Why is love related to the heart

Holiday Handbook: Browse shopping deals, recipes, tips for gathering safely and more. For centuries, people have thought of the heart as the command center of love, and the notion endures even as research shows most everything related to affection, attraction and adoration happens in the brain. Still, an organ that beats faster whenever a loved one comes near or aches when a partner is gone is clearly a part of the story.

Sandeep Jauhar, a cardiologist, in his recent book, " Heart: A History. Doctors have long known love can offer important protections for the heart just as the lack of it can have profound health consequences. Indeed, recent studies have found heart patients who are divorced, separated, widowed or never-married have a higher risk of dying than their married counterparts.

So you end up with basically heart failure. It recovers, though not completely many times. So the connection between the heart and love is strong. When people tried to express all that, how did they create the heart symbol? Scholars still debate its origin. One possible explanation dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who used the same symbol. At the time, a rare plant called silphium , now thought to be extinct, was employed as an aphrodisiac and a method of birth control among many, many other uses.

Its seeds looked very similar to the heart shape we know today. During the Renaissance, European scientists made huge steps in understanding the heart, in part thanks to dissections. Leonardo da Vinci produced detailed anatomical drawings and even created a glass model of the heart to better understand its function, and his findings began to veer away from Aristotle and Galen.

In , the English physician William Harvey published an account describing how the circulatory system works. Language and literature helped the heart maintain its symbolic role in Western society. Writers like Shakespeare and Dante, and the poets they influenced for centuries onward, set a sort of standard for modern notions of love and intimacy. Their descriptions of the heart have lingered, too. And while the European understanding of the heart has greatly influenced Western society, cultures around the world have made breakthroughs on how the heart works.

One surprisingly common connection between the heart and emotions is called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or broken-heart syndrome. In broken-heart syndrome, when a patient experiences severe emotional distress, they literally feel it in their heart. In his practice as a cardiologist, Khan says that he sees patients with broken-heart syndrome once or twice a month; they can be treated with drugs to improve heart function, like ACE inhibitors and beta blockers.

Register or Log In. His collection of 12 love poems and illustrations was intended for Marguerite Bullioud, the love of his life, although she was married to another man. In one of the illustrations above , two women attempt to catch a bevy of flying hearts in a net stretched out between two trees. The winged heart, borrowing from angels, had already appeared in earlier illustrations as the sign of soaring love. Saint Valentine of Rome was added to the Catholic calendar by Pope Gelasius in , to be commemorated on February 14, the same day it still occupies.

While there have been various theories of why St. Valentine became associated with love, it most likely developed during the late Middle Ages in the context of Anglo-French courtly love. The earliest English, French and American valentines were little more than a few lines of verse handwritten on a sheet of paper, but over time, makers began embellishing them with drawings and paintings.

Then, the first commercial valentines appeared in England at the end of the 18th century. They were printed, engraved or made from woodcuts and sometimes colored by hand. The French, too, began exploiting the commercial valentine, with cards featuring angel-like cupids surrounded by hearts above , a French card, circa In , the heart icon underwent yet another transformation when it became a verb. Trash piled up on the streets, the crime rate spiked, and it was near bankruptcy.

Twenty-two years later, a new graphic form appeared that brought the heart into a whole new realm. In the original set of symbols, there were five concerning the heart. One was colored completely red, one included white blank spots to suggest 3-D depth, another had jagged white blanks at its center signifying a broken heart, one looked as if it were in flight, and one had two small hearts sailing off together.