I’m Shrinking
Do you remember that scene from the 1957 classic, but somewhat cheesy movie The Incredible Shrinking Man when he starts to shrink so much due to exposure to radiation and insecticide that he literally shrinks away into oblivion? As he does so you hear him say in a smaller and smaller voice, “Help! I’m shrinking…I’m shrinking…” Well, it turns out that this is where science fiction meets reality. News flash! We are all shrinking. As I have started to do my light research on the topic, I am finding all the rationalizations for our shrinkage. To begin with and to keep this as prurient as possible, shrinkage is somewhat normal when it comes to male genitalia when exposed to any combination of cold and/or fear. It is a primordial reaction and it is all about protecting the family jewels as they say. The production of reproductive hormones in the gonads makes the body want to protect this all-important biological function, so when exposed to extreme cold, such as a plunge into an icy lake, there is an almost immediate retraction into the warmth of the body, from which they were long-ago expelled to create a cooler, more productive environment. Hanging in the breeze is helpful to testicular sperm production, but retraction when bitter cold is thrust upon them is an instinctive reaction. Hence, testicular reaction. What is perhaps not so well known is that fear can cause this same primordial reaction and can cause the penis to also shrink to allow for greater protection of this important proboscis-like delivery system. You’ve seen a dog with his tail between his legs and since we humans have no tails, our bodies do the next best thing and hence…shrinkage.
But the shrinkage that focuses our attention much more as we age is that of our overall stature. The most obvious cause is the gradual wearing away and or general deterioration of the cartilage between our bones, most notably our spines that generally takes out an inch or so of our natural height during our fifties and sixties. We lose about another inch on average when we get to the eighties for the same physiological reason. I might add that this loss of the all-important cushioning between our bones also makes mobility more difficult and causes us to go from a spring in our step to a shuffle in our crawl. Additionally, the normal loss of abdominal musculature, the much discussed core strength we have come to understand is so important to well-being and posture, further causes us to stoop and lose height. Add to this the depletion of calcium and the osteoporosis that makes brittle and shrinks the skeletal structure and you can have lots and lots of shrinkage. And here’s the worst part, we can postpone it through exercise and healthful care in diet and activity, but we cannot stop this inexorable trend. Hence the cry from the little and littler man, “Help! I’m shrinking!”
My research on the subject also lands on the issue of what does not shrink with age and there are actually several parts of the body to which this pertains. The most often referenced issue is that both the nose and the ears get bigger as we age. This is actually correct and it seems to be due to two somewhat related causes. Both the nose and the ears are mostly made up of cartilage, that wasting material that cushions our bones and then wears away with usage to cause us to shrink with age. Well, a unique quality of cartilage is that it’s cells seem to split more prodigiously than normal body cells and as such, in places where it is not being ground down between bones, such as on our faces, it just keeps on growing after the rest of us has stopped growing. There must be some natural limitation to this phenomenon or else the predictions of constantly lengthening lifespans will result in some pretty weird and distorted faces out there.
Do you remember the Woody Allen movie Sleeper? Woody is trying to escape from the cryogenics laboratory and pretends to be Dr. Temkin, who is a cloning expert. He has been brought in to Clone a human being from just a nose. He and Diane Keaton go through a hilarious scene where they are in an operating theater pretending to be experts in croning (er…rather cloning) and they put on a farce of a surgical procedure that includes the famous “checking the cell structure” routine where they dance around until the cell structure has supposedly been checked. It is then that Dr. Temkin tries to steal the nose by putting it under his own surgical mask and then proceeds to escape by threatening to shoot the nose. It is high comedy from one of its masters of the art. But comedy is always best based on truth and ending up with a nose may well be the outcome of human attempts to outlive their natural lifespans. I’m not sure what happened to the ears of that cloning patient but they must have also been hanging around somewhere.
That reminds me that in addition to the special quality of cartilage that causes it to keep growing with age, there is the added feature that cartilage is also known to soften with age, which some suggest is another cause for apparent aggrandizement of the nose and ears of aging people. In some cases the force of gravity alone is enough to cause the sagging cartilage of nose and ears to droop more and more and thus cause them to appear to enlarge. This should be particularly upsetting to us because it is one thing to have one’s nose and ears get bigger. It worked for Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf in Grimm’s Fairy Tales and it can, indeed, be argued that it is all the better to smell and hear you with. But to have these parts droop with age causes me to shift to the Wizard of Oz scene when the Wicked Witches have houses and water thrown on them and they go off-screen with the lament, “I’m melting…” which may even be worse than “I’m shrinking…”
I have failed to reference one other badly part that is prone to change with age, and that is the feet. This is a body part that literally has to bear the burden of the entire rest of the body, all day long, every day. The lowly foot is made of the same stuff as the rest of our body, bone, muscle, flesh and sinew, and while it may be like a Timex watch at keep on ticking even though it takes a licking, it does suffer some consequences. It might seem that cartilaginous diminishment might cause the foot to reduce in size, but in actuality it is the opposite. The length of the foot does not generally increase or decrease with age. Once a size 10 always a size 10. But it does widen with age. This is a combination of both general gravitational forces that literally squash the foot down and out and a physiological breakdown of the delicacy of the natural arch of the foot. I imagine that the arch is somewhat vestigial in that it resulted from our ancestral adjustment from walking on all fours to walking erect. The foot arch may well be the most valuable part of the foot anatomy since it gives a certain stringiness to our step. Notice how the prosthetic limbs are made of bent steep that even further amplify this springiness feature. Well, with age, the spring leaves our step because it leaves our arch and flattens our feet. This results in a widening of the foot. As someone who has worn 3X-wide shoes my whole life, all I can say is, welcome to the club…foot, it sure beats shrinkage.