You are trapped. Miles deep inside a cave, you have no wristwatch. How can you keep time?
Counting. You get bored. You lose count. Thud. Thud. A certain pump inside your chest, however, does not. And unlike most muscle types, this pump is not enslaved to the brain, aside medullar and hormonal modification.
Arrhythmia kills the most people in this country. Broken down, this word separates into “a” “rhythm” “mia”, respectively meaning "no", "beat", "heart". The heart is not synchronous with a beat.
It often takes losing something to fully appreciate it. With skyrocketing incidence of heart disease, it allows those of us fortunate and healthy to appreciate our hearts that currently palpitate without fail. Considering the enormous amount of statistical variance in the body, operational persistance is a feat of creation.
If you missed a beat in a musical performance, at least you wouldn't bite the dust.
How do we measure our progress through time? Time is recorded by measuring reticular pace. Centripetal motion. Pendulums (see Part I ) Tick. Tock. A natural rhythm gives us a sense of pace, which forms our conception of time. Biological rythyms govern our survival. While this series will culminate next with what this means for consciousness, we must first explore the most crucial and audible tempo created by a pacemaker that ticks off each moment to our inevitable appointment with death. A very elegant design.
Where is this pacemaker that plots your fate? If your heart were a mansion that anyone could walk into, the first room would be an atrium inhabited by a funny and electric musician.
While the mansion's rubbery walls reverberate his jazzy beats, allowing for something called the Frank-Starling mechanism , this man sets the true beat of the place. Personifying the sinoatrial node, a very unique group of specialized neurons that are organized in a manner to coordinate enough spark to have your heart beat 110 beats a minute, he constitutes the beat of life. Strip away all music from every song and what is it that we truly dance to?
Neurons demonstrate best. They synapse to the beat.
Come back for part three as we make our way into your brain and explain your consciousness.
You may just understand the neuronal dance that will save a loved one from death.
(Find Part I here )
