Are You Your Body? Let’s Figure This Out#

Okay, so the big question is: are you just your body? Well, yeah, kind of, right? But where does that stop being true? How much can you take away from yourself before you’re not ‘you’ anymore? Or does that question not even make sense?

Your Body: A City of Cells#

Think about your body. It’s made of cells, trillions of them. That’s like, ten times more than the number of stars in the whole Milky Way galaxy!

• Each cell is like its own little living being, a tiny machine built from up to 50,000 different proteins.
• These cells don’t have thoughts, feelings, or goals; they just are. But they’re still individual units.
• Together, these cells team up to form big structures that handle all sorts of jobs:
  • Getting food ready
  • Gathering resources
  • Moving stuff around your body
  • Checking out your surroundings, and all that good stuff.

Here’s a mind-bender: If you take cells out of your body and give them the right place to live, they can keep going for a bit. So, your cells can hang around without you, but you definitely can’t exist without them. If all your cells were gone, there wouldn’t be a ‘you’ left.

Where Does ‘You’ End?#

So, is there a point where a collection of your cells stops being you?

• Imagine you donate an organ. Billions of your cells keep living inside someone else. Does that mean a piece of you is now part of another person? Or is their body just keeping a part of you alive?
• Let’s try a weird experiment: You and a random person swap cells, one by one. Your body gets one of theirs, theirs gets one of yours. When would they become you? Would they ever? Or is this just a super slow, slightly gross way to teleport yourself?

You’re Not Static, You’re Changing Constantly#

Thinking of ourselves as something fixed and unchanging just doesn’t hold up. Almost all your cells have to die during your life.

• Since this video started, about 250 million of your cells have kicked the bucket.
• That’s between one and three million cells dying every single second!
• In about seven years, most of your cells have been replaced at least once.
• Every time your cells get swapped out, you’re a tiny bit different than you were before.
• So, a piece of you is constantly dying off. If you’re lucky enough to live to be old, you’ll have gone through roughly a million billion cells in total.

What you think of as yourself is really just a snapshot, a moment in time.

When Cells Go Rogue: Cancer#

But sometimes, cells are broken and refuse to die. This makes us question the whole idea of our body being a single, unified thing. We call these cells cancer.

• They break the body’s biological ‘social contract’ and become practically immortal.
• Cancer isn’t an invader from the outside; it’s a part of you that decides its own survival is more important than yours.
• On the other hand, you could argue that a cancer cell becomes a completely different entity inside you – another being just trying to live and grow. Can you really blame it for that?

The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks#

Here’s a truly chilling cell story: the case of Henrietta Lacks.

• She was a young cancer patient who passed away in 1951.
• Back then, cells usually only lived for a few days in a lab, making research super tough.
• But Henrietta’s cancer cells were different – they were immortal!
• Over many decades, these cells were grown and multiplied countless times.
• They’ve been used in countless research projects and have helped save countless lives.
• Henrietta’s cells are still alive today! In total, they’ve been grown into at least 20 tons of biomass around the world.
• So, there are living parts of someone who’s been considered dead for decades spread all over the planet. How much of Henrietta is still in those cells?

Is It About Your DNA?#

What exactly makes one of your cells you, anyway? Maybe it’s the info inside it: your DNA.

• Not long ago, everyone thought every single cell in your body had pretty much the exact same genetic code. But nope, turns out that’s wrong.
• Your genome (your complete set of DNA) isn’t fixed; it changes over time. It gets altered by mutations and things in your environment.
• This is especially true in your brain. Recent discoveries show that just one neuron in an adult brain can have over a thousand mutations in its genetic code that aren’t found in the cells right next to it.

But even then, how much of your DNA is really you?

• About 8% of the human genome is made up of pieces from viruses that infected our ancestors way back when and just… stuck around.
• And those little powerhouses inside your cells, the mitochondria? They used to be bacteria that joined up with the ancestors of your cells ages ago. They even have their own DNA!
• An average cell has hundreds of these mitochondria – hundreds of tiny things that aren’t really human, but they’re still kind of a part of you. Yeah, it’s confusing!

A Self-Sustaining Pattern#

Let’s backtrack a bit. We know you’re built from trillions of tiny things, which are made of even tinier things, and it’s all constantly changing.

• Together, all those tiny pieces aren’t sitting still; they’re dynamic. What they’re made of and their condition is always shifting.
• So, maybe we’re just a pattern that keeps itself going, without clear edges.
• This pattern somehow gained self-awareness at some point and can now think about itself across time and space, but it really only exists right now, in this exact moment.

Where did this pattern even start?

• When you were conceived?
• When the very first human showed up?
• When life first started taking over our little planet?
• Or maybe when the elements that make up your body were created inside a star?

Reality’s Fuzzy Edges#

Our human brains are wired to deal with things in clear black and white, absolutes. The blurry edges that make up reality are tough for us to get our heads around. Maybe ideas like beginning and end, life and death, you and me, aren’t really solid absolutes at all. Maybe they’re just ideas that belong to this flowing pattern, a pattern that’s just a tiny part of this strange and beautiful universe.

The question of who we are isn’t just about our bodies, but also about our minds. And just like our cells can be divided or separated from us, our brains can also be divided and separated from us – even while they’re still in our skulls…

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