Theoretical Anatomy - Part 4
You can find the previous parts here:
Crivsola woke up the next morning in her jail cell to see Lomytguya doing a headstand. She turned her head to the door and saw the guard looking in. Lomytguya saw Crivsola’s surprised face and laughed. She walked over and whispered in Crivsola’s ear that she had bribed the guard with Nsujala - both of them had the freedom to do whatever they wanted in the jail cell without being caught.
Crivsola instantly asked her cellmate whether she had eaten something before doing a headstand. When Lomytguya answered in the affirmative, Crivsola asked whether she had ever let food out of her mouth when doing a headstand.
“Only once and that too last week,” said Lomytguya. “I was drinking Nsujala all night with the guard and when I did a headstand after breakfast the next day, everything came out!”
Crivsola’s face lit up with excitement. She realized the flaw in her earlier experiment - the sample of people she had picked was not representative of the population of humans. It was representative of the population of those who had been drinking a lot of Nsujala. So, Nsujala did something to the body which resulted in this outcome.
Crivsola was very interested in pursuing an explanation for this phenomenon. However, she decided to be disciplined and stick to her original plan - she would come back to this after she was able to explain simpler phenomena about the human body.
When you are sampling a population, you need to be relatively sure that the sample you have picked does not have some specific characteristic which makes it different to the population. For example, if you wanted to study the effect of sugar on kids, but only happened to work with kids who have juvenile diabetes, you will get a result which is not true about kids in general. Similarly, if you look at the effect of lifelong smoking on those who are above the age of 90, you are missing out on the effect of lifelong smoking on those who died young. The result may be very different in the latter case.
Crivsola was convinced that a headstand does not result in food coming out of the mouth in normal circumstances. So, she now needed to amend her model to explain why that was the case.
While exercising in the jail garden, she ran into a fellow prisoner. He was bending down over what looked like a door in the ground. She asked him what that was. He said that he had been tasked with catching a wolf who had been spotted on the jail premises.
That didn’t answer her question so she probed again, “How is that door helping with that?” In response, he pushed against the door and it moved inwards. “This door only opens in one direction - downwards. So, if the wolf steps on it, it will fall through. However, the wolf will not be able to open the door from the inside. I’m trying to lure the wolf here and get it to step on the door.”
Crivsola got very excited - maybe the human body also had such a door. That door would allow food to enter but not to exit when doing a headstand. It obviously malfunctions when you have too much Nsujala.
So, to both her existing models, she added a door near the bottom of the neck.
In the next part, Crivsola will try to figure out what happens to the food when it enters. Currently, there is no way for the food to escape, so she needs to figure out how that happens.