Kent Dunlap
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Kent Dunlap’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Those are some of the multifunctions of the 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.
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
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.
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.
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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