The Seahorse In Your Brain: Where Body Parts Got Their Names

The title hippocampus comes from the Greek phrase for seahorse. It is part of the mind concerned in emotion and reminiscence. Pleasure Ho/NPR conceal caption

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Pleasure Ho/NPR

The title hippocampus comes from the Greek phrase for seahorse. It is part of the mind concerned in emotion and reminiscence.

Pleasure Ho/NPR

The hipbone's linked to the leg bone, linked to the knee bone. That is not really what these physique elements are known as, however we'll forgive you in case you do not sing concerning the innominate bone connecting to the femur connecting to the patella. It simply would not have the identical ring to it.

When the traditional Greeks had been naming physique elements, they had been in all probability making an attempt to provide them names that had been simple to recollect, says Mary Fissell, a professor within the Division of the Historical past of Drugs at Johns Hopkins. "Certain, there have been texts, however the historical world was very oral, and the folks studying these items have to recollect it."

So the Greek students, and later Roman and medieval students, named bones and organs and muscle tissue after what they regarded like. The thick bone on the entrance of your decrease leg, the tibia, is called after a similar-looking flute. And though you or I would get confused when a paleoanthropologist writes concerning the foramen magnum (which interprets to "actually large gap") a local Latin speaker would know precisely what to search for — the actually large gap the place your mind attaches to your backbone.

Generally the names get a little bit bit extra summary. Take the tragus, a tiny flap of pores and skin on the outer ear. It is named after goats not as a result of it appears like them, however as a result of some folks have tufts of hair on the tragus like goats do on their chins.

"I am fascinated by the battle of translating sensory experiences to phrases, and that is what these early anatomists had been doing. Generally within the names or descriptions you may nearly really feel the battle of somebody seeing this object and making an attempt to scale back it to phrases,"says Fissell.

The perfect instance of that battle might be the hip. It isn't exhausting to think about somebody staring on the bones that make up the human pelvis, making an attempt to explain them, after which giving up and calling the factor innominate: the unnamed bone.

Simply as it may be exhausting to pick the constellations within the sky, generally it may be exhausting to see the objects and animals Greek, Roman and medieval scientists named physique elements after. We requested anatomists, professors and museum professionals what their favourite unusually named physique elements had been, and illustrated just a few with animated GIFs to make the inspiration simpler to see.

Auricles

Your coronary heart is split up into 4 chambers: two ventricles and two atria. As your coronary heart beats, doorways open and shut between the totally different chambers, so the blood strikes a method and never the opposite. The atria sit on the prime of the guts and work as blood assortment chambers. There are floppy, wrinkled-looking pouches on both atrium, ready to develop as blood flows into them. These are the auricles, and so they get their title from the Latin phrase for ear. We predict they kind of seem like the ears on a pet.

Crista galli

The within of your cranium is not clean — it is really fairly lumpy. On this case, the lump in query is the crista galli, a little bit ridge of bone inside the center of the cranium. Should you think about your nostril touring up and in a little bit methods, the crista galli sits proper excessive of it. There is a row of tiny holes on both aspect to your olfactory bulbs, the elements of your mind that enable you odor. The falx cerebri (which mainly means hook-shaped factor in your mind) is a membrane that runs between the 2 halves of the mind. It attaches to, you guessed it, the crista galli. Roughly translated, crista galli is Latin for crest of the rooster. It provides new which means to the time period "birdbrained."

Hippocampus

The hippocampus is certainly one of a number of elements of our mind concerned in reminiscence. Some intrepid brain-dissector will need to have thought it regarded like a seahorse, as a result of that is precisely what hippocampus means in Greek. We agree; it actually does. (See above.)

Lumbricals

Maintain your hand along with your thumb perpendicular to your index finger, along with your fingers bent the place they connect to your hand and straight in any respect different joints. It ought to seem like you are making an attempt to carry the Monster Guide of Monsters shut. The muscle tissue that allow you to do which might be your lumbricals. A bit disturbingly, lumbrical comes from the Latin phrase for worm. By all means think about them squirming across the subsequent time you maintain a pencil, one thing your lumbricals additionally enable you do.