteria, engulfs it, and digests it, sort of like the way the security guard would stop and question that intruder. At that point, the macrophage gets on its walkie-talkie and calls for backup. The message—the chemical equivalent to “Help! Help! Intruder! Pimple forming on tip of nose! Prom’s tomorrow night!”—is an SOS to other cells so they’ll immediately respond to the area by traveling through the bloodstream (that’s why skin beneath a scab is red—it’s made up of the additional blood supply).

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Just like the paint on your house, skin comes in many colors and is exposed to all of the elements of the world. While it seems as if the main purpose of skin these days is to sell girlie magazines, its primary purpose is to protect your insides. Though skin is literally only skin deep, it does offer many insights into the way our inner system works. Covering seventeen thousand square centimeters in the average person, your skin is your body’s largest organ and, in fact, is more than just a physical body or armor. Skin also:
•Protects against infections. Infections from the outside world travel to our inside world via three places—through our lungs, our intestines, and our skin. Since our skin has the most interface with the outside world, it has a protective quality to it; the top layer of skin is a dead layer, which acts as a shield against outside invaders.
•Sends important signals to our brain. For example, if you burn yourself and it hurts, you’re receiving the message to step away from the campfire (that’s good). If it’s painless, it means you may have killed the part of the skin with pain fibers. The effect? Not only wouldn’t you get the message, but you also wouldn’t be able to heal properly.

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Within your ear canal, glands secrete wax. We’ve figured out all kinds of beautification purposes for wax, like cleaning cars and stripping off back hair, but ear wax has a more important function. Acting like a Venus flytrap, ear wax traps dust and repels water that can enter and damage your ear—making it the perfect system for when man lived outdoors. After it traps foreign substances, the wax is pushed to the outer area of the canal, where it dries up and is supposed to tumble out of your ear. One of the worst things you can do to your ears is use a Q-tip, fingernail, or fishhook to pull wax out of your ear. Anything you put in your ear acts as a ramrod and shoves the wax in deeper (not to mention risks puncturing your eardrum), which can hinder sound waves from making it to your main auditory processing center.

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The biggest threat to your hearing is LOUD NOISE. MUCH RESEARCH HAS SHOWN—sorry, didn’t mean to shout…Much research has shown that being exposed to loud noises over a period of time can lead to significant and permanent hearing loss. Later in the chapter, we’ll explain what some of those things are (remember, even the noise of snoring is about 85 decibels). Of course, hearing loss can occur for other reasons as well. A relatively simple and treatable infection can develop if water gets trapped inside your ear (a common occurrence in children). Without quick treatment, it can lead to hearing loss.

As opposed to not hearing enough, some people experience chronic ringing in their ears—a condition called tinnitus. That’s a disorder related to the function of the cochlea—a circular structure in your ear containing tiny hairs called cilia. When working correctly, sound outside your body hits the eardrum and vibrates the fluid inside the ear, which shakes the cilia. The cilia transform the sound wave into electrical energy so the cranial nerves can conduct the information to the brain. If the cilia are inefficient, your ears ring. Typically, people with tinnitus are more prone to hearing the ringing when they’re by themselves because it’s usually drowned out by all the buzzing and hissing around you when you’re with others.

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You’re most familiar with the outer structures of your ears, and you know the many purposes they serve. They hold up glasses and provide a nice backdrop for gold earrings. They also let you hear the sweet sounds of Beethoven, the comforting words of a partner, and the activities of the newlyweds in the next hotel room. The outer fleshy part of the ear, in essence, serves as a funnel for sound. It directs and localizes sound (that’s actually why we have two ears—so you can determine the direction from where the sound is coming). Once sound enters your ear canal, your brain can make decisions based on the sounds you’ve heard.
In order for you to hear, sound travels down an assembly line of structures—each with its own role in producing sound (see Figure 8.2). The outer ear contains your eardrum; its role is to convert sound waves into mechanical vibrations that vibrate the three bones attached to the inner ear, which is filled with fluid and nerves. At that point, a sloshing motion is produced in the inner ear when the fluid is vibrated, moving tiny hair cells in the ear. The nerves recognize that final step as an electrical connection to send signals to the brain—and that’s how we hear sound. If you have too much wax, it can block the sound waves from ever reaching the drums, which prevents the bones from moving, ultimately restricting your ability to hear. Essentially, your ear is taking sound waves—a form of mechanical energy—and converting them to electrical energy so your brain can understand it.

That’s right; our ears convert an analog world into a digital one. Your ability to hear also depends on the hairs on the cochlea. If your hair cells die, you suffer hearing loss—most likely because of loud noises or less blood supply. And you have two frequency ranges with which you usually hear sound. High-frequency ranges, which people lose first, helps you hear things like leaves rustling and whispered consonants, while low-frequency ranges help you recognize speech.

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