Love Thy Heart! ​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​

Sunila Kelkar explores what keeps your heart beating and why every heart beat matters!

- Sunila Kelkar

COVER STORY

Sunila Kelkar explores what keeps your heart beating and why every heart beat matters!

Did you know?

The human heart is the size of a large, closed fist.

The human heart beats about 60 to 80 times per minute, about 1,00,000 times a day and around 3 billion beats in a lifetime.

A healthy heart pumps around 5.7 litres of blood in a day.

The heart is situated in the centre of the chest and points slightly towards left.

The name of the Bollywood movie ' Dil Dhadakne Do' (if taken literally) seems to suggest that the ability of the human heart to beat is a conscious and voluntary decision. We are able to relax our heart beats through slow and deep breathing (mediation) and spike them through high intensity exercise or due to an increase in adrenalin which is basically our fight or flight mode. The universal truth, however, remains that rather like breathing from our first breath to our last, the thoroughly critical ability of the beating of our heart remains involuntary.

Anatomy

According to Henry Grey's book 'Anatomy of the Human Body', the human heart weighs between 280 to 340 grams in men and 230 to 280 grams in women. The human heart has four chambers - the two upper chambers called atria and the two lower chambers are called ventricles.

The right atrium and the right ventricle (together called the right heart) and the left atrium and the left ventricle (together called the left heart) are separated by a thin muscular membrane called septum. The right atrium is larger than the left atrium. But the left atrium has thicker walls.