Our Built in Air Conditioner
We tend to consider noses merely as handy smell detectors. But they’re also very efficient air-conditioners.
Everyday your nose deals with more than ten thousand litres of air. By the time the air reaches your lungs, it’s clean, and as warm and humid as the air on a beautiful summer’s day.
The nose first acts as a cleaning system. The course hairs inside the nose catch most of the biggest particles. Smaller particles that are left, get caught by sticky mucus membranes inside the nose. This clean air is then warmed by running it past three inflatable blobs of tissue that provide a greater surface area for heat exchange. Noses are so efficient that even when the outside temperature is at freezing point, the inhaled air has reached body temperature by the time it arrives in the throat.
The nose needs to secrete about a litre of moisture a day to humidify the incoming air, and to trap unwanted bacteria and particles. To make sure that any trapped bacteria is removed, tiny hairs called cilia wave around at about ten waves a second. This keeps the mucus pushed to the back of the throat. As you swallow, the bacteria are pushed into the stomach, where they’re destroyed by powerful acids. On a cold day, the cilia are less active and so the mucus drips from the nose instead of being swept into the throat.
So next time your nose runs, help those sluggish cilia, and blow.
I’ve sometimes thought what a thrilling movie it would be if we could chronicle the body’s defences against alien attackers from the environment. From special cells created by the immune system to the rather crude mechanical aspects of nose hair, the body is always on the alert for danger from the outside.
While our bodies have many ways of handling germs and dirt, which most of us ignore, they also benefit from some assistance. Research shows that regular hand washing with a good soap is the first line of defence against many diseases. Other aspects of personal hygiene, prompted by the awareness of potentially dangerous bacteria, back up basic cleanliness and the body’s own defensive strategies.
When we think of cleanliness, most of us think first of our bodies. But there are many allusions to clear or clean consciences in literature. One of the most famous is Lady MacBeth’s “Out, damned spot! out, I say!–” as she tries to deal with the stains of a guilty conscience she visualizes as blood stains on her hands.
The stains of a guilt-stricken conscience are much harder to deal with than blood on the hands. There are two popular ways of dealing with the feelings of inner contamination we sense when we have violated our own standards of right and wrong. One is to just distract ourselves – attempting to ignore them. The other is to sear our conscience – justifying our behaviour to ourselves in one way or another. The weakness of these is that they only deal with the symptoms, not the issue.
The best way to deal with a guilty conscience is to seek forgiveness of the offended party. That will require some humility on our part, but the sense of release that comes when we have done the right thing can be astonishing. Many of us live with a certain amount of background guilt so frequently that pardon and reconciliation seem foreign to us.
Those who truly love us and care for our relationship with them will be able to forgive us and allow the restoration of the relationship, but now strengthened by honesty.
The best example of this is the way God forgives those who have pitted themselves against Him in one way or another. We have His assurance that because of steps He has already taken, we can be totally free – not only from the feelings of guilt that disturb us, but the guilt itself.
Dr. David Humphreys and Ron Hughes
