do you like books I mean really really like books then you're in the right place each week your host Sam hankin interviews the best of today's top selling authors and the up-and-coming superstars of modern literature this is the Avid Reader here is your host Sam hankin hi everyone welcome to another edition of the Avid Reader Our Guest today is Dr Vincent figureda author of the Curious history of the heart a cultural and scientific Journey published by Columbia University earlier this year Dr figuerado has been a practicing cardiologist and scientist for almost 30 years as you'll see his study of the heart exceeds its physical and mechanical pounds although that's what he's been doing but pushed into his life and Embraces the Romantic the cultural the spiritual aspects of this muscle this fist size muscle this pump this electrical engine which is why we're here today and able to have this talks it's Anatomy it's Health it's disease it's death or all part of this book but what is exciting and unexpected is the other heart that the doctor shows us it's the heart of the Ancients who felt it was hearts and ran things and the rain was just like a useless blob of mucus that you could pull out through the nose if you're Egyptian um a heart that loves the hearts that break heart that gives the heart leads part of gold the heart that made richer so what is this organ drives the blood throughout the body that nourishes us that literally feeds us and gives us the very air that we breathe so let's ask innocent hello doctor thanks so much for joining us thank you very much it's a pleasure to be here well we talked a little bit before we began about the title because as I said I'm a Bookseller and um although it's a cliche and people who come into my store generally judge books by their cover and the title is the most important aspect of that so um why is the heart and this particular history of it a curious thing when people sometimes think of curious oh well that's interesting or curious might be oh this is something evanescent or spiritual or extraordinary in some sense are both of those meanings implied in the title I would say all of the above um I I'm a physician scientist I have been for most of my life and I'm curious by Nature very early in my career I became fat fascinated by this remarkable organ the heart and I like to read books that uh focus on the history of a single subject like salt to world history or emperor of all maladies about cancer so I decided early on in my career I was going to eventually write a book on the history of the heart and I spent 20 years Gathering data started writing it five years ago and what I found was throughout human history there's this continuity of curiosity that carries from prehistoric times to present the heart for our ancient ancestors was the king of the organs it was the the home of emotions of memory of reasoning it was where the soul was in our body and it's how we connected with God and that held true for Millennia multiple Millennia and then around the time of the Renaissance the heart became demystified as just a blood pump curiously at the same time the heart began to be used more and more in art and literature and daily society as a symbol of romantic love as a symbol of love of family and of God and it began to appear on Coats of Arms of families and the shields of Crusaders and so it was curious that while the heart seemed to drop in importance physically or scientifically it became more important symbolically to humans in societies around the world the purpose of the title was I wanted people to know there was more than one history of the heart there was the the history about the exploration and experimentation that helped us learn how the heart worked and how we can treat it but there was also this curious Obsession by Society with the heart and the heart symbol as to what it meant with regards to our love and our relationships to each other you know it's funny and I'm jumping to the very end but I thought about something about you when I read the acknowledgments because it was very heartfelt acknowledgment that you thank your patient yes and I thought what a nice guy and so it was like heart to heart you get these cliches and Shakespeare they go on forever so okay well then why did you feel this heartfelt gratitude towards your patience um I have been Mings over my career careers in the laboratory but the one thing I've always been is a physician to my patients um my favorite thing in in the world is is caring for hearts and my patients um allow me that privilege and so they are important to me and you're emotional about it as you said and that goes to their brain connection but I I jump all around so let's hold off on that um but I think one of the most fascinating you know and as I said when I began the book I didn't expect you know I expect okay anatomical history of the heart it's going to show you how the heart Works how it comes um artificial Hearts things like that but you start off in the ancient path and of course all of us know that I think let's let's talk about pulling the heart pulling the brain out through the nose right I never understood I never figured out how they could actually do it I I don't I don't like to think about it but um for many ancient societies um like Egypt uh the heart was considered uh where one's self was it's where emotions reasoning and memory were so it was treated with great reference so for instance when the Egyptians would embalm a body they would remove all the organs from the body except the heart they would put back in the other organs were put in pots next to the body the brain was considered just a phlegm producing organ of no importance and so they literally would try and pull it out and rinse it out to clean out the cavity and so if when you first began thinking about this decades ago while you were working every day with the muscle holding it in your hands did you ever just come up with a supposition as to why people assumed or presumed or thought why right here so if you think about our ancient ancestors for them you know the beating of a heart meant life and that heart would beat faster with fear and with love and when someone died the heart would stop beating and the body would cool so it made sense to them that the heart determined life and it was actually it was a furnace it's what kept the body warm and when the heart stopped beating the body would cool so when they would experience emotions fear or love that heart would beat faster and stronger so they Associated emotions with the heart and as they tried to figure out where was their their self their ability to connect with God put their hands right here where do you point to when you say me right here so that it was no surprise that at that time they would think that the heart was the king of the organs and and the home of the Soul and then as you go through the book you begin to see how that attitude changed but tell us also the illustrations and graphs in the books are really instructive and they're very accessible for the reader so I want to say that since I have the proof and can't really show them right now but um given that what was the metamorphosis of that ancient feelings apart as a center how did it graduate including through the Dark Ages morph into this idea that no I think we're wrong about that aspect of how we work so while most ancient societies where they were talking Sumerians Egyptians Chinese Indian early Greeks they all thought could they were cardiocentric they believed the heart was was the repository of emotions memory Soul reasoning um there were some early Greeks that began to question that they they noticed that when someone got hit in the head and they were knocked out they were unconscious so maybe the brain did have some importance but certain um thinkers back in that time Aristotle and of you know of Greece and Galen who was Greek but of Rome um they their thoughts predominated and they were cardiocentric and when the Middle Ages started and the Catholic Church sort of subject subjugated all forms of thinking they said that Aristotle and Galen are correct and everything else is wrong and that held true in in medieval Europe right up until the Renaissance when the likes of uh Da Vinci and visalius and William Harvey came around and so you talk a lot about the church in the book and obviously during that time period the church and science were often at odds whether you're talking about Galloway or anybody who challenged us right the age of the Greeks so how did that I guess when I read a book I always wonder about especially a book like this which I read or operableities which I also wrote I always wonder about what's the Tipping Point just like Malcolm gladwins right yes if if there is a swerve which is another book a good book if there is a Tipping Point or I swear when was it if you could I mean it's so fuzzy it was as we can we came out of the of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance um probably the first person who we can really acknowledge is understanding the workings of a heart as a as a pump would be da Vinci but unfortunately his Works uh were kind of hidden for 250 years after his death before we really saw those um visalius uh who was probably one of the greatest grave robbers of History um so that he could dissect dissect dissect um he started producing some very accurate anatomical uh of illustrations of the heart and an understanding heart but it was I'm gonna say when William Harvey experimentally demonstrated that the heart was the center of a circulatory system and it was essentially a blood pump uh that's when the heart began to be demystified and viewed as just another organ its purpose pumping blood and that brings me to uh like I said going into the anatomical you know when you're in middle school or like me in junior high school and the things you always learn the ones you remember it's the size of a man's fist oh that's the first thing the next thing are four chambers and then depending on who your teacher is you know you're basically talking about Plumbing or on an electrical system right some other aspect of the house and so why don't we do that why don't we go through what's inside this mechanism and what it does for us so um as Harvey demonstrated and um Da Vinci understood the heart is a is a blood pump um and it's a remarkably efficient one it pumps a gallon and a half per minute um it pumps over 2 000 gallons a day and it pumps over 58 million gallons over a lifetime if you turn on faucet kitchen faucet on full force that's more than 50 years of that faucet being on that's the amount of blood that that little heart that's a little bigger than the fist uh pumps Parts probably about half to two-thirds of a pound um and it's beating 70 to 80 times uh per minute and it does that throughout life um I think what did I have like 30 billion times and uh it never fails it never fails it's pushing about a third of a cup of blood per beat out but by doing that it ends up being a gallon and a half per minute and that's about how much blood is in our body so it's circulating the blood in our body every minute if you had to tick things off if an alien was an exam I mean examining human body for the first time how would you be able to determine at first blush you wouldn't that it's not only Plumbing but it's electrical it's providing us with an Ascent nutrients and also allowing the lungs to restore oxygen to the very fluid right so um what Harvey eventually understood was the heart is actually two circulatory systems and there's a pulmonary circulatory system and a systemic to the body circulatory system and uh the electrical system that allows that heart to beat every 70 to 80 beats per minute um is is remarkable it's a it's essentially a biologic pacemaker that functions in the majority of us without fail for our entire lifetime when you when you think of Harvey as you've been talking about them doesn't it feel like you're actually standing on the shoulders of giants like they say about Newton it's been a pretty damn good job many people will say that Harvey did not discover circulation and in fact you can even look back to uh ancient ancestors like the Indians and the Chinese and they probably had a sense that blood left the heart and came back they just couldn't prove it where you give Harvey credit is that he experimentally demonstrated it and definitively proved it and that's kind of when the heart started becoming just a pump so funny when my brother and I were little we always we were so fascinated with the idea that the blood inside the body was blue we would actually cut ourselves sometimes that's just light diffraction it's actually it's actually sort of a maroon when it's deoxygenated and bright red when it's oxygenated it's funny I was listening to um a YouTube video that you did with the Einstein Hospital Network about art and what was interesting and what made me think of it as you were talking about you know this obviously lasts our whole lives and a healthy heart does a great job but just as we're doing with our environment as we're doing with civil discourse in today's society a lot of us maybe a majority of us really mess up the heart's doing its job and you ticked off a lot of those things in that few minutes that you spoke to that woman about and it must be depressing to you you know here's this wonderful mother that was doing just great and then you started eating badly you started sitting all the time smoking all the time yeah yeah um it's a shame because heart disease incidents would really uh decrease if we walked more we ate a little less we didn't smoke um but in modern Western societies I mean we do it because we're able to we can afford it um those are things that I have conversations with my patients and I and I'm I'm blunt with them and honest and they appreciate it but there's other factors that are that are also affecting the heart that sometimes I don't think is fair to blame on them and that's stress and anxiety uh and those are those are major players in heart disease and uh until recently we really did not count them as risk factors and we really didn't think it was important to deal with those things but but stress anxiety depression are major players and heart disease well there you go that gives us a nice segue into the brain heart connection because why is he saying that okay the stress I have resides in my brain the anxiety I have regret worry all that is in the brain but even as I'm talking about it I kind of feel it here but why is that it's like the stomach being second brain right what's going on there so and it was assumed that the brain unilaterally sent orders to the heart and heart responded but what we're now finding is there's this Dynamic two-way dialogue between the heart and the brain and it turns out that the heart's sending as many signals to the brain as the brain is to the heart in fact in examining the heart there is an area in the top of the heart where there's almost a little brain there's over 40 000 nerve cells attached to the heart and it helps the heart sense regulate and remember an example of how the heart can negatively affect the brain are as anxiety or panic attacks and it's often the case that these people have unrecognized abnormal heart rhythms so that normal rhythmic electromatic and electromagnetic energy that goes up to the brain from the heart because the heart's a very powerful electromagnetic magnetic generator that irregularity affects the brain and the Heart can affect the brain in the medulla the hypothalamus the amygdala which is the emotion Center and that abnormal Rhythm causes these people to have panic attacks and anxiety and when it's discovered that they have the abnormal rhythms and they're fixed their symptoms go away examples of where the the heart beneficially affects the brain are uh coherence methods like meditation or mindfulness um singing in a choir feelings of uh compassion all of those generate very stable rhythmic rhythms that feed the the brain and leave to increase motivation and pain tolerance and and improved emotional connectivity would you actually say that the neural network that's our brain is actually connected to another neural network as far as the heart the little brain and the Heart yeah well it whether the two are directly related most of the signals coming from the heart go through the vagal nerve back up um what that group of neurons is probably doing in the heart is helping the heart itself to sense to regulate to remember so then go ahead and by the way the heart connects with the brain not only nerve wise but hormone-wise and as I said electromagnetically turns out the heart produces as much oxytocin the love hormone as the brain does well one of the things you talk about I have to write notes down I'll forget because I'm going to be 71 next week my nephew is for my 70th birthday gave me a really good Phillips uh uh defibrillator the best question I ever got right I just have to be there you know it's like the survivalists who build these shelters and I always say to them you need to be there when it happens otherwise it's kind of and you have now if someone asked me if you cared and I said no I don't think so it says but it talks to you I said yes but at that point you really you're usually not conscious so but it's all right but when when you're talking about fight or flight I was thinking because you're talking about anxiety so this is a crude way of putting it so when you when you go into that fight or flight an adrenaline is flowing if it's if it's not real you're paranoid if you're schizophrenic and you and you you see a danger that isn't there but that that response is what happens are you essentially wasting Heartbeats foreign figuratively yes um because obviously that's going to produce stress and anxiety and stress and anxiety directly have negative implications with regards to cardiovascular disease but they also lead to bad behaviors so those people you know they're they're not physically active they smoke more they drink more um and that stress is just constantly producing you know the it's activating the sympathetic nervous system and it's easing cortisol levels and those all have negative effects on the cardiovascular system long so yeah you're wasting heartbeats as figuratively correct I was just thinking about when you're talking about America and you know you go to a restaurant and you get a bowl of spaghetti that's way more you are not hungry one-third of the way through the meal yet you eat the entire meal because as you said you can so I was wondering in your career you know you've written over 200 papers you've attended conferences all over the world have you ever studied different societies and why they are healthier why they live longer well the easy answer to that is as is look at developing nations so I mean you know westernized Nations U.S Europe you know much higher rates of cardiovascular heart disease than countries that are third world um and then you look at the third world countries that are now starting to develop and they're adopting Western culture so they're adopting the lifestyles and uh and the the environmental ramifications of and as they do that the the uh rate of heart disease and stroke goes up that's the other thing that you mentioned in that talk on YouTube um with Einstein um was people shouldn't forget that this is essentially the number one killer it has been the number one killer since 1900 with the exception of two years because of the Spanish Flu and it is the number one killer well let me ask you this is it fair to call the number one killer because sometimes the death isn't actually cause simply by the cessation of a beating heart right pick off those things that make that happen um if when we talk about cardiovascular disease so that includes heart disease stroke Peripheral arterial disease cardiovascular disease Far and Away the number one killer worldwide um but even heart disease itself is pretty much the number one killer in developing or developed Nations um I'll give you an example um 10 times as many women die of heart disease than they do of breast cancer and yet we do a pretty miserable job of discussing with women the importance of risk factor modification to prevent heart disease but we are very focused on breast cancer so yeah it's funny how things get a certain Buzz about them yeah people don't take them long look it's Marsden trees kind of thing one of the appointment things that you mentioned because we were just talking about how the heart does such a great job is a situation when you talk about young athletes and you know they have exactly the lifestyle that you recommends in your talk right so unfortunately about one in 50 000 young athletes per year suddenly die that comes out to about 75 13 to 25 year olds in the United States per year and the reason for this is they have underlying genetic heart issues that weren't recognized one is called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with too thick of a heart muscle wall others have abnormal takeoff of the coronary arteries that feed the heart muscle that take sharp turns and can suddenly occlude others have problems with their electrical system and can develop dangerous heart rhythms with exertion or immediately after and they look perfectly healthy so unless you screen for it you're going to miss it and there are many programs one that I've worked with Simon's heart that is trying to educate um parents and schools about athletes and the potential for sudden cardiac death and they go in and and do screenings yeah the other thing is well I was uh there was a great guy on our softball team must have he was like 23 years old he was playing in center field and he just fell down yeah in our Township it takes 20 minutes for the ambulance to get there and no one else knew what to do whereas and I can't remember his name the football player this year yes yeah Demar Hamlin so right and they they were they were there within minutes or seconds and to save these people they are already and they're going to die tomorrow it was interesting he was actually uh he got struck in the chest I think what happened to him is called commodio quartus uh it's what happens sometimes if a baseball or a hockey puck um or a cricket ball hits just in the wrong place at the wrong time in the chest and induces a life-threatening heart rhythm that if someone doesn't jump on it then they can die and he's been cleared he's been able to play football again right it turns out that it was he just got struck exactly the wrong way at exactly the wrong time in the heart rhythm cycle that that happened but otherwise he has a perfectly healthy heart it's always been interesting to me how you know you watch that Replay in slow motion he stands up and for a moment he seems fine and this is how my father died it was in between Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy he stood up because I feel dizzy and that was it yeah I think fortunately for your dad and for Demar um that Rhythm and blood stops getting to the head and when they stand up within seconds there's no blood up there and they hit the ground oh yeah they actually made the same movement that was exactly the same movement yeah that's fascinating well so it's almost impossible in this hour to cover everything but I wanted to move forward a little bit because um when you talk about the oh you know the other thing I want to talk about as I told you before we began I wrote some questions that I might be answering one of them was um about the epigraph and we don't have to go through all of them but the reason I find them fascinating once again is a Bookseller is because people like to read them and I like them because the authors wouldn't put them in there unless they thought a long time about the chapter how did you come up with all those they're all really good uh a lot of research um would write a chapter um you know I write a chapter on um for instance art and then I went and I looked for quotes by artists and found if they were any relevant I can actually give you uh Vincent van Gogh said I have put my heart and soul into my work and have lost my mind in the process I thought that was especially relevant for the heart in our chapter it's interesting the people that you choose and I have some of them here too but um some of them are really funny and it's for example oh yeah we can talk things um work but aspirin aspirin does but but the other thing is like I said to you before aspirin and caffeine are like those things that one day coffee is great for you or wine is great for you and the next day is not and no such of that aspirin that you're supposed to be taking is the same dosage as Saint Joseph's children's Aspirin because it was easy for the companies to do right so what's the deal actually Sumerian cania formed they were using willow and Myrtle which both contain salicic acid which is essentially what aspirin is made of for aches and pains over 5000 years ago and then willow bark was used by Greeks Romans Africans mesoamericans Chinese for as a pain and fever reducer and it was used right up through the Middle Ages and it wasn't until the 1800s that acetyl salicylic acid or what we now know as aspirin was made bear which was a drug and die company started selling it in 1899 as a pain reliever and one of their first ads says it won't affect the heart 50 years later we found out it affected the heart it reached heart attacks uh there's been many studies looking at aspirin's beneficial effect on heart attacks and so we got to the point where we were putting everybody on aspirin but it turns out that the risk outweighs the benefit in some people and we're learning that now so current guidelines will say if you have known coronary artery disease absolutely should you know secondary prevention you should be on aspirin for life the question is in primary prevention and we were telling people who had never had heart attacks or Strokes that they should be taking aspirin but the problem is those people have a small risk of having cardiovascular disease but they also have a small risk of stomach bleeds brain bleeds hemorrhagic Strokes so in going back and looking at the data people who are at high risk so they have greater than 10 percent chance of having a cardiovascular event over the next 10 years those are the people we consider putting on aspirin now but if you don't meet that criteria aspirin is not beneficial and we do use 81 although most of the studies looked at 162 to 325 but it's convenient because we were already making baby aspirins and that's why we use radio another thing my brother and I did which was horrible especially for kids and race syndrome but St Joseph's baby asthma for children tasted so good I've never tasted that flavor again and my brother and I would just would eat it it's amazing we're still unless playing with Mercury from my uncle's a dentist well fortunately you had no brain malformation so you're fine well who knows Others May disagree um the other thing that's interesting is with the epigraphs is you pick people that I definitely admire for them yeah all of them I admire and you have two epigraphs from Steve Jobs in addition to being the person who put a dent in the universe he was also someone who had how do I put it he he basically that's another way of looking hard is you know follow your dream kind of thing and that's right can you start following your heart what do you have to lose what is that what does that even mean though if your feelings tell you wherever they are located your head your heart your gut go with them you don't live forever so go ahead and just do it it's an interesting bifurcation though because going with your gut is like saying okay here's a problem figure the solution out I'm going to implement it it's almost military whereas following your heart has that as I said at the outset that romantic or that goodness exactly yeah so no wonder you find it fascinating so what so what what was and what still is your day-to-day work with the heart I'm practicing cardiologists which I love again I care my patients it's an honor to to help them in their heart health um when I wrote this book was essentially Saturdays and early mornings I'd get up very early in the morning and work for a couple hours that was the only way I could get it done did you have index cards all over the wall like people do um I I actually because that's the way I worked with with all my previous uh you know Journal articles and chapter chapters that I wrote but no I did this one on the computer I wanted to be in the Modern Age so I I had my notes on all on the computer you've given me some good Segways because that goes right into since you're using the computer that goes into your chapter about the future of the heart and that was really fascinating because you know there was that um six week six day old kid Oliver who had a heart transplant and you know I can't even imagine how that was done but at the same time when you talk about the baking and Christian and the beginnings the beginnings of the artificial heart obviously you're you are the person to me where do you think that's going especially now when you're talking about 3D patterns yeah yeah that's where it's going in that it's it's mind modeling I mean look where we are now we are we're now at the point where we're putting in valves on a catheter instead of doing open heart surgery I mean that's the future now um but you know where where are we going we at we're not like salamanders when when heart cells die we can't regenerate them salamanders can but new um stem cell research and genetic uh therapies are helping us to regrow heart cells from from stem cells in areas of the heart where there's now scar so we can rebuild the Heart by injecting cells so that's actively being studied now um xenotransplantation that's transplantation of another animal's heart into a human we've tried chimpanzees baboons pigs dogs goats um I hate to say it but the one most the heart most like a human is a pig heart I think George Orwell in the Animal Farm um uh and actually recently in the news a recipient of a genetically modified pig heart survived two months with that heart um we now have mechanical hearts or mechanical assist device that we're actively using so we have what's called an lvat a left ventricular CIS device if a person has a broken heart we can implant this and assist their heart until time of Transportation transplantation or the heart recovers and there's some people who aren't candidates for transplantation um and we're now putting in completely artificial hearts into those people as destination therapy and I think the the longest one has been seven years survival um but 3D printing is going to be really interesting because we'll be able to design custom-made heart valves to put in a person that matches their original one and as you said we may ultimately get to the point where we can 3D recreate a heart using that person's stem cells to make them another heart now that's obviously in the future but that's the way we're heading yeah and the thing is the reason when I was reading the book was the same time that all this has come out about artificial intelligence and the snowballing and then people coming out and saying it's going to destroy civilization and you know using it as you probably have too you must be amazed I could ask it um what kind of questions should I ask a person who's written the book about a heart and I'll get really good by better than the ones I asked and so if that's moving as fast as it is why can't you say okay maybe you could say something like if I asked you 10 years ago oh well maybe in 50 years would you now say 30 years you can now say 20 years and for many of the therapies I've described I would say definitely within 20 years a whole heart a way that therapies have x-rated through the 20th and 21st century with regards to the heart I mean at the beginning of the 20th century we finally knew what a heart attack was but it was bad rest and a priest was the answer by the end of the 20th century you know we're doing angioplasty stents bypass surgeries heart transplants valve Replacements pacemakers defibrillators so it's amazing what can happen in a short period of time and it almost seems like it's accelerating and so who knows what we'll see over the next 20 years biologic pacemakers where they inject cells that replace the heart's pacemaker without having to put a tin can in them with with leads using Nanobots little you know cell-sized robots to break through a clot and a heart attack so that you can get the the rescue medicines through quicker and save more muscle I mean gene therapy personalized gene therapy where we're creating vaccines to prevent people from having future heart attacks there's a lot coming and again of course it always you always have to take into account where you are when it happens whether you're here whether you're in New York whether you're in Boise Idaho or whether you're in Zam zambu you know right right because and it's it's fascinating also that with this recent um brain surgery in utero that they did um is it where was it not here I don't know but fascinating that yeah they do they do heart surgery on it's mind-boggling and yet less than 100 years ago we weren't doing heart surgeries oh uh I shouldn't be doing this as we're concluding because I I always go back to the beginning but the beginning story and maybe this is a good way to end was the nobleman the Aristocrat who get the jagged Montgomery yeah talk about that that was fascinating because Hugh Montgomery oh at age 10 off a horse and hit a sharp Rock which crushed his ribs and caused an abscess over the heart um miraculously I guess the abscess popped and he survived but he ended up with essentially a hole in his chest and there was nothing between the heart and the outside except just a sort of a fibrous membrane so you could actually look in that hole and see his heart beating and he actually became famous and he traveled Europe so people could see this Fascination when he came back to London William Harvey had heard about it and he was the the doctor or the physician of King Charles II King Charles II wanted to see this guy so Hugh Montgomery was brought by William Harvey to the king and the King actually reached in and touched his beating heart I wouldn't want a lot of people touching myself but you let the king you let the king and he said I feel no pain because the heart has right and that was part of the demystification of the heart because William Harvey said well if it can't feel you touching it then how can it hold emotion what do you expect really in conclusion what would you expect because I'm going to be out front this is going to be a table at the bookstore um already is actually uh so what do you expect people to take away from this book with regard to not only the anatomical structure of the heart but the history of it in terms of it's it feelings the way people feel about it and also secondly with regard to their own health in their own body what are the things I think what I love is when they express awe in the pervasiveness of of the heart in art culture religion uh and Society from ancient times to present um I want them to to understand why the heart was considered so important for Millennia to human beings and how maybe those humans weren't so wrong after all that it turns out maybe the heart is playing more of a role in our in our spiritual and our emotional and our physical lives because it is constantly working with the brain to maintain our health and that's funny and that's what I took away from it and it's not I did not expect that in the slightest when I began the book so that's what's fun about it well so thank you so much I I mean there's so much more we're going to talk about but I'm glad we got to jump around and talk about a lot of the book so thank you so much Vincent I really appreciate it you're welcome thank you very much for having me on the program bye-bye [Music]