More Than a Blood Pump: An Experimental Enquiry of the Folk Theory of the Heart (original) (raw)
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The Heart of the Matter: An Exploration of the Persistence of Core Beliefs
2005
Examples of the conceptual metaphor of the heart pervade our culture. More than just a representation of romantic love, the heart metaphor contains the residue of ancient beliefs concerning the seat of cognition and the basis for thought and emotion. This paper explores the hypothesis that the notion of the heart as a meditating organ is more than just a metaphor-it is an instance of how certain core (i.e. of the heart) beliefs persist across time and differing media. This paper briefly summarizes the portrayal of the heart in Western culture and examines the implications of its persistence in contemporary public discourse and media products.
International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 2013
Heartbeats are strongly related to emotions, and people are known to interpret their own heartbeat as emotional information. To explore how people interpret other’s cardiac activity, the authors conducted four experiments. In the first experiment, they aurally presented ten different levels of heart rate to participants and compare emotional intensity ratings. In the second experiment, the authors compare the effects of nine levels of heart rate variability around 0.10 Hz and 0.30 Hz on emotional intensity ratings. In the third experiment, they combined manipulations of heart rate and heart rate variability to compare their effects. Finally, in the fourth experiment, they compare effects of heart rate to effects of angry versus neutral facial expressions, again on emotional intensity ratings. Overall, results show that people relate increases in heart rate to increases in emotional intensity. These effects were similar to effects of the facial expressions. This shows possibilities f...
A cross-cultural analysis of heart metaphors
Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2008
In this article we propose a cognitive model which results of metaphorical expressions gathered from dictionaries and thesauri and their later examination and classification. We begin with basic conceptual operations, such as reification and personification, to arrive at more complex metaphors which constitute the “Idealized Cognitive Model”.
THE SECRETS OF HUMAN HEART, ITS CONDITION AND INFLUENCE ON SPEECH AND ACTIONS
There is a compassion connection between human beings and the heart communicates with other hearts energetically or through interactions of electromagnetic fields. Sense of devotion and deep feelings originate in the heart due to external stimuli and translate into action. It is through this connection that humanity is above most of other organisms. Functionally, the heart serves as a control room for the action and behavior. The inner conscious of mankind is activated through heart. Functionally, the heart serves as a control room and communicates to the brain in four major ways: neurologically, biochemically, biophysically and energetically. Communication along all these conduits significantly affects the brain's activity, and one's behavior. The cause and effect condition of the heart is collectively called as the heart's condition. Quran gives pivotal role to the heart for understanding, feeling, storing secrets and communicating with the brain, influencing speech, and other's hearts. The present research discusses some of these facts extracted from the Glorious Quran and explained in the terminology of modern science for the guidance of scientific community in particular and humanity in general.
Man-Machine Metaphorical Couplings in Electrocardiographic Theory and Practice
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013
Western medical sciences have been under the scrutiny of sociologists and anthropologists for a long time. Social scientists have provided valuable insights into the social aspects which help make some claims more scientific than others while at the same time showing that changing vocabularies could have a major social impact. Researchers like Emily Martin (2001) or Susan Sontag (1978) have focused on the scientific and popular language that is in use when talking and thinking about certain medicalized aspects of the human body such as bodily functions and diseases. By deconstructing the meaning of the words found in medical textbooks, everyday conversations and many other instances they have argued that science is built on strong metaphors which have become so entrenched in present reality that their metaphorical function passes unobserved allowing them to act like cognitive scripts with a great influence on what individual human beings experience when confronted with embodiment (Csordas, 1999). The paper is concerned with electrocardiography, a science which investigates the workings of the human heart in order to identify abnormalities in the cardiac rhythm. Starting with writings coming from the beginning of the 20th century when the practice was invented and perfected and ending with present day medical textbooks and scientific articles, the paper presents a periodization of the metaphoric language associated with electrocardiography and the human body. In the beginning the human heart was seen writing its own story through the electrocardiograph, but nowadays images talk about TV cameras registering from multiple angles the game that the body is playing. The principal argument is that medical science is based on metaphoric thinking that relate man and machine, the relation being biunique and that the analysis of its vocabulary can help discover how both body and machine are constructed in the social imaginary.
Imagining the Heart: Incorporations, Intrusions and Identity
Somatechnics, 2012
Of all the possible surgical interventions into human corporeality, organ transplantation -and in particular heart transplantation -has consistently excited a depth of interest and range of emotions that far exceeds mere engagement with the technical demands of the operation. The annual number of transplantations carried out worldwide is in the thousands, of which the heart graft is the second most common procedure, limited only by the perennial shortage of donor organs. The survival rate of recipients is high and transplantation is by far the most successful treatment of end-stage heart failure. My question, then, is why on the one hand the seemingly beneficent nature of organ donation and transplantation is broadly supported by the lay public, and yet on the other, the same unexceptional and clinically relatively low risk procedure 1 should nevertheless provoke widespread cultural and individual psychic anxiety. On the surface the process is represented as an unproblematised social good, so what is it that underlies a far more complex socio-cultural and personal response? I shall suggest that it is not the biomedical risk of heart transplantation that causes concern, but the manner in which the procedure deeply disrupts the cultural imaginary and poses irresolvable difficulties to the question of personal identity.
Mounting evidence suggests that interoceptive signals are fundamentally important for the experience of the self. Thus far, studies on interoception have mainly focused on the ability to monitor the timing of ongoing heartbeats and on how these influence emotional and self-related processes. However, cardiac afferent signalling is not confined to heartbeat timing and several other cardiac parameters characterize cardiodynamic functioning. Building on the fact that each heart has its own self-specific cardio-dynamics, which cannot be expressed uniquely by heart rate, we devised a novel task to test whether people could recognize the sound of their own heart even when perceived offline and thus not in synchrony with ongoing heartbeats. In a forced-choice paradigm, participants discriminated between sounds of their own heartbeat (previously recorded with a Doppler device) versus another person's heart. Participants identified the sound of their own heart above chance, whereas their metacognition of performance – as calculated by contrasting performance against ratings of confidence-was considerably poorer. These results suggest an implicit access to fine-grained neural representations of elementary cardio-dynamic parameters beyond heartbeat timing. It is now held that the ever-continuous representation and regulation of bodily signals provide the foundations for the experience of the self 1. We exist in our bodies, as our bodies exist in our minds 2. Traditionally, experimental work in this field has focused on the processing of exteroceptive (e.g. tactile and visual) and motor bodily signals. Many experimental paradigms have been developed over the last years to manipulate these signals and to investigate their influence on the bodily self 3–6. However, the influence of the private internal body, i.e. interoceptive signals 7 , has been largely overlooked and has only rather recently entered the experimental study of the self 8–10. This is potentially surprising, as it has long been argued theoretically that self-awareness emerges from an image of the homeostatic state of the body, i.e. from the constantly present interoceptive signals 11,12. The reason for this dearth of experimental research may be that inherently private interoceptive sensations are not easily amenable to experimental measurement and manipulation. Cardiac sensations provide a privileged source of information for the study of interoception. The central role of mapping, re-mapping and interpreting one's own cardiac signals has long been recognized in theories of emotion 11,12. Yet people differ greatly in their ability to explicitly and accurately identify discrete interoceptive events such as heartbeats 13. This ability, often named interoceptive accuracy (IAcc; 14) is typically assessed by asking participants to track their heartbeats for short periods of time 13 , or by asking them to discriminate between auditory tones presented either synchronously or asynchronously with their
Multiplicity and ontological instability in nonhuman hearts
Saúde e Sociedade
This paper reflects on the relationship between biological bodies and technological artifacts, based on ethnographic research on the development of circulatory assist technologies, known as artificial hearts. To understand the embodiment that such mechanical devices help to produce, we aim to characterize two types of bodies enacted from medical practices and biotechnologies designed for patients with advanced heart failure. The immunological bodies, produced from heart transplantation, will be contrasted with the bionic bodies, composed of the assembly with artificial hearts. We propose that it is necessary to consider each of these technologies as co-produced with different natures, supported by specific materialities, practices, moralities and assumptions. The attention given to practices and materiality will allow to highlight the various material-semiotic intertwinings. Tracing the development trajectory of this field will allow exploring the imagination from which such interve...