Our heart has its own brain

According to RCO News Agency, This is a very mechanical function. However, each contraction is considered like a musician’s note, played with gusto or tenderness under the guidance of nerves that lie just beneath the outer layers of the heart.

These pathways, known as the intracardiac nervous system, were thought to act as a stop-off point for information transmitted by parts of the brain and spinal cord, according to ScienceAlert.

Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Columbia University in the United States have now discovered a surprising level of complexity among the neurons that surround the zebrafish heart, challenging existing theories about how the organ maintains its pulse in different species, including our own.

Konstantinos Ampatzis, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute, who led the study, says: This “little brain” plays a key role in maintaining and controlling the heart rate, and is similar to how the brain regulates rhythmic functions such as movement and breathing. Throughout history, cardiac activity was thought to be autonomic.

Albrecht von Haller, an 18th century German anatomist, claimed in his Compendium of Physiology that the heart has an “intrinsic excitability” caused by the blood entering it.

In the 19th century, bundles of nerves called ganglia were found in the hearts of frogs and then in the hearts of humans, which were quickly understood to act as a pacemaker for the heart, controlling the rate of muscle contractions.

This marked the beginning of centuries of research into the heart’s steady ability to beat, and scientists studied the extent to which the central nervous system controls the pulse.

Today, it is believed that the brain affects the function of the heart through the sympathetic “fight or flight” system and the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system.

This is managed through numerous neural pathways that connect the convoluted muscle fibers of the heart to the peripheral ganglia, which in turn are connected to bundles of neurons in the central nervous system and remotely alter the rate in response to chemical and pressure stimuli.

Given the scrutiny of generations of scientists, not only is it not surprising that the debate over the brain’s influence on the heart continues, but there is still much to be discovered about the structure of the heart.

Ampatzis and his team used a combination of immunolabeling, Aran profiling of individual cells, and analysis of the electrical properties of neurons passing through cardiac tissue to produce a detailed map of the intracardiac nervous system of a zebrafish heart.

The researchers discovered a high diversity of cell types, including a subset of neurons that resemble central pattern-generating neurons in the central nervous system, pathways that control everything from chewing food to walking.

Despite an evolutionary gap of hundreds of millions of years, humans and zebrafish have surprisingly similar cardiovascular physiology, suggesting that most vertebrates share these neural pathways.

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