300: that’s how many words the average human reads per minute. But in the minute or two it’ll take you to get through this roughly 600-word article, your body will be doing a lot more -- spawning millions of blood cells, shootings trillions of chemical signals, and basically, you know, keeping you alive.
We teamed up with CVS/Minute Clinic to take a look at the astounding things your busy body does in a minute. If you feel guilty taking time to read this, just remember: you’re not really procrastinating. You and your body are totally multi-tasking.
120 MILLION:
The number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells you’ll make by the end of this. And while that seems sure to cause serious overcrowding inside your vessels, it’s actually necessary to keep up with the rate at which red blood cells wear out -- about 120 days.
28:
The times that cycling champion Miguel Indurain’s record-setting heart would beat each minute while at rest. If your own heart doesn’t seem quite so chill, that’s probably okay: While the "typical" elite athlete can clock around 40 beats per minutes, the average person’s resting heart rate is somewhere between 66 and 72 beats per minute.
30,000 - 50,000:
The number of skin cells you’ll shed. Every minute of your life, your valiant skin, which protects you from the elements and damage, loses a vast number of troops. (Don’t worry, they’re quickly replaced.) If you’re having trouble visualizing how much that is, an average human can lose about 105 pounds of dead skin over their lifetime.
1.3:
The gallons of blood pumped by your heart. With each heartbeat -- and, remember, there are typically about 70 per minute -- your heart pushes out about 2.4 ounces of life-bringing blood. Over the course of a life, the heart’s hard work becomes even clearer: it ultimately pumps 1 million barrels of blood, or enough to fill three supertankers.
15 - 20:
The number of times you’ll blink this minute. (This explains why you still can’t win a staring contest.) While 20 blinks might not seem like much, it actually means you spend roughly 10 percent of your waking life with your eyes closed.
600 MILLION:
The estimated amount of visual information, measured in bits, that your retina pushes to your brain for interpretation. But before you get excited about your raw processing power, you might consider that that data transmission speed is on the lower end of what an ethernet connection can do.
20:
The percentage of blood that will be cleaned by your kidneys. The waste-cleaning tag team processes and cleans the entire volume of blood in about five minutes, meaning that it tackles about 1.2 liters in 60 seconds. Perhaps this is most impressive when you consider that the average kidney only weighs about a quarter of a pound.
1.1:
Inches of hair you’ll grow (presuming you still have some on your head.) While any individual strand of hair only grows an average of a half-inch per month -- and even that may depend on race, diet, age and sun exposure -- each head has about 100,000 strands. Because it’s a lot of hair growing a teeny amount, it’s still going to take a year or four to grow your hair out.
86 BILLION
Electrical signals will be passed on by your neurons. While we can’t pretend to understand every inner working of the brain, we can tell you that experts believe the brain’s cells send billions of signals every minute. And that’s the lowest estimate. The highest estimate is something we have trouble imagining, even with all our brainpower: 17.2 TRILLION neural firings per minute.
MinuteClinic brings convenient medical care to your neighborhood inside select CVS/pharmacy® stores. We are open 7 days a week, including evenings and weekends with no appointment necessary and most insurance accepted. Our nurse practitioners offer services to keep you and your family healthy. In addition to diagnosing and treating illnesses, injuries and skin conditions, they also provide vaccinations, physicals, screenings and monitoring for chronic conditions.