1. What impressive and sobering facts are known about the human heart?

THE human heart, as to size, is only about as large as your fist. Yet it is a real powerhouse. Think of it! Every few minutes your heart circulates the five to six quarts of blood in your body around the 60,000-mile network of arteries, veins, and capillaries, bathing each of the trillions of cells of your body with the precious fluid of life. Since before you were separated from your mother’s womb, you have been completely dependent upon this intricately designed organ’s beating day and night without letup. If it stops beating for more than a few minutes, the cells in your body begin to die, starting with the fragile brain cells, which, in being starved of vital oxygen and other nourishment of the blood, begin to perish, making death imminent.

2, 3. (a) Despite medical advancements, what continues to be the chief cause of death? (b) What can be done physically to safeguard the heart?

² To do its enormous job for an average lifetime of approximately seventy years, the heart necessarily must be rugged. It is, but the heart is greatly affected by the way a person lives and thinks. The strains and living habits of this modern world put a crushing burden on the heart. Things can go wrong with it, and despite advances in medical research which have brought forth heart transplants, mechanical hearts, and other devices and techniques in the field of cardio-vascular therapy, there is still relatively little that doctors can do for you if your heart begins to fail. Heart disease is still the number one killer by a wide margin.

³ Doctors do tell us, however, that there is much you can do to safeguard your heart, but this must be done before the trouble begins. Improper eating, smoking, heavy drinking, anxiety, prolonged stress, violent emotional outbursts, not getting the proper amounts of rest and exercise, all have detrimental effects upon this vital organ, hastening death or perhaps making a person an invalid for the rest of his life. Wisely the Bible counsels: “A calm heart is the life of the fleshly organism, but jealousy is rottenness to the bones.”​—Prov. 14:30; Eccl. 2:23.

4. While safeguarding the heart physically is vital, what is much more important? Why?

⁴ It is serious business when we talk about this little organ on which life is so dependent. We have only one. When it goes, death has indeed claimed another victim.

LOOKING DEEPLY INTO THE HEART

5. Is the “heart” part of the mind? Explain.

⁵ Where and what is your heart? You may say, What heart are you talking about? You know you have a heart in your chest, one that is pumping blood throughout your entire body, serving every single cell with that stream of life. But do you have another “heart” in your head, a “figurative heart”? Is it part of your brain or is it that abstract capacity of the brain that we call the “mind”? No! The brain, in which the mind resides, is one thing and the heart in our thorax, with its power of motivation, is another thing.

6. How does the Bible use the word “heart”?

⁶ With but few exceptions, the use of the word “heart” in the Bible is limited to the operations of the heart of man as the powerhouse of one’s desires, emotions and affections, the place that comes to include the capacities for motivation. The Bible does not speak of a symbolic or spiritual heart in contradistinction to the fleshly or literal heart, just as it does not speak of a symbolic mind, and thus we do not want to make the mistake of viewing the literal heart as merely a fleshly pump as does orthodox physiology today. Most psychiatrists and psychologists tend to overcategorize the mind and allow for little if any influence from the fleshly heart, looking upon the word “heart” merely as a figure of speech apart from its use in identifying the organ that pumps our blood.

7, 8. (a) Describe the interplay between the heart and the mind of an individual. (b) What influence does the heart have as to personality traits?

⁷ The heart, nevertheless, is intricately connected with the brain by the nervous system and is well supplied with sensory nerve endings. The sensations of the heart are recorded on the brain. It is here that the heart brings to bear on the mind its desires and its affections in arriving at conclusions having to do with motivations. In reverse flow, the mind feeds the heart with interpretations of the impulses from the senses and with conclusions reached that are based on the knowledge it has received, either at the moment or from the memory. There is a close interrelationship between the heart and the mind, but they are two different faculties, centering in different locations. The heart is a marvelously designed muscular pump, but, more significantly, our emotional and motivating capacities are built within it. Love, hate, desire (good and bad), preference for one thing over another, ambition, fear​—in effect, all that serves to motivate us in relationship to our affections and desires springs from the heart.

9. What do some scientists believe about the heart, apart from its being a pump for the blood?

⁹ Let us consider some significant points about the fleshly organ in your chest, the heart, called in Hebrew lev and le·vavʹ and in Greek kar·diʹa (from which we get the word “cardiac”). Some medical scientists and psychiatrists believe that the heart does considerably more than pump blood. For instance, Dr. D. E. Schneider, a neurologist and psychiatrist of New York, points out that, when the human embryo is forming, the heart and the brain develop from the same area, that the heart is in part nerve tissue and, additionally, has the capacity for manufacturing and storing certain highly potent chemicals that exercise a regulatory effect on the body, including, according to this research, the brain. His conclusion is that there is “evidence for a two-way relationship between mind and heart,” and that, even as the mind has its effect on the heart, “the heart [yes, the fleshly one in your chest] in turn may influence the mind intensely.” Certain other researchers have arrived at rather similar conclusions.