Welcome! Clearly, the purpose of our website is to provide resources on the heart and how it works. Our goal is to provide explanations, analogies, diagrams, and interactive learning tools the promote understanding of how the heart works. As we develop our website, we hope to provide learning tools about the heart for people of all ages. Whether you are trying to explain the heart to your 5 year old, you are studying for your tenth grade biology final or you are trying to learn more about the different heart diseases and how they affect the heart, we plan to provide helpful learning tools.Eventually, we will develop practice exams, online interactive exams and games that further promote learning about the heart muscle. There are all kinds of great resources on the internet like the American Heart Association, Wikipedia, Various Medical Clinics, Center for Disease Control, the National Institute for Health and many other resources. We are not trying to replace these organizations. We will just provide as another resource that focusses on learning for all ages, provide another educational perspective and ultimately, promote heart healthy living through understanding of how the heart works. Please contact us anytime with your thoughts and ideas: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Introduction: How does the heart work?
For starters, it certainly helps to understand that the heart is a muscle. It is a muscle that is about the size of your fist. If you place your fist in the middle of your chest (leaning ever so slightly to the left), it might help give you a good visual about the amount of space your heart occupies.  

This fist sized muscle serves as a pump for the circulatory system. The circulatory system is a series of vessels that allows the transport of blood throughout the body. Blood carries oxygen, water and nutrients to the body organs and tissue so that the body can sustain life.

The vessels that carry the blood are known as blood vessels. There are three types of blood vessels: arteries, veins, and capillaries. Arteries carry oxygentated blood away from the heart, capillaries allow the exchange of chemicals and water between the blood and body tissue, and the veins carry the blood from the capillaries back to the heart. If the blood vessels of the body were laid end to end, they would be able to circle the globe almost two and one half times!
 
The heart has four chambers: left atrium, left ventricle, right atrium and right ventricle. The muscle is on an "automatic governor" and controled through an electrical impules through a part of the brain known as the medulla oblongata. When the electrical impulse moves across a chamber of the heart, it causes it to contract and pump blood to the next chamber, to the lungs or to the body. This signal starts with a specialized bundle of nerves in the right atrium known as the sinoatrial node (SA Node or sinus node). When there is a discharge from the sinus node (the natural pacemaker), the heart beats. Various physical, hormonal and emotional factors can cause the sinoatrial node to discharge which allows it to meet the ever changing demands of the human body.