Humans are unique among all forms of life on planet Earth; we are the only creatures to be born with a human heart. Many other species have tried. Chimpanzees and pigs can only manage a close proxy. Some blue whales succeed, but only briefly. They die almost immediately because a human heart is way too small for one of those big dudes. Most blue whales born with a human heart live only long enough to think “Aw sweet, a human heart. I’m gonna swim around here and….oof…I’m a little dizzy…..uh-oh,” and then they die.
We have understood the heart to be important since time immemorial. Many ancient cultures believed the heart to be the seat of a person’s intellect or will. This is interesting. In modern times, with our modern-ass scientific gizmos, we know that thoughts and emotions are chiefly the domain of the brain. We understand that cognitive experience happens in the head. In fact, when I am deep in thought, I will say I’m “in my own head”. Or when I am facing a stressful situation, I develop a headache. I wonder how much of that sensation is innate, and how much of it is because of my cultural schema. Somebody told me it happens in my brain, so that’s how I experience it. But what if I had been raised to believe that my “self” came from my heart? If I had been born three-thousand years ago, would my chest feel like it was buzzing while working out a problem? Would I get chest pains from a shitty day at work?
That way of conceptualizing one’s true “self” through the heart still dominates culture today, even though we don’t really think it’s totally-for-real-true. It’s more a metaphor. As evidence, I will point you toward literally any facet of culture. If you love someone, you give them your heart. If they reject you, your heart is broken. If someone is kind and generous, they have a big heart. If someone is evil, they are heartless. If someone is a sniveling, petty, needlessly-combative shrew made of shit, they are my landlord.
And just look through song or movie or book titles to get an idea of how much significance we give the heart. “Hearts in Atlantis”, “Heart of Glass”, “Heart Cooks Brain”, “Heart of Darkness”, “Heartless”, “Heartbreak Hotel”, “Heart of Stone”, “My Heart Will Go On”, etc. etc. etc. The band Heart.
It has become a cultural symbol of intention. To send someone a ❤️ is shorthand for love, support, compassion. It represents the seat of emotion rather than the seat of the intellect now.
I mean after all, the heart’s real function is utilitarian. It pumps blood around your body. Keeps the oxygen moving to where it is needed and keeps the carbon dioxide moving out of you. Moves nutrients and hormones and all kinds of juices around. It’s completely different than the real mastermind, the ol’ brain.
Or is it?
Scientists have discovered that a cluster of neurons hang out near the top of the heart. Using badass Alienware microscopy, we found out that a tiny brain is helping to regulate the activity of our principal subject here. Nervous system cells are scattered all over your body, but these ones sitting atop the heart are basically identical to the ones inside of your skull. Your ticker gets it’s own little thinker called an “intrinsic cardiac nervous system”. Heart gets brain, brain regulates heart, man brings back dinosaurs.
For a long time, if your heart was damaged in battle, you were dead. If a fellow caveman drove a particularly sharp rock into your hairy chest, it was game over. Same for if a rapier found home in your cardiac rhythm machine, or if a musketball burrowed into your aorta while you were standing next to Napoleon. The heart was too quintessential and mysterious to be subject to human attempts to repair it. As the physical phylactery for your soul, it was beyond our capabilities. We could amputate your leg or stint your arm. If shrapnel found it’s way into your heart, well, goodbye.
Until World War One. The Great War, as it was called then, because it was so fun and awesome. In WW1, some guys were like “Nah man, fuck that shit. I can totally do surgery on the heart.” George Grey Turner was a British doctor. He received a patient who had been shot right in the heart with a machine gun round. He used a brand-new technology called an X-Ray to look at the patient’s chest, and he could see a bullet inside of the patient’s heart, moving with every beat. Figuring “Well, if we go by the book, he’s already dead,” Turner cut him open and reached in and grabbed the dude’s heart. He palpated around, hoping to extract the bullet. He never did, but he dislodged it enough to heal his patient’s hit points, and the man survived. I like this story because World War One is such a fuckup. There was no legitimate motivation for either side, but we had all this new technology that we just had to try out for the purposes of killing people. Planes! Tanks! Chemical Weapons! All kinds of ways for the industrial revolution to kill people! But there was also some dude who was like “Hey maybe some cool cutting-edge tech could be used for Life.” And it was to salvage a man’s heart. Other doctors had done work on the heart before. Not in the same way but also progressing the thought. Daniel Hale Williams was a noteworthy one. We slowly learned that it wasn’t sacrosanct and beyond reproach. We could heal it.
Werner Forssmann was a German, as if you couldn’t tell by the name, who did heart surgery on himself. Again, there was a superstition that too much intrusion into the heart itself would be fatal. So he decided to test his own hypothesis about putting a catheter up in there. He duped a nurse into assisting him to cut open his own chest and to insert a needle to better take an x-ray of his heart. The man touched his own heart with his fingers. Aware and under only local anesthesia. He was reckless and stupid, but it proved that such a thing was possible. He later became a Nazi, but um…I mean. Nobody is saying he was smart in that way. I certainly am not. Ugh, okay.
What is the dang heart? We may never know for sure. Metronome of the soul? Perhaps. Thick knot of muscle, squeezing carbohydrates around my body? Perhaps. A delicious nugget of muscle in an otherwise offal bucket of livers and gizzards? The world may never know.
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