The Beat of Life

Reinhard Friedl

Description

An accessible, informative read about the latest research in cardiology, written by an eminent heart surgeon. Will benefit from the current trend in popular science books about the human body.

Sujets

• Médecine
• Spécialités médicales
• Santé et bien-être
• Santé du quotidien
• Life Sciences
• Cardiothoracic
• Diseases
• Medical
• Breath
• Norman Doidge
• Breathing
• Henry Marsh
• The Brain That Changes Itself
• Biology
• Do No Harm
• The Body
• Cardiothoracic surgery
• Gut
• Surgery
• Disease
• Cardiology
• Souffle (film)
• Heart
• 454 Life Sciences
• Bill Bryson
• Chirurgie

Informations

• Publié par: Legend Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800316065
• Langue: English

Extrait

For Josef and Olivia
R EINHARD F RIEDL
For Tex Poole (1926-2020), whose noble heart gave out aged ninety-three
G ERT R EIFARTH

Published by Hero,
an imprint of Legend Times Group
51 Gower Street
London WC1E 6HJ
[e-mail]
www.hero-press.com
Copyright Verlagsgruppe Random House GmBH, M nchen, Germany, 2019
Copyright English translation Gert Reifarth, 2021
Originally published as Der Takt des Lebens. Warum das Herz unser wichtigstes Sinnesorgan ist by Reinhard Friedl, with Shirley Michaela Seul
First published in English in Australia by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Books, in 2021
This edition first published in 2021
This book is intended for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. The experiences of patients described in this book have been fictionalised.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED .
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
9781800316058 (hardback)
9781800316065 (ebook)
Cover design: Ditte L kkegaard
Text design and typesetting by Typography Studio Printing managed by Jellyfish Solutions Ltd
You always hear of people who lost their mind because of love. But there are also many who lost love because of their mind.
J EAN P AUL , novelist
I had explored the mysteries of the brain, and it was time to devote as much academic rigour and hard science to exploring the secrets of the heart.
J AMES R. D OTY , clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford, and the founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education
CONTENTS
Revealing the Heart
The Six-Cylinder Bio-Turbine
Heart on the Table
The Bleeding Heart
One Heart after Another
Chimeras of the Heart
The Colourful Neuroshow
Heart Tone
Wisdom from the Heart
Hearts in Sync
The Heart in the Incubator
What the Heart Can Feel
Danse Macabre
The Heart in the Eyes
Loving
The Lonely Heart
The Big Picture
Heart Consciousness
Heart Encounter
Farewell to the Artificial Heart
Homo cor
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Index
REVEALING THE HEART
Ba-Boom, Ba-Boom, Ba-Boom
Most of the time you don t hear it, but if your heartbeat were suddenly to stop, you d stop too. You live from one beat to the next. In between, death resides. If after one heartbeat there isn t another, the clock of life stands still. It might happen while we re sleeping - or shopping. None of us knows the hour of our death.
Your heartbeat is my profession. Sixty to eighty times per minute, this sound creates life. Most hearts beat calmly and strongly, some in a constant rush. Even if the heart stumbles occasionally, it always tries to go on. I have seen many hearts labouring with their last ounce of strength. The heart knows no weekend, no holiday. On your seventy-fifth birthday, it will have beaten about three billion times. It started its work eight months before your birth, twenty-two days after procreation. The heart is the first organ to develop, long before the brain and the first breath. Nothing works without the heart. It throbs through the years and decades, unnoticed - until something ceases to function. Or until a high-tech scan, by accident, discovers a defect that has not yet been felt.
Afflictions of the heart are always dramatic. A pain in the chest is completely different from a pain in the hip. We perceive everything to do with the heart as an attack on our lives, on our inviolability. Even if later it turns out not to be life-threatening, an aching heart is a cause for concern and often triggers a fear of dying. A headache can also be a harbinger of danger; it can eventually lead to death by stroke or brain haemorrhage. Yet a severe headache worries us less than a light pressure in the chest. Deep inside, human beings sense that the heart is the source of all life.
As a heart surgeon I have held thousands of hearts in my hands. I have operated on premature babies and repaired the heart valves of patients well advanced in years. I have implanted artificial hearts and stitched up knife wounds to the heart. As an organ, the heart has been investigated down to its smallest parts. We seem to know everything about it - and yet we know nothing. Every week there are hundreds of new scientific findings published about this organ that has not changed since Homo sapiens emerged 300,000 years ago. 1 It seems that the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is still correct: The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
Independently, separated by time and space, without knowledge of each other and despite different languages, all human beings draw hearts to express love, both earthly and celestial. Does this point to an inner truth anchored deeply in every human being? Or merely to a desire that we all share unconsciously? All great cultures, from the Stone Age to the present, and all religions and spiritual movements perceived and continue to perceive the heart as a symbol, as the biological centre for love, compassion, joy, courage, strength, truth and wisdom. But in the age of heart transplants and data migration, the magic of the heart seems to have vanished - as if it could not withstand our mechanised world. But maybe those qualities are precisely what we need for a more humane future.
In Saint-Exup ry s The Little Prince , the fox says: One sees clearly only with the heart. Yet so far we have not found eyes on our biological heart, nor sensors for compassion and love, nor a pump discharging courage and strength. However, we all experience these heart qualities as an inner reality that guides our lives. How, then, are these related to our physical, pumping heart? What can science reveal about this other heart and its dimensions of consciousness? And how do these things influence illnesses and therapy?
Aristotle believed the heart rather than the brain was the source of all emotions. Modern neuroscience argues that love originates in the brain. Has it stolen the secrets of love away from the heart? And is our language only a memory - but of what? Or is it just trivial metaphors when we speak of someone becoming close to our heart, of closing off our heart to someone or inviting them into it, of losing or taking heart, of a weight felt on or being taken off our heart, of a broken heart or something that makes our heart stop, of stealing someone s heart or giving ours away, of wearing our heart on our sleeve, which is better than something saddening it or making it sink? What is dear to the heart s heart? Some of these symptoms are indeed taken to a cardiologist - for example when they manifest as cardiac arrhythmia or angina pectoris. Doctor, I feel as if there s a stone weighing on my chest . In the past I took care of these people solely as a surgeon; today I am interested in the whole human being.
Heart surgeons can put hearts to sleep and make them beat - but they usually don t speak with a lot of heart, rather in terms of mechanics: heart-lung machines, ECG, ultrasound or even artificial hearts. And of course they speak with their colleagues - assistant doctors, anaesthetists, cardio technicians, surgical nurses. A heart operation is not an intimate matter. The heart, hidden deeply in the chest and well protected by the ribs, is opened up to the glaring light of high-tech operating theatres under the concentrated gaze of many pairs of eyes. To the heart surgeon, it is first of all a pump they have to repair, the motor of life. In contrast to all other doctors, heart surgeons don t only know this motor s functions through video images and data generated with the help of ultrasound or computed tomography (CT) scans, intracardiac catheters or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Even in this era of high-tech medicine, it makes a big difference to one s understanding of this organ to see it with one s own eyes and touch it with one s own hands - rather than just observe it second-hand via monitors.
As a heart surgeon, I reach deep into the chest and put hand to heart. A heart is not used to such contact. Hearts can react very sensitively to touch. Some get a fright and respond with arrhythmia. Yet even sick hearts are strong, so powerful that their inherent strength astonishes me time and time again. When they lie in my hand it feels as if they are the essence of life, the pure and absolute will to live. For me, every heart is its own being; every heart has its own appearance. I never know what is about to be revealed to me when I cut the skin with a scalpel and open the chest. Some hearts are very lively and muscular, others a little chubby with clearly visible fat. Some betray their long path through life and appear tired and spent. Yet they all have one thing in common: they like nothing more than to beat.
What is it, really, that I am holding in my hand? Merely a pump, or the origin of all human consciousness?
Neuroscience has not yet been able to explain the mystery of how consciousness arises. The prevalent thinking suggests it emerges as a result of biochemical and electrophysiological processes in the central nervous system and the brain. Neuroscientists know the components, their functions and complicated circuitry very well. However, how something intellectual emerges out of the organic matter of our bodies, how a thought or an emotion is formed - this remains largely unknown. According to famous neurosurgeon Eben Alexander and other brain researchers, the emergence of consciousness is a blank spot on the map of neuroscience. 2 What if the heart could fill in at least part of this unknown territory?
Shut down
I remember when I saw a heart for the first time as a young doctor. It reminded me of a tender, freshly peeled fruit. I looked at the orange-sized organ with awe. Pumping muscles, partly covered