What's up? Your head is on top of your body, right? I mean, of course it is. It's on top of your neck and that's above everything else.
Hmm. But what about now? I'm Patrick Kelly and today we're learning how to describe where things are on the body.
We call these directional terms. And if you watched my last video about naming the regions of the body, you know what they're called, but now we have to talk about where they are and how to get to them. And to give accurate directions, anatomists need a consistent map to base them off of. That's why we use the anatomic position, a standardized position that we picture in our heads whenever we're using these directional terms.
Here, stand up and do this with me. It's standing up straight, feet flat on the floor, looking forward, arms by your side, and palms facing forward. This will be forever and always your reference point for talking directional terms. Now, this body thing is three-dimensional, so we're gonna need some axes and planes to work with. And you can think of these like lines that slice people in half.
Hypoth- like imaginary. They're imaginary lines. First up is the transverse plane, which cuts people into a top half and a bottom half at the waist.
And let me just blow your mind with some magic, it cuts people into a half that looks like a T and one that looks like an upside down V for transverse. The frontal plane just divides the body into a front half and a back half. Not nearly as mind-blowing, but it is easier to remember. Finally, the sagittal plane divides the body into a left half and a right half.
It's the only way that you can divide a body into two identical halves, so I remember this one by the two identical t's in the name. And because the sagittal plane gives us two equal sides, it also gives us our midline, which helps us establish our first two directional terms. There's medial, which means we're going towards the midline, and lateral, which means we're going away from the midline or out to the side.
If you've seen a lateral in football, it's really similar. It's when the ball gets passed sideways. It's the same thing in directional terminology.
And since you have two equal sides of the body, things can be bilateral, which means that they're on both sides. Now, maybe you're thinking you're all high and mighty because you learned some directional terms. You might even think that you're superior to all others around you who are inferior.
First off, wow, that's incredibly rude! How dare you talk about people like that? But also, those are our next two directional terms. How did you know? Superior means pointing towards your head, while inferior means pointing away from your head.
Now, if I look down or inferiorly, Do you see that? Ah, it's ants! Which is exactly how you're going to remember the term anterior, or referring to the front of the body.
And on the flip side is the posterior, or the back half of the body. And excuse me, would you please stop staring? Gosh, you're so superficial!
Luckily, superficial is the directional term for shallow, or towards the skin. And on the other side, you could be going deep, away from the skin. Now, the limbs get their own terms because they're all over the place.
If you take your arm out and look at your fingers, they're so far away. They're so distant. Which is exactly how you're going to remember that directional term.
Anything away from that joint is going to be distal. But if you look at your shoulder, it's in way closer proximity, which is how you're going to remember that directional term, proximal. And you can say the same thing for your leg. Your hip is proximal to your knee, but your toes are distal to your shin. Speaking of your toes, that whole foot thing doesn't really have an easy shape.
So we call the bottom of your foot the plantar side, and the top part of your foot the dorsal side. which is the side that you tie your shoelaces on. And you'll probably tie those shoelaces with your hand, which have a palmar side and a dorsal side as well. Now that you know the basics, you get to have some fun with them.
You can start using them to give directions all around the body, like... I can never reach my posterior thoracic. Can you scratch that for me? Or you can use a combination of directional terms. Yeah, that's good.
Just like a little more superior laterally. And really, you never know exactly when you're going to use them, but you do know for sure that you are going to use these every day in your study of anatomy. And if you need a refresher on the regions of the body now that you are a directional terms pro, you can go ahead and check out this video right here.
And if this video helps you out, move those phalanges superiorly and hit that subscribe button. So until next time, have fun, be good. Thanks for watching.