Day 12 | 12 Body Parts of Christmas
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Download the Redfin app and start searching today. Time has come. The time has come, the war has said, to talk of many things.

Of shoes and ships and ceiling wax. Of cabbages and kings. I don't know if that's actually, I'm doing that from memory, from when I read Alice in Wonderland. I am the walrus. Oh, here we go. So, we're on day 12. This is the last day. Last day of Christmas. Congratulations, we made it. We made it 12 days of Christmas. We're on day 12. I'm looking forward to seeing my family again. We get to sing the entire song. Are you ready?

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me twelve cranial nerves, eleven body systems, ten functions of the liver, nine abdominal regions, eight B vitamins, seven cervical vertebrae, six extraocular muscles, five layers of skin, four heart chambers, three middle ear bones, two carotid arteries, and a spleen with a healthy body.

Wow. We did it. We did it, Matt. 12 cranial nerves. Wow, wow, wow. Now, I don't think anyone wants to hear this, but let's just say that we're not going to go through all 12 cranial nerves. I mean, we will, but not in detail. But we're talking about Christmas Bell's palsy. We're talking about... I like that. Good playing words. ...getting something called Bell's palsy. I remember, so I did my PhD with, I'm going to change his name...

Justin Bieber got that, right? Oh, yeah, he did too. Anyway, I'm going to change this guy's name to Paul. And one day we walked into the labs while we were doing our PhD and Paul, one side of his face, this was 13, 14, no, 15,

This was 15 years ago. Thought he had a stroke. Yeah, yeah. He woke up with Bell's palsy. So one side of his face, he had a drooping eyelid on one side and his mouth was drooping on one side. He had difficulty when he was blinking. He couldn't really close that eye fully, but he also couldn't really open the eye fully. A little bit of a headache, a little bit of pain, not much in his jaw and ear. His taste had changed dramatically.

And obviously because of the... Was the sound louder? Yes. Well, yes. The sound, he couldn't sort of...

innately reduce the loudness on that side. And that goes to the ossicles, actually, one of the muscles that dampen the stapes. The third day of Christmas. And eating and drinking was difficult, obviously, because of the paralysis. Oh, yeah. So he had a temporary facial nerve paralysis. Falsy. Falsy, yes. That's why you call him Paul.

There you go. Very good, mate. You're so good at putting things together. So if we think about the cranial nerves, there are 12 pairs of cranial nerves and you can use the mnemonic O-O-O to touch and feel very good velvet, our heaven. Right. Okay. Which is, okay, do you want to go O-O-O? What's the first one? Olfactory. Yep. Optic. Yep. Oculomotor. Okay. To touch. Trochlear trigeminal. Yep. Very good velvet. Yep.

No, sorry, to touch and feel. Okay, I was going to say. Abducens facial. Yep. Very good velvet. Vestibular cochlear. Good. Glossopharyngeal. Vagus. Yep. Ah, heaven. Accessory.

Half glossal. Perfect. You can also use another mnemonic that helps tell you whether it's a sensory nerve, meaning picking up information about... Sensations. Sight, smell, taste, touch, whatever, stimuli, or whether it's motor. Movement. So it's making something. Okay, jeez. Movement or... Let's get this done and get out of this studio. Or releasing. This is the last one, so we need to save the moment. Or releasing something. So you can say, some say marry money...

But my brother says big brains matter most. So that's obviously S, M's or B's. If it's S, it's sensory. If it's M for motor, if it's B, it's both sensory and motor. So some say, so olfactory. Sensory. And optic. Sensory. And oculomotor. Some say marry. That's motor. So the third one's motor. So I'm not going to go through all of them. But anyway. Right. Right.

But M is mixed. M is mixed. Both. Both sensory motor. So, for example, if we've got olfactory, that gives us our sense of smell. Can you put these 12 in context to your Christmas dinner? Okay. I'm at a Christmas dinner with the Todorovic family. Food's great. Company, not so great. And I smell a delicious Christmas ham. Okay. That's olfactory nerve. Number one. Right?

I see the family that I didn't choose around me. Optic. That's the optic. I continue to move my eyes to witness all these family members I didn't invite. So that's oculomotor, but it's also going to be abducens and trochlea. That's right. So that's three, four, and six. As I'm sitting there, because I'm exhausted, I rub my face in exhaustion. But you're also chewing.

Yeah, but I was going to do both sensory and motor. Okay. So I rub my face in exhaustion and the feeling of my hands on my face is the sensory component of the trigeminal nerve. But I'm also chewing that delicious food, which is also the motor component of the trigeminal nerve.

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Download the Redfin app and start searching today. Then we've got, I'm going to skip facial, but that's seven. So we're going to focus on today. Exactly. So we did abducens, that's six. So we're going to skip facial, which is seven. And we're going to go to eight, which is vestibular cochlea. I'm hearing the loud yelling. We did that with ossicles. We did the joyous noise. And not falling off your chair. And not falling off my chair.

Then we go from eight to nine and nine is glossopharyngeal. So this is I swallow the food and it's going down my throat. That's the motor aspect. But also the sensory is tasting that food on the back of my tongue. A little bit. Yeah, one third. But also the carotid sinuses is nine as well.

Oh, yeah, that's right, to pick up the baroreceptor, the pressure, which was topic, which was day two. Day two. Day two. It was carotid arteries. Yes, yes, you're right. Then we got 10, 10th cranial nerve, vagus nerve. That's going to do a lot. Yeah, so basically sensation of the heart, lungs, airways, throat, gastrointestinal tract, ear, but also motor of the heart, lungs, lungs.

gastrointestinal tract and so forth. And then we've got the 11th cranial nerve, which is the accessory. And this is going to give us our shoulder sort of shrugging. It's like, I don't know what to do with this family. That's the shoulder shrugging I get. And then hyperglossal is moving the bolus of food, delicious bolus of food in my mouth. Now let's go back to facial because I've got facial palsy. I've woken up Christmas day and I've got this drooping side of my face. And what has happened is that the facial nerve is both sensory and motor. And

And so the sensory component, what would you say the sensory component of the facial nerve would be? Taste, anterior two-thirds. That's right. So my taste has changed...

motor-wise, pretty much any facial expression that you can show, whether it's joy to see your kids at the dinner table or whether it's a grimace seeing your parents arguing, this is facial nerve. And because you've got two of these nerves, one either side of the brainstem shooting out,

It's only generally affecting one and you get paralysis of the face, so the drooping of the eye and so forth. Now, the question might be what has caused this facial nerve paralysis? We wrote an article on that. Remember that? Oh, we did write it. That case study that the person got herpes. That was glossopharyngeal. Oh, it was also facial. But wasn't it an isolated glossopharyngeal? That was the point. Was it? The whole paper was isolated glossopharyngeal varicella zoster shingles. Yeah, yeah. Was it? Yeah.

I thought there was a bit of... Anyway, I retract that. Well, don't retract the paper. No.

I don't think it's ever been cited. Anyway, what causes this? Well, we don't really know, but we do know that it's anything that can really cause inflammation, swelling or compression of the facial nerve to a degree that it paralyzes it temporarily. So this could be viral. Yeah, so what can happen is the nerve becomes infected with something and it becomes swollen and there is a location for the facial nerve. It goes through a

Yeah. And it can crush itself in there. Yeah, yeah. And then that can cause an injury which then paralysis, causes paralysis and then has to regenerate. And so the types of viruses like herpes, varicella zoster, which is the one that gives you chicken pox and shingles. Shingles, yeah.

Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, even influenza, like a whole bunch of viruses could do it. Autoimmune conditions can do it. Trauma, whether it be mechanical or whether it's a stroke, so no more blood supply to that nerve. Or it could just be idiopathic. Or a tumor. Or a tumor, yep. Or it could be idiopathic, meaning we don't know. So during this Christmas meal, and I get this facial nerve paralysis. Wow, it's very immediate. It's going to...

Yeah, straight away because my whole body was inflamed with anger. I don't know. But anyway, it generally doesn't last a huge amount of time. It can last months. Yeah.

I would say that predominantly it is reversible. It's short-lasting. I think for my friend Paul, it lasted maybe a month or so before it started to get better. But still, it can be quite limiting in what you can do. And that's where I think we spoke about before, you could develop a condition called crocodile tears. Ah, where you start to just lacrimate. Yes, because the facial nerve is in relation. Facial nerve.

It comes from a salivatory nucleus in your brainstem which controls salivation and lacrimation. Yeah. And the nerves that regenerate, they can go down the wrong path. And so when you eat, you now cry. There you go. Beautiful. I think that's a great way of ending this 12th day of Christmas. Matthew, thank you so much. I think we should finish by singing the song again. No, I don't think. A three, a two. Are we doing this together? Together, the whole thing.

On the 12th day of Christmas, my true love gave to me 12 cranial nerves, 11 body systems, 10 functions of the liver, 9 abdominal regions, 8 B vitamins, 7 cervical vertebrae, 6 extra ocular muscles, 5 layers of the skin, 4 heart chambers, 3 middle ear bones, 2 carotid arteries, and a spleen in a healthy body. Thank you, everyone.

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