Cryptic Body Parts Trivia Quiz

Answer: Brain

The brain, that wonderful grey blob enclosed in our cranium, filled with billions of cells, neurotransmitters, dendrites, various lobes, and everything else apart from regular upgrades, is the human body's equivalent of a highly functioning computer - except ours is far, far more advanced. It enables us to hear, to see, to taste, to breathe, to feel, to remember vast amounts of information, to analyse, to touch, to love, to dance, and to sing. Everything.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who gave us the English translation quote for this question, was a famous French scientist and philosopher. While pondering at one time (and philosophers are all prone to pondering) how it would be possible to prove whether he actually existed, he came up with the above. This could just as easily be proved by accidentally sitting on a pin.

Answer: Eye

Our eyes are the organs which enable us to see, to perceive, and to send those messages along neurotransmitters back to our optic nerves, then to the visual cortex of our brain. Those messages then have to be sorted out by the brain, flipped the right way up and then sent back to either the right or left hemisphere of the brain to have that image encoded into our short or long term memory. The eyeballs are filled with a wobbly jelly like substance known as vitreous, but you don't really want to spoil the wonder of the eye by picturing that image.

In Greek and Roman mythology, a Cyclops is a one-eyed creature with an eye in the centre of its forehead. You'd go cross-eyed trying to focus on that.

Answer: Ear

Hearing specialists are those members of the health profession dealing with all aspects of our hearing and its problems. Very valuable personnel, don't you agree? ("Ear, Ear!" from the back of the room).

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), that tortured genius of a painter, who developed such a unique brush style in his very many paintings, began to develop signs of mental illness in his early twenties, a time of trouble for many young men, with a contributing factor perhaps being the brain's periodic bouts of synaptic pruning. It grew more and more severe as time passed, and found reflection in his work. In 1888, after a particularly violent argument with his friend Gaughin, van Gogh severed most of his left ear with a razor. He committed suicide in 1890, with his last words recorded as "This sadness will last forever".

A video featuring most of his works, as "Starry, Starry Night" is played, is available on youtube. Absolutely beautiful - but heartbreaking.

Answer: Neck

The neck is a type of isthmus, connecting the head and the brain, via the central nervous system and the spinal cord, to the rest of the body's torso. If you study a person's neck for a while, without their realising it of course, it's a kind of creepy looking structure, rather like a cobra's neck as it rises to strike - but it contains so many important parts of the body that it's astonishing.

If the head is slashed off at the neck, it's lights out. The beheaded dies immediately - as happened to two of the ghastly King Henry VIII's wives, Anne Boleyn and the terrified little Catherine Howard.

Answer: Heart

While the brain could also be likened to the bridge on a mighty ship, the heart is the ship's engine room, working 24 hours a day non-stop, for the duration of a person's life, pumping blood through all the vessels of the body, and distributing oxygen and nutrients along the way. For millennia, ancient people also associated the heart with our feelings and our emotions, leading it, over all that time, to become a symbol of love as well. Ah, love in zee boiler room - vive l'amour.

Christiaan Barnard (1922-2001) was a heart specialist and surgeon from South Africa, who has gone down in history as carrying out the first human to human heart transplant. Although his patient died - from pneumonia - 18 days later, this remarkable surgical breakthrough has only become more and more refined and improved since then.

Answer: Stomach

The human stomach is a little like a very busy post office. The mail comes in one end (food and drink) - and shoots out the other end on its way to its final destination (the toilet). While it is being sorted in the interim, it absorbs any of the necessary vitamins and minerals humans need to keep bodies functioning.

The term 'breadbasket' refers to any large grain growing area of the world, but as far as this question goes, it is also a slang term used to describe the human stomach area. Interestingly so, this has been used in England dating way back to the 1700s. The origin of the term is thought to refer both to an actual basket holding various bread products - and the stomach where the bread finally ends up after consumption. Unfortunately though, some of us have more bread in our baskets than others.

Answer: Appendix

The human appendix looks a little like a small deflated balloon, one that is attached to the large intestine - and the interesting thing about it is that nobody can really say what it's there for. It was once believed that it was a vestigial attachment, much like the tails scientists believed we once all had at the end of our spinal columns. I refuse to consider the thought that I once had a tail - so undignified - but wish they'd make up their minds. On the one hand, we're told that we're descended from apes - but, on the other, that apes don't have tails - so which is it? The Bible or the banana? The latest scientific theory about the appendix - emphasis on theory - is that it is a storage area for bacteria that benefits the gut.

The appendix in a book consists of one or more pages placed right at the end of the work, and which contain any other information pertinent to the contents of the book. Inclusions such as maps, or photographs, or diagrams - that sort of thing.

Answer: Elbow

The elbow on an arm is the reasonably flexible area between the upper and lower arm - centred around the elbow joint. Or, if you want the physiological terms, between the radius and ulna in our lower arm, and the humerus in the upper arm. There's nothing funny about it though if you put it out or injure it in some way. Talk about painful!

Tennis elbow may or may not have had an effect on that champion, world famous, now retired, tennis player, the gentle Roger Federer - except of course that connection no longer applies, and nobody really knows what causes this condition. So all the medical experts continue to huff and puff their theories all over the court. The full medical term for tennis elbow is 'lateral epicondylitis or enthesopathy of the extensor carpi radialis origin' (Wikipedia) and if you had to write that too often, you'd have writer's cramp as well.

Answer: Patella

The patella is a flat, triangular shaped bone centred comfortably over the knee joint, with the purpose of covering and protecting that joint. Did you know that babies aren't born with a patella as such? Their plump little legs have to stay nice and soft to make the task of crawling comfortable, and that covering only begins to form over their knee joints between the ages of three and six.

In the world of criminals if somebody has been 'kneecapped', this usually means a victim has been punished by having a bullet shot into that part of their leg. The term is a bit of a misnomer though, as most of the damage done by 'kneecapping" is done to the knee joint, rather than the patella. This was a particular form of punishment in Northern Ireland during all the troubles there, with some 2,500 people punished in this way.

Answer: Heel

The Achilles tendon is also known as the heel cord, or the calcaneal tendon. This is the thickest tendon in the human body, and aids people to flex and turn their feet about. Named after the mythological Greek hero, Achilles (and also known as the Achilles cord), this tendon was given its fancy name in 1693 by Philip Verheyen, a Flemish Dutch anatomist.

And why was it named after Achilles? Because, to make her baby invulnerable to injury, deliberate or otherwise, the mother of Achilles dipped him into the river Styx when he was small. She did this by holding the baby by his heel (it doesn't say which one) and dipping him under the water. It's a wonder the poor little thing didn't drown. However because she had covered that area of his foot with her hand to hold him, thereby blocking the water, Achilles wasn't invulnerable there, and sure enough, when he was later shot there by a poisoned dart as a man, he died.