pg 83...
the human body is made up of several hundred different types of cells - muscle, blood, nervous, and so on. At any given time, approximately 75 trillion of these cells are working away in your body. In a very real sense, you are the sum of their actions; there is no you without them. And yet those cells are dying all the time! Thousands probably died in the time it took you to read the last sentence, and by next week, you will be composed of billions of new cells that weren't there to enjoy the reading of that sentence, much less enjoy your first step or your high school prom. Cells are dying all the time in your body - and most of them are being replaced at a tremendous clip. (Even brain cells turn out to regenerate themselves far into adulthood) And yet somehow, despite that enormous cellular turnover, you still feel like yourself week to week and year to year. How is this possible?
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Softwares. Steven Johnson.
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