It is hailed as the source of love and revered as the temple of emotion, but how many of these amazing facts do you know about the heart? Read on to find out!
1. The heart is the first functional organ you developed.
It started to beat and pump blood at about three weeks into embryogenesis, and not to mention, has been going on non-stop ever since (knock wood). Perhaps time to take a moment, hand-on-heart, to say a quiet thanks?
2. Just like the right brain and left brain, you have a right heart and a left heart.
As you may have learned in school, the heart has four chambers, two atria, which are above and serve as the collecting chambers, and two ventricles which are below, and serve as the discharging chambers. The right atrium and the right ventricle together are sometimes referred to as the right heart, and the left atrium along with the left ventricle is referred to as the left heart.
3. The heart runs on electricity.
Don’t be shocked; this is merely to say that it is stimulated to beat by a set of electrical impulses that are generated in the top-left corner of the heart called the sino-atrial node.
4. Your lungs are not of the same size due to the heart.
Since the heart is between the lungs, your left lung is smaller than your right lung and has a cardiac notch to accommodate the heart.
5. Athletes are ‘large-hearted’ people!
It has been established that well-trained athletes can have larger hearts in proportion, due to the effects of exercise on the heart muscle, just like muscles in the rest of the body strengthen and grow because of exercise.
6. There’s very little symmetric about the heart.
Consider this. The heart is slightly offset to the left (although it can be offset to the right too in rare cases). The left ventricle is much thicker as compared with the right, due to the greater force needed to pump blood to the entire body. The right side of the heart has a tricuspid valve, while the left side has a bicuspid valve.
7. The beating sound of your heart is caused by the valves of the heart opening and closing.
A classic open-and-shut case then, which can only be heard from very close quarters.
