YOU NEVER THINK about the weight of your organs inside you. Your heart is a half-pound clapper hanging off the end of your aorta. Your arms burden your shoulders like buckets on a yoke. The colon uses the uterus as a beanbag chair. Even the weight of your hair imparts a sensation on your scalp. In weightlessness, all this disappears. You organs float inside your torso.* The result is a subtle physical euphoria, an indescribable sense of being freed from something you did not realize was there.
In Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void," she explores the concept of weight and the unnoticed burden of our internal organs. The author illustrates how our body parts, from the heart to the hair, exert weights and pressures that we often overlook. This culminates in a realization of how the body's composition can impose a constant sensation of heaviness.
When one experiences weightlessness, such...
