It serves the same purpose as biting your tongue to prevent yourself screaming, or hipping around when you stub your toe. In really simple terms, your brain can only process so many signals at once. Once it’s receiving too many signals it prioritises them and ignores the least important. Since *reacting *to pain is more important for survival than *sensing *it, physical movement takes precedence over feeling discomfort, so if you move, the brain shuffles the sensation of discomfort lower down the list of things it pays attention to.
Note that this is very simplified. The reality has to do with the volountary and involuntary nervous systems desensitising each other and a heap of other stuff that I’m not sure I recall clearly and can;t b bothered Googling. But in simple terms, moving lessens the pain by forcing the brain to concentrate on the muscles.
Cecil did a column on this. For some peoples, it wasn’t until the 19th or possibly 20th century that they learned this, from outsiders.
Depends entirely on what your tolerance is and how you define “things”
As the question is phrased, the answer would be some sort of molecule. I would guess carbon dioxide. Identical units are produced in the million of moles every microsecond. If we restrict ourselves to the macroscopic, then I guess salt crystals would win. Thousands of of crystals are made every hour.
If we restrict ourselves to macroscopic substances that are “the same” to tolerances of a few percent, then I guess the answer would be some form of foodstuff. While we may produce a lot of, say, 7/8 Whitworth nuts, I don’t think it could ever compare to the number of M&Ms or even Oreos.
First off, your own feces isn’t usually fatal to humans. The reason why we avoid it is because it *might *cause illness, not that it is a certainty. At a guess, I would say that ingesting trace amounts of feces, as you’d get from licking your “clean” anus, would probably result in illness less than one time in a thousand, and serious illness one time in a million.
Secondly, other animals don’t clean their anuses with their tongues. That’s mostly something that only the carnivores do. Carnivores are a lot more tolerant of gastrointestinal contamination because of the physiology of their stomachs and the length of the gut. when you consider that a wolf or a lion will happily eat the feces of other animals wrapped in the decaying remains of the colon, their own feces is almost sterile in comparison. In contrast herbivores, including us, have guts that are designed to ferment their food, which means that microbes that get in there can cause some really nasty infections. Cattle, for example, can easily die from ingesting feces because it introduces botulism into the stomach, where it thrives. So it’s not like humans are particularly odd in our sensitivity to feces.
Not quite. Cats lack the primary receptor for sweet carbohydrates. That’s quite along way from saying that they can’t taste sweet or that they aren’t attracted to it. It’s entirely possible that, because antifreeze is a powerful trigger for alternative sweet receptors, cats crave it even more than other mammals because it is such a novel and pleasant sensation.