To understand how to motivate people we need to understand some of the basic biology of people – how we move, how we detect stuff, how we feel, how we think, how we react, how we move. We’ll look at this working from the outside in.

Our Skeleton and Muscles

The first thing to understand is our skeleton, our muscles and the nerves that move them. This will quickly show how we express ourselves through our movement.

Skeleton – protection and framework

Protection

The skeleton of any animal is the stiff bones that provide two main things: 1) protection and, 2) movement. The protection part comes from the bones covering up the soft organs that really need to be kept all together. The main bones that do this are the skull and spinal column that protect the brain and spinal cord both of which are easily damaged, and the rib cage that protects the main organs: heart, lungs, stomach, liver, pancreas.

To allow movement and full function the skeleton doesn’t protect over parts of the body. In the skull, there are holes for the eyes and in the torso a big gap where the intestines sit. The trade-off between protection and agility (bones are heavy) is a fine balance but since the first Human (species Homo) seemed to have appeared on Earth around 2.8million years ago this is the structure we have and it’s a very unique structure for movement and expression – massive head with a skull at the top, long sticky out bi-jointed limbs, and a protected chest but an exposed torso. This structure allows us to do a super neat and unique trick – walk on two feet upright with a head balanced on top.

Framework

The second important function of the skeleton is to provide a rigid structure that acts as part of a mechanical system that can pull and push on its environment. The bones that don’t forget do this through one bone connecting to another through a muscle that can shorten (contract) resulting in one end move relative to the other. Without bones, muscles would simply get shorten moving one end closer which is not very useful.

The other cool thing about the skeleton is that it is surprisingly flexible. By this, I don’t mean it allows you to touch your toes but that the bones can twist, compress, and bend. Not by much as you can’t be rigid and bendy but bones do provide some help in the everyday movement to a point where they will obviously and painfully break (we’ll come onto nerves and how they work in a moment).

One last thing just to cover the skeleton and its bone and how essential they are. The bones are the place where many of the body’s cells start from before they specialise into different types of cell. For example in the highways and small roads of your circulatory system (heart, arteries, veins) you will find oxygen-carrying red blood cells along immunity carrying white blood cells. These two types of cell start in the bone marrow and mature as they circulate through you every second.

Muscles – movement and expression

With a skeleton in place to provide structure and protection the next thing we need are the muscles to move us around. There are three types of muscles:

1. Smooth muscle: smooth muscle is a type of muscle that is found in circular form and is the primary way we moves food through the gut by contracting from a large circle to a smaller circle pushing the food along in a wave contraction. Anything that involves a hole getting bigger or smaller will involve smooth muscle from the pupil in your eye to, you guessed it, your bottom where your anal sphincter stops and allows poop to come out with one obvious complicated exception that I’ll cover in a minute.
   
2. Cardiac muscle: cardiac muscle or heart muscle is a specialist type of muscle that powers the heart to continously pump blood around the body. The contraction is straight unlike the smooth muscle which is curved making cardiac muscle similar to striated muscle which I’ll cover next. Although similar they are key differences in how the muscle contracts as it has to be coordinated to pump or squeeze blood in pulses which is different from having to contract to pull a bone in normal movement.
   
   Both smooth and cardiac muscle are involuntary as they don’t contract on demand but contract due to changes within the automatic function of the body e.g. oxygen levels in the blood or food in the intestines.
   
3. Striated muscle or muscle: as we can’t control smooth or cardiac muscle when we say muscle we mean striated muscle – the stuff that moves us around the place. Striated muscle is voluntary when able to be controlled as it can quickly wear out once used a lot in an instance. Although we often think of muscles as being big ones that move us they are the same muscles that we use in our facial expression which we use to communicate to others. There are also muscles needed to move the eyes and a muscles to move the tongue (a special muscle that in simple terms is only joined to a bone at one end but it’s complicated as it’s made up of eight different types of muscle).
   
   There is also the issue of the mouth which is hole that gets bigger and smaller (opens and closes) just like it does at the other end of the tube (your anus – astronomy jokes always welcome). As I’ve mentioned the anus is a sphincter of smooth muscle and as it’s smooth muscle it’s under largely automatic control. The mouth (fancy name: oral cavity of mouth hole) is also a spchincter but is a way more complicated bit of machinery but from a muscle point of view (you can fairly say “would you kiss your mother with the sphincter”). The key difference is that the muscles of the mouth namely the lips are voluntarily controlled – you can keep your mouth shut for as long as you want – because all the muscles are striated muscle so come under what we will get to know as the somatic nervous system.

Smooth, Cardiac, and Striated muscles are the only muscles in the body and they are all connected to the nervous system to control their contraction and our movement both internally and externally.

If you are reading this I know that you are not only of sound taste and curiosity but also of mature mind and thought. With this assumption in mind, I can include the sometimes delicate subject of the sex organs or genitals, in this case, the male penis (I don’t think pictures are needed here just a description).

Despite many characteristics of the penis acting like a muscle it has no muscles associated with its movement in the form of an erection (it even means ‘stand up’). The mechanism is a unique one where when aroused blood is pumped into two chambers or balloons which inflate the penis. Whilst aroused blood is prevented from leaving the ballons allowing the penis to stay inflated. Once the arousal goes blood is allowed out and the erection goes down due to the chambers emptying/balloons going down. Now, strictly speaking, there are muscles involved in erections that let blood in and out but the notion that the penis is powered by muscles is not correct.

Summary

The basic skeleton and muscles of the body provide a structure to allow movement through our environments. The bones provide the framework for the organs to sit in and for the muscles to attach to.

The next step to building a better person is to spend a little time exploring the bones that protect our internal wiring and computing power: the bones of the nervous system.

Next Page >> Nervous System