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In Episode One of the TV Series, David Suzuki travels to Harvard University, to meet with Dr. Ary Goldberger - a heart researcher who has found a way to turn heartbeats into music and then use this music as an aid to diagnosing the person's heart. |
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Ary Goldberger on why a new tool for diagnosing heart disease is necessary: "When people listen to a healthy heart, what they hear is something that sounds quite regular, it's either the lub-dub, lub-dub, or they are looking at a cardiac monitor that's showing something that seems to be ticking off impulses much like a clock. But in fact, when you make the precise measurements and look at the way the heartbeat is actually changing in a very subtle way, what you see is this extraordinarily complex variability that is totally surprising, I think is very non-intuitive. The normal heartbeat although it feels regular and we don't have a sense of what people call palpitations or irregular heartbeats normally, but the normal heartbeat has this very complex, subtle syncopation. It's a very jazzy rhythm that's going on. We sense that as being regular but that's actually a misperception." |
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Dr. Goldberger on why being unpredictable is good for your health: "If you get fixed into a constant response, if you settle down to a steady state, that's where you are and it's much harder to respond to something which may come at a very different angle or at a different speed, in the case of the athlete. So the organism is constantly being challenged, and that, we think, may be part of the advantage of this type of complex physiology." |
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Ary Golderger on why routine is not such a good thing when it comes to your heart: "When our physiology is the most complex and has this turbulent-like, jazzed up type of dynamic, we feel good. When things become excessively routinized, too periodic, too predictable, then that's where one sees various pathologies in many cases. So overly predictable behaviour is usually a bad thing. It's bad in psychiatry where people perseverate or have automatic behaviours; it's bad when you look at the brain waves during seizures; it's bad in a heart, dying hearts often show kind of a sine wave or the same pattern that repeats itself again and again. So excessive periodicity turns out paradoxically to be one manifestation of a wide range of pathologies." Ary Goldberger on what can be learned from listening to the heart as music: "Well, the essence of healthy function is adaptability, the ability to cope with an environment that's going to play tricks on you. It's like if you, you know, if you're an athlete, if you're a baseball player, you don't know what pitch you're going to see. So it's the unpredictability in the environment that tests the organism constantly. And what you don't want physiologically is to be tied down to some predictable response because the most likely event is that the environment will throw you a curve ball or throw you a change of pace. You don't know what's going to happen next. So having this sort of bubbly type of turbulent-like dynamic which has all these different frequencies, all these different responses built in, gives you an advantage. It means that you can recruit any given instant, or over any given time scale, an appropriate response, and then you can go on and take the next challenge. So it prevents what we refer to as mode locking." |
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