MicroFactzzz#0024 · 🧬 Human Glitch
A Human Heart Can Keep Beating Outside the Body — No Wires Attached
Your heart has its own built-in pacemaker and can keep a rhythm even when it's disconnected from your brain and the rest of your body.
Most organs shut down almost the instant they're disconnected from the body. The heart is the exception.
It has its own internal "pacemaker" — the sinoatrial node, a cluster of cells that generates electrical impulses completely independent of the brain. That's why, under the right conditions (say, a lab solution supplying oxygen and nutrients), a heart can keep contracting rhythmically for a while even outside the body.
It's this same property that makes heart transplants possible — a transplanted organ starts beating on its own before it ever reconnects to the recipient's nervous system.
Okay, here's where it gets weird: your brain doesn't actually tell your heart to beat. All it can do is speed up or slow down a rhythm the heart was going to generate on its own anyway.
Sources
- General knowledge / encyclopedic sources
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Krulicza Nora
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