Doubleday
US-BORN Bill Bryson has now spent more than half his life living in England, everywhere from Kirkby Malham in North Yorkshire to Wramplingham in Norfolk.
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That non-standard relationship to the UK gave him the edge to write Notes from a Small Island, a wry account of getting to grips with Britain’s strange customs. The book made him a household name in the late 1990s. Other books followed, all using the same formula: Bryson pokes fun at himself while discovering some new and interesting place.
Then, in 2003, a surprise: he published a book about science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, which set out to explain how the universe progressed from its earliest origins to humans in the here and now.
At the time, he told New Scientist that when it came to science, “it almost was not possible to know less in these fields than I did”.
But his journey of self-education built him a new fan base. The book won the Royal Society’s science book prize in 2004, and became a UK bestseller the following year.
Now he has followed up with The Body: A guide for occupants – a journey of a very different sort.
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What do you hope people will take from your new book?
My idea was to do a kind of celebration. I didn’t want to dwell on diseases and illness and human frailties because I think the body is mostly a success story. The miracle of life is that all of these things inside you work together. You don’t have to tell your heart to beat or your lungs to inflate and deflate. We could spend our whole lives playing Pac-Man or something and not having really to think about anything because your body looks after you. To me, that’s quite a miracle.
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Wasn’t there a rather personal reason that spurred you on?
Yes, one of the impetuses to write the book was that I was sent for an MRI scan to make sure there was nothing wrong with my heart. It turned out there was nothing wrong, but in the course of doing that, the scanner obviously went low enough to note that I only have one kidney.
I thought: I’m dying! One kidney has packed in and the next one is going. So I went to see a kidney specialist and he said: “No, no, you’re fine. You were probably born with one kidney or you have one very shrunken kidney which atrophied very soon after birth.” He said about one person in 100 goes through life like that.
That made me think. I mean, you could only have one kidney too. You could be part of this very select club but never know it. Because most of us go through life without having any idea what’s inside us. That made me realise, I’ve been living in this wobbly shape all these years and I have really no idea what’s in there.
One of the mind-blowing things you write about is that the brain can “predict” what will happen…
I thought that was amazing. To allow you to function in the world better, the brain is constantly “predicting” what’s going to happen a fifth of a second in the future. If what you saw inside your mind was what your eyeballs were taking in, it would just be complete chaos. For one thing, your eyes have to look through all the blood vessels and everything, and your brain filters all that out, which I find astounding.
“I’ve been living in this wobbly shape all these years and I have really no idea what’s in there”
Does the brain have any other editing tricks?
You have a big blind spot in the middle of both eyes, so your brain is constantly filling in. When you see me, you’re missing out a whole bunch because the optic nerve nullifies the central part of your vision. And there are tricks that can help you identify the blind spot that I mention in the book. But the bottom line is that, in each eye, you have a big hole in the centre of your field of vision that you’re not aware of in the same way that you’re not aware of blinking.
Another thing that rocked me back on my heels was the idea that a cubic millimetre of your cerebral cortex – about the size of a grain of sand – has enough storage capacity to contain all the movies ever made, including trailers. The real problem I had was keeping the head and brain from being the whole book, because everything about you that is really fascinating is from the neck up.
Isn’t one of your children a doctor? Did that influence you?
My eldest son was in medical school for years and years. When he’d come home at the weekends, if he and I went to the pub, he would tell me really excitedly about some technical stuff, electrolytes or ribosomes. I was kind of captivated, enchanted really, by how taken he was by the human body.
But I came to realise that although he came to know everything you need to know in order to practise medicine, he didn’t know a lot about things like why Alzheimer’s disease is called that. I realised that there was an awful lot about the body that even he didn’t know. So that got me interested in it as well.
Did researching the book take you to interesting places?
Yes, my doctor son is attached to Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, and is friends with Ben Ollivere, a professor and orthopaedic surgeon there. He invited me to visit the dissecting room and to spend time with people who took me through the human body – in the most literal sense.
How did you find that?
I’d never done anything like that before and wasn’t sure how I would respond. I didn’t know whether it would make me queasy. Initially it did, very slightly. But you become captivated by what they’re teaching you.
The thing that I will always remember is how completely different the body is. An opened-up human body, a cadaver drained of all life and colour, is just a slab of meat – not very different from your Christmas turkey. To me that was all the more marvellous, to think that these innards I’m looking at were until recently this person who used to sit up, laugh, smile, have dreams and fall in love and do all of these things. And all that did it was this flesh, this kind of mass of undifferentiated organs. The body gets described in terms of being a machine – it’s nothing like that. It’s just tissue, and yet, miraculously, look what it does.
A few years ago, you were very involved in a UK campaign to clean up the countryside. Are things better now?
I don’t think we’re going in the right direction with anything. Seriously, I don’t think the world has ever been as crazy and as unprepared for the future as it is right now.
One thing that particularly disturbs me is how untrusted scientists have become. I grew up in a world in which anybody who had a lab coat on was believed automatically. Maybe we were a bit naive, but we’ve gone in the other direction and a lot of people are automatically suspicious of almost anything scientists tell them.
I don’t understand why, when it’s so obviously sensible to at least cautiously accept, say, global warming as something we need to do something about. The consequences are so bad if we don’t – you’re not going to make the world a worse place if you’re wrong. I struggle not to be too depressive about the world now.
What do you want to do next? More science books?
What I’m going to do next is just nothing. The greatest luxury is to go somewhere and not have to write about it.
