Did you know that when a choir sings, all of its members synchronize their heartbeats? Here are 24 interesting facts about the heart that will make you take a different look at this most important human organ. The heart is the engine of a person with many super powers.
Every day, the heart generates enough energy to drive a truck as much as 40 kilometers.
For a lifetime, the equivalent of energy allows you to get to the moon and back.
The heart pumps blood to nearly all of the 75 trillion cells in the body.
Only the corneas of the eyes do without a blood supply — until recently, even scientists did not suspect this interesting fact.
The heart does a much greater amount of work than any other muscle.
Over an average life span, the heart will pump nearly 1.5 million barrels of blood — enough to fill 200 train tanks.
The first cell of the heart begins to beat after 4 weeks.
The blue whale has the largest heart, weighing over 680 kilograms.
The more educated a person is, the less likely they are to get heart disease.
Regardless, heart disease is still the biggest threat to your health.
Heart disease has even been found in mummies as young as 300 years old.
Happiness, lack of stress, exercise and a healthy diet keep your heart healthy.
The number of heart attacks peaks on New Year’s Eve, and also in summer, during a period of intense heat.
The highest chance of a heart attack occurs on Monday morning.
The first pacemakers had to be plugged into an outlet.
Because the heart has its own electrical impulse, it can continue to beat even when separated from the body, as long as it has the necessary supply of oxygen.
In 1929, German surgeon Werner Forssmann examined the inside of his heart by inserting a catheter into a vein in his arm. This was the first cardiac catheterization and is now a common procedure.
On December 3, 1967, Dr. Christian Barnard of South Africa transplanted a human heart into the body of Louis Vashansky. Although the patient lived only 18 days afterwards, this is considered the first successful heart transplant.
Take a tennis ball and squeeze it as tightly as possible: this demonstrates the effort of the heart in order to pump blood.
An interesting fact is that a woman’s heart beats faster than a man’s.
As stated earlier, happiness does lead to heart health, as does laughter. Laughter can speed up the flow of blood through your veins by 20%, as it relaxes the walls of blood vessels.
No one is exactly sure why the heart is historically associated with love (many ancient civilizations associated it with emotions), but some historians attribute it to the Greeks.
The idea of a broken heart actually carries some weight. After overcoming an emotionally traumatic state, your body releases stress hormones into the bloodstream, which can temporarily “shock” the heart and even mimic the symptoms of a heart attack.
A recent study by Swedish researchers showed that when a choir sings, the heart rhythms of all participants are synchronized.
