Kent Dunlap
Appearances
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
Well, I think that you put your finger right on it is that it's a very underappreciated part of the body. And we tend to focus, of course, on the importance of the head. And of course, the head is really important. And also the torso, which houses our heart and lungs, which are obviously important. But the part in between the neck is often overlooked.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And I think that it has some really important and crucial things that are going on biologically. And it also carries with it a lot of cultural weight, too, a lot of cultural significance. So it was these two aspects of that, both the culture and the biology of it, really got me interested in it.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And so I started looking around across animals and across cultures to see how the neck is represented and how it's used. And it became fascinating to me.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
It doesn't have its own chapter, but it certainly makes appearances in several different places. For example, one of the places where I'm talking about the pumping of blood by the heart up to the brain, giraffes are remarkable because they have to pump their blood up approximately six feet up into the air, which, if you think about it, is about six times as far as how we have to pump our blood.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
That involves a lot of amazing adaptations for the heart and the blood vessels and so forth. Another place the giraffe comes in is in the supposed evolutionary explanation for the giraffe which is that giraffes evolved their long necks so that during periods of drought they could reach high leaves up in the trees.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
That may very well be true but in the past couple decades people have also posed a different function of the giraffe neck and that is it appears that the giraffe neck also plays an important role in sexual interactions. That is, males bash their heads against each other using their neck in competition for females.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
Sure. So one of the things that is phenomenal in the human neck is our larynx and our ability to produce speech. And so all of the things from common things that I'm doing right now with you to all of the great speeches and songs that humans can produce and so forth all begin there in the neck, in the throat.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
and so that there's clearly a lot of biology in how the larynx produces sounds how it produces vibrations that travel up through the throat and out the mouth but then of course there's all of this interesting production of culture through the voice as well in terms of great speeches and songs and so forth what does the neck do i mean other than it like you said it's like a path passageway from the head to the torso but
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
Well, that's certainly one of the most basic, but yes, I would also call the neck one of the great multitaskers in the whole body. So most body parts have one or two things that they are doing, but the neck does so many different things. You've listed a couple of them, that is transport all these vital fluids, that is air and blood and food between our head and our torso.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And it also then serves as a instrument of sensation because it moves our head and our eyes around so that we can scan the environment. It's got internal sensors in it, which allow us to detect the carbon dioxide levels in our blood. It's got lots of lymph nodes in it, which are important in fighting infection. It's got the larynx, which does this amazing thing called speech and song.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
Those are some of the multifunctions of the neck.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
Well, this is one of the very interesting things about the neck and really one of the cruel things about the neck too is that we have at least two different pipes that are going down there. One is the windpipe and the other is the esophagus, that is the food pathway.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
the cruel thing about these two pipes is that they cross and consequently sometimes in rare occasions the food can go down the wrong tube and it start head toward the lungs and that's a bad news and it will uh result in us choking so there's an extreme vulnerability associated with this crisscross of the tubes that is the windpipe and the esophagus the food tube the
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
There's at least one other set of cords that are really important, and that's the spinal cord. So the spinal cord goes up through the spine between the backbone and the brain, and any damage to that can very quickly result in death.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
That's a really good question. Yes, our neck is one of the most complicated joint systems in the whole body. So we have seven bones there in our, you know, backbones, vertebrae in our neck, but they articulate it about 37 different places. So there's very complex joints in there which allow us to rotate quite a bit.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
It's true that there are some important arteries that run up in there, but they tend to be housed in pretty big spaces, and also they are relatively stretchy. So even though you turn your head to the left and right, these critical vessels don't get stretched all that much.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
If you did twist it too much, yes, they certainly could burst, and in extreme cases, this will happen when that neck is twisted too far.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
Well, I think that has many answers. One is that certainly a neck is a place where we display a lot of our personal self-expression. And this is in the case of how we move our head or hold our head. We all know that head movement is really important in nonverbal communication. But it's also a signpost where we...
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
adorn ourselves in all sorts of personal ways with necklaces, with ties, with clerical collars. We identify occupations at the neck, that is blue collar and white collar workers. So yes, it's a place of great expression in all sorts of ways, both in how it moves and what it holds there.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
There certainly is. And the neck has played an important role in sexual communication in many different ways. One is that the neck is very different between the sexes. That is, males have a neck that's about 50% bigger in volume than that of a female. Yet the way we're often talking about feminine beauty is a long neck.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And certainly in many, many cultures around the world, most cultures, they value a long neck in estimations of feminine beauty.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
So some animals, like that you mentioned a giraffe, are extraordinarily long. Some are extraordinarily flexible like owls. Some mammals actually have a fused neck that don't allow them to move their head at all. And in all those cases, often the neck and the capacities of the neck match the lifestyle of those particular animals. A good case in point is owls. I think you've mentioned owls before.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
They can twist their head more than... 360 degrees around. And they need to be able to do this because their eyes in their head are actually not mobile. And I won't go into it at length, but their eyes, as being nocturnal predators, they have to have very large eyes. And with their large eyes, they're unable to move those eyes around in their skull.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
1.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
So in order to compensate for that, they have extraordinarily flexible necks that they can turn all around and see all around themselves, even though their eyes are fixed within their skull.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
2.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
That's absolutely right. There are so many different vulnerabilities in there, and we've mentioned that you can choke there, you can cut an artery right there, or you can snap your spinal cord, and all those would quickly result in death. Sadly, this is also a feature of the neck that has been taken advantage of by a lot of political entities.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
3.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
That is, the neck is a place where we control people politically, either by hanging them, by decapitating them with a guillotine, or by shackling them as well. Cultures in their dark past have used the neck as a place to control and oppress people.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
That's right. I kind of think about the neck almost as like a frame on a portrait. So typically what you do is when you're looking at a portrait of a painting or a photograph, you will see a person's face and spend a lot of time looking at their face. But then right there below the face is this area that we can use to advertise our membership into different groups.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
For example, you might be wearing a tie that indicates what your alma mater is or what branch of the service that you... serve. Or you might display features of your financial status, that is how expensive and gaudy your jewelry is there. So it's a very important place for broadcasting these emblems of status and membership.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
One place that you see its use a lot, as I mentioned, is in portraiture. So you can be aware of this, actually, almost any public place you go now, because there are people snapping selfies of themselves. And you'll notice when you look at those people that they almost never look straight into the camera.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
They're almost always holding their arm outstretched above them, tilting their head up and to the side. And it seems that, at least in the Western cultures, that humans really avoid this head-on view of a face. We almost always turn our head. This is not the case in all cultures and at all times.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And if you look in art museums, for example, you'll see that in Western cultures since about the Roman period, the neck is always turned in art. But if you look at other cultures and at other times, you will see that forward face-on posture.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
I think it looks more inviting and appealing and softer to have our neck square on our... I mean, tilted or twisted compared to being square on our shoulders. Other places that you see that head posture being really important is in depictions of authority. So one place, for example, that you might see it is on a marine...
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
that is part of a marine recruiting poster, where the symbolism is supposed to be of strength. One place you see it, for example, is in the Statue of Liberty, where the Statue of Liberty is a very strong figure, and she has her head straight forward. You'll see portraits of kings and queens with their heads straight forward.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
But other characters that want to exude more warmth or personality will almost always tilt their head or turn their head in some way.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
I think if anyone said that we understood the neck fully, they would be a big liar or pretty ignorant, one of the two. Because yes, there's always things to learn. One feature of the neck which is very at the forefront now is this whole phenomenon of text neck. That is people having sore necks because they spend so much time with their head tilted over a device, a computer or a phone.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And so there's a lot of research going on now in terms of what you... what are the actual pathologies that go on in the neck when people bend over a device for so much time and what you can do to avoid that. Another area of research is that there are just practically infinite shapes and sizes of necks across the animal world.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And some of those have been studied a lot, like owls and giraffes that I've mentioned, but there are others which are only just now beginning to be studied a lot. One example of that is whales, and the whales, even though their neck bones are often fused together, they have an amazing throat which allows them to take in a lot of water into their mouth, but then not swallow it down into their gut.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And just in the last few years, scientists have discovered this valve that separates the mouth and the esophagus, the food tube, which allows them to do this remarkable thing.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
It barely does in terms of... the neck bones that separate the skull and the rest of the backbone, but it has down in the front of the neck, that is what we would call the throat, there's all sorts of complicated anatomies there involved with their feeding behavior.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
That's right. I think that that's a good example of sort of the vulnerability of the neck that we all know very deep-seated. And when we want it, we can live with it. Often people do live with it if they've slept on their pillow wrong or something. But it's something that they persist through, but it's a constant nagging to them. Yeah, there are all sorts of expressions with a neck.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
For example, a very close competition is a competition that's neck and neck. If you are dealing with a really ruthless person, they might go for the jugular. There are many other expressions that include the neck.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
One of the things that drew me to the neck that I found very interesting is that why is it that this structure that's in our body is so vital and so crucial for existence and yet it's also so vulnerable? That is, why wouldn't natural selection and evolution sort of eliminated all those vulnerabilities?
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And one of the things that's interesting is that the many features that the neck does, the many functions that the neck does, are sometimes competing with each other. So you can't optimize everything at once. Let me give you one example. Human speech is possible in part because we have a larynx, a voice box, which is situated relatively low in our throat compared to other animals.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And this position of the throat gives humans the capacity to make many, many different kinds of speech sounds. But on the other hand, this low position of the larynx also gives a lot of space above the vocal cords, above the voice box, which is susceptible to collapse. And a remarkably high number of people have sleep apnea, that is periods during their sleep when their breathing stops.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
And we inherit this vulnerability to sleep apnea because we have this descended larynx leaving this space above the larynx that is so susceptible to collapse when we sleep.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
It is remarkable and it even brings to the marvels of the respiratory system too because it's actually hard to suck a lot of air down a very long trachea, a very long windpipe. We know this is sort of true because we can't breathe out of very long snorkels. You may have noticed that all snorkels are relatively short. We don't dive 20 feet down underwater with a snorkel.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
and that's because it's really hard to pull enough fresh air down that long pipe to get to our lungs. So this has been a big question about how very long-necked animals can pull in enough air down through that very long trachea.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
Thank you very much, Mike. It's been a pleasure.
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Always in a Hurry: The Illusion of Urgency & What You Never Knew About Your Neck
The neck has played an important role in sexual communication in many different ways. Males have a neck that's about 50% bigger in volume than that of a female. Certainly in many, many cultures around the world, they value a long neck in estimations of feminine beauty.