Salon | Newsreal: The heart of the matter

T A B L E+T A L K
Is adultery so bad? Should it be a crime? Join the quarrels in Social Issues

A L S O +T O D A Y
If gays are no good, then neither is their money
By Daniel Reitz

D A I L Y+Q U O T E
I want my $35,000 Biedermeier, and I want it now!

R E C E N T L Y
It's the leaks, stupid!
By Joe Conason
The unholy alliance between Kenneth Starr's office and the media
(02/12/98)
Blowback
By Jonathan Broder
Are journalists now fair game in the sex scandal wars?
(02/12/98)
The Reich stuff?
By Andrew Ross
President Clinton's former Labor secretary thinks his old boss is off course -- but not in the way Kenneth Starr thinks
(02/11/98)
The horny dilemma
By Fred Branfman
Former Gary Hart aide speaks up for sexually satisfied presidents
(02/10/98)
Germ war games
By Jeff Stein
If the U.S, finds itself back in the desert against Iraq, get out your gas masks
(02/09/98)
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The heart of the matter
WHAT LOVE HAS JOINED, NO MAN, NOT EVEN A SCIENTIST, CAN REND ASUNDER.
BY GEOFF SHANDLER
Once there was a time when the heart meant everything. It was the engine that kept us alive, the emotional seat of the soul, the repository for, and projector of, everything and anything to do with love. But we all know now that the brain is where the real action -- and feeling -- is, while the heart is just a four-chambered muscle, a relatively straightforward pair of pumps contracting in sequence to push deoxygenated blood into the lungs and oxygenated blood out into the rest of the body.
Despite this scientific certitude, we have yet to figure out how to make an artificial heart that works a fraction as well as the one we're born with. (The most successful artificial heart -- the Jarvik 7 implanted in Barney Clark in 1982 -- only kept its recipient alive for a few months.) And even though we've known for quite a while exactly what our blood is made up of, researchers are still struggling to discover a truly workable blood substitute.
All of this may be discouraging to researchers and to those who suffer from heart ailments, but it also may, somewhat perversely, be rather encouraging to the poetically inclined. For them, and for all of us, it may not be too late to claim that love and the heart have more in common than our brains might like us to think.
Take, for example, the recent work of cardiologist Ary Goldberger of Harvard and Boston University physicist Chung-Kang Peng. Studying healthy volunteers and those suffering from advanced heart disease, they discovered that the time interval between heartbeats fluctuates dramatically, even when a body is at rest. Healthy hearts seem to have a built-in mechanism that keeps the fluctuations within a certain range; if the last 300 beats were slightly faster than normal, the heart beats slightly slower than normal for the next 300. Goldberger and Peng called these fluctuations "long-range anti-correlations."
Heart disease, Goldberger and Peng discovered, weakens the heart's "memory" -- it "forgets" to compensate, and can settle into a lengthy run of beats far from the norm. Imagine crossing a river on the curved surface of a fallen tree. You can zig and zag from side to side and remain balanced, but get stuck favoring only one side of the curve and you are much more likely to end up wet. The unhealthy heart zigs, it seems, more than it zags.
Also quite revealing was a paper published in Nature two months ago that claimed that changes in interval fluctuations were not random but operating according to the deterministic logic of chaos theory. Chaos differs from randomness in that, while long-term outcomes and heartbeat patterns are unpredictable, the timing of each individual beat is influenced to some extent by the timing of the last few.
What researchers Chi-Sang Poon and Christopher Merrill of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology discovered is that heart disease actually makes the beats less "chaotic," meaning that disease is not a slippage into disorder but, almost paradoxically, a trend toward order and regularity. Like a tennis player waiting for a serve, the heart is better off wobbling on its toes than standing pat, albeit flat-footed.
What consolation to all of those who have described their love life as "utter chaos" to know that they might have been scientifically accurate! Love is a classically chaotic system with its ups and downs, its fast beats and slow, its short-term predictability and long-term mystery. It reveals signs of mathematical complexity in the unintended consequences small actions can have.

N E X T+P A G E+| On never forgetting

T A B L E+T A L K Is adultery so bad? Should it be a crime? Join the quarrels in Social Issues A L S O +T O D A Y If gays are no good, then neither is their money By Daniel Reitz D A I L Y+Q U O T E I want my $35,000 Biedermeier, and I want it now! R E C E N T L Y It's the leaks, stupid! By Joe Conason The unholy alliance between Kenneth Starr's office and the media (02/12/98) Blowback By Jonathan Broder Are journalists now fair game in the sex scandal wars? (02/12/98) The Reich stuff? By Andrew Ross President Clinton's former Labor secretary thinks his old boss is off course -- but not in the way Kenneth Starr thinks (02/11/98) The horny dilemma By Fred Branfman Former Gary Hart aide speaks up for sexually satisfied presidents (02/10/98) Germ war games By Jeff Stein If the U.S, finds itself back in the desert against Iraq, get out your gas masks (02/09/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		The heart of the matter WHAT LOVE HAS JOINED, NO MAN, NOT EVEN A SCIENTIST, CAN REND ASUNDER. BY GEOFF SHANDLER Once there was a time when the heart meant everything. It was the engine that kept us alive, the emotional seat of the soul, the repository for, and projector of, everything and anything to do with love. But we all know now that the brain is where the real action -- and feeling -- is, while the heart is just a four-chambered muscle, a relatively straightforward pair of pumps contracting in sequence to push deoxygenated blood into the lungs and oxygenated blood out into the rest of the body. Despite this scientific certitude, we have yet to figure out how to make an artificial heart that works a fraction as well as the one we're born with. (The most successful artificial heart -- the Jarvik 7 implanted in Barney Clark in 1982 -- only kept its recipient alive for a few months.) And even though we've known for quite a while exactly what our blood is made up of, researchers are still struggling to discover a truly workable blood substitute. All of this may be discouraging to researchers and to those who suffer from heart ailments, but it also may, somewhat perversely, be rather encouraging to the poetically inclined. For them, and for all of us, it may not be too late to claim that love and the heart have more in common than our brains might like us to think. Take, for example, the recent work of cardiologist Ary Goldberger of Harvard and Boston University physicist Chung-Kang Peng. Studying healthy volunteers and those suffering from advanced heart disease, they discovered that the time interval between heartbeats fluctuates dramatically, even when a body is at rest. Healthy hearts seem to have a built-in mechanism that keeps the fluctuations within a certain range; if the last 300 beats were slightly faster than normal, the heart beats slightly slower than normal for the next 300. Goldberger and Peng called these fluctuations "long-range anti-correlations." Heart disease, Goldberger and Peng discovered, weakens the heart's "memory" -- it "forgets" to compensate, and can settle into a lengthy run of beats far from the norm. Imagine crossing a river on the curved surface of a fallen tree. You can zig and zag from side to side and remain balanced, but get stuck favoring only one side of the curve and you are much more likely to end up wet. The unhealthy heart zigs, it seems, more than it zags. Also quite revealing was a paper published in Nature two months ago that claimed that changes in interval fluctuations were not random but operating according to the deterministic logic of chaos theory. Chaos differs from randomness in that, while long-term outcomes and heartbeat patterns are unpredictable, the timing of each individual beat is influenced to some extent by the timing of the last few. What researchers Chi-Sang Poon and Christopher Merrill of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology discovered is that heart disease actually makes the beats less "chaotic," meaning that disease is not a slippage into disorder but, almost paradoxically, a trend toward order and regularity. Like a tennis player waiting for a serve, the heart is better off wobbling on its toes than standing pat, albeit flat-footed. What consolation to all of those who have described their love life as "utter chaos" to know that they might have been scientifically accurate! Love is a classically chaotic system with its ups and downs, its fast beats and slow, its short-term predictability and long-term mystery. It reveals signs of mathematical complexity in the unintended consequences small actions can have. N E X T+P A G E+\| On never forgetting