Something You Should Know
The Amazing Things Your Heart Does & The Power You Have to Change Lives
Mon, 24 Mar 2025
I am sure you know people who love to offer unsolicited advice. And if you think back to the last time someone offered it to you – you likely didn’t follow it. No one does. This episode starts by revealing why people hate unsolicited advice and what works so much better if you want to get someone to do something. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/do-the-right-thing/201407/giving-people-advice-rarely-works-does We have known for a long time that the human heart is not really involved with emotions. You can’t really love someone with all your heart – that’s not what the heart does. Still, we talk about love and the heart as being connected. Why? That’s just one of the things I discuss with my guest Dr. Vincent Figueredo. He is a practicing cardiologist, professor of medicine and author of the book, The Curious History of the Heart: A Cultural and Scientific Journey (https://amzn.to/4hlJQfa). Listen as he also reveals just how amazing your heart is, what it does and what it is like to hold a beating human heart in his hands! We can all help people make real positive changes in their lives by taking some very small actions. That’s according to important research conducted by my guest Greg Walton, PhD. He is the co-director of the Dweck-Walton Lab and a professor of psychology at Stanford University. Listen as he explains what he calls “Ordinary Magic” – small steps that can be very influential in keeping people on track and help them become the people they want to be. Greg is author of book called Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts (https://amzn.to/4ihZlGa) Do you know what the difference is between a habit and an addiction? While they seem similar, there is an important distinction. Listen as I explain the difference. Source: Charles DuHigg author of The Power of Habit (https://amzn.to/41D7JJd) PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off QUINCE: Indulge in affordable luxury! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is unsolicited advice ineffective?
So I could give you some advice, but it probably wouldn't do any good, so I won't. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. In our desire to help people, it's just natural to offer them advice. Trouble is, people don't usually take it. And you know this because people probably tell you how to eat or drink or vote or dress or whatever, and you don't listen to them either.
So why doesn't offering unsolicited advice work? Research indicates that whenever someone tells us what to do and how to do it, we get defensive, because we want to maximize our personal freedom in decision-making. It's just human nature. So what does work?
Research on observational learning suggests that while people will resist unsolicited advice, they will follow the behaviors of others, especially when there appear to be good and reinforcing outcomes from those behaviors. So instead of telling people what they should do, model the behavior and just stay quiet.
Of course, I just told you what to do, so telling you this completely contradicts what I told you to do. But you get the point. And that is something you should know. So you know what your heart is, right? It's that pump in the middle of your chest that's pumping blood all the time. And you want that because when it stops pumping blood, well, that's a big problem.
Chapter 2: What makes the human heart so fascinating?
But the heart is unlike any other organ in the body because it is somehow all wrapped up with love and emotions. We write and sing songs about the heart. People get their hearts broken. Love makes the heart grow fonder. Love makes the heart beat faster. No other organ. I mean, your spleen doesn't conjure up any particular emotions, most likely, nor does your liver.
But the heart, well, that's something special. And here to tell you things about your heart you never knew about how it really works and how it all got mixed up with emotion is Dr. Vincent Figueredo. He is a practicing cardiologist, scientist, and professor of medicine, and he's author of a book called The Curious History of the Heart, A Cultural and Scientific Journey.
Doctor, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you very much. So this is such an interesting topic because I've often wondered, and I'm sure many other people have, how the heart got mixed up with love in the first place, why we associate love with the heart, and why
Why we still do, even though we now know that the heart really doesn't have anything to do with love, but we still write the songs and the poems and say the words that make it sound as if we still believe the heart and love go together. So how did this all begin?
Chapter 3: How is the heart connected to emotions?
Well, you know, if you go back to millennia ago, ancient ancestors, for them, they understood that that beating heart meant life. It would beat faster with fear and love. And when someone died, it would beat no more and the body would cool. So they thought, well, this beating organ in the middle of our body, it's our heat, it's our furnace, it's what supplies our heat.
And it must be where our emotions are. Because if we're angry or scared or if we're in love or excited our heart responds to us and so that must be where our emotions are and and where our being or our soul is and and that would that held true for you know millennia right up until the renaissance
And even though we know now that it's not really true, the mythology lingers. I mean, we still write songs and tell stories and talk about my heart yearns for you, but your heart doesn't yearn for anything.
Yeah. Basically, since the Renaissance, you're right. We just view the heart physiologically as a blood pump and nothing more. And yet metaphorically, we continue to use it when we talk about our emotions, our love, our memory. It's interesting, you know, think about the grandmother sees her grandchild running to her. Where does she cross her arms over her heart?
Where do you point to on your body when you say me? You point to your chest. When we're on emails and doing texting, we use heart emojis. There's 41 heart emojis. There's only one brain emoji. When we're on Instagram or X, if we like something, we push the heart. If we're at the restaurant, we look for the heart symbol for heart-healthy food. So the symbolic heart is pervasive in our society.
And, you know, if you ask people, you know, where is your love of family and your love of God, they're going to say in their heart. And yet if you ask them, what does the heart do, they say it just pumps blood.
Isn't that weird? And nobody says, oh, my pancreas yearns for you. I mean, nobody says that. But I think what you said in the beginning, though, is so true that because we can hear the heart, you can't hear your pancreas or your lungs. I mean, your lungs work, but it's a very deliberate thing you do with them. But your heart makes this noise that reflects emotions.
So that's what must be where the emotions are.
And in fact, there's a term for that. It's called interoception. And that's feeling things within your body. And the most common one would be the heartbeat. And that can have positive ramifications and negative ramifications. When people feel irregular rhythms in their body, it induces panic attacks and anxiety. But when they feel that nice, harmonious, regular, coherent beat, it calms them.
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Chapter 4: What are the health implications of heart failure?
Let's not have the heart attack. Let's prevent it.
We're discussing some extraordinary things about the heart with my guest, cardiologist Dr. Vincent Figueiredo. He's author of the book, The Curious History of the Heart, A Cultural and Scientific Journey.
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So Vincent, I'm curious, when people have heart disease and sudden death is the first symptom, is it really so out of the blue? Is it really that Bob was fine yesterday and today we don't know why, but boom, he's just dead?
No, Bob probably hasn't been fine since he was a teenager. If you look at autopsy studies of, for instance, young soldiers during the Vietnam and Korean wars, it's remarkable how much coronary artery disease cholesterol plaque they have already built up.
This starts with just these cholesterol fatty streaks as early as our teens and continues to build through our life such that there's cholesterol plaque buildup and calcification of our coronary arteries by the time, you know, Bob is 60 years old.
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Chapter 5: Can heart disease be hereditary?
So given the shortage of human donor hearts around the world, I can see in 10 years, xenotransplantation occurring. We're now starting to grow heart muscle to replace lost heart cells. We're not salamanders. We can't reproduce heart cells in our body. But with stem cell studies, we're learning how to rebuild lost heart muscle. Maybe someday we'll be able to rebuild a whole heart.
We're developing vaccines to prevent future heart disease, looking at people's genetic makeup and determining whether they should get that vaccine early in life. We're using 3D printing to create, for instance, a perfect heart valve match to a patient. Someday maybe we'll do a 3D printing of an actual whole heart to replace someone's broken heart.
Well, I really like how you've approached this topic of the heart, really through two lenses, the medical lens of what the heart really is and what it does, but also the cultural part of it, of how we tie the heart with emotions. This was really fun. I've been talking to Dr. Vincent Figueredo.
He is a practicing cardiologist, and he is author of the book, The Curious History of the Heart, A Cultural and Scientific Journey. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you so much, Vincent. This was great.
Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox, and we would like to tell you about the new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. We're going to have a planet off. Jupiter versus Saturn! It's very well done, that, because in the script, it does say wrestling voice. After all of that, it's going to kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice.
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Chapter 6: Is it possible to die from a broken heart?
In the very best relationships, your partner has this image of you as this wonderful person, funnier, kinder, more attractive than anybody else has even than you have. And also that image is fitting for you. It's fitting for who you want to be. And in a relationship, in a very good relationship, you have that image also for your partner.
And you're each kind of trying to become that wonderful person together. That's the theme in the movie Jerry Maguire. In the beginning, Jerry Maguire, played by Tom Cruise, is a sports agent. And he... decides to leave the company that he built, the sports agency that he built. He sees it as a godforsaken business. He walks out and he wants to build something honest and true.
And he invites anybody who'd like to join him to join him. And only one person joins him. That's the character played by Renee Zellweger. And their story is a love story, but it's a story of...
kind of love in becoming so renee zellweger's character says to her sister at one point i love him i love him for the man he almost is i love him for the man he can become i'm paraphrasing and then at the iconic climax of the movie He says to her, I love you, you complete me. And that's when the relationship fully coheres. And it's this dynamic in which he's trying to become a better person.
He's trying to become a good person. And she sees that trajectory in him. She sees that image of who he could become.
and her having that image allows him to realize that and it's the same thing in the juvenile justice context if both people start with mistrust and conflict they're not having a good image of each other but what our intervention does what that ordinary magic is is it is an opportunity for a kid to begin to show that image of the good and successful person they hope to become and
the teacher can then hold that image and hold it up for the young person as they're going through the challenges of school. So, for example, in one little detail from that work, we ask teachers, well, imagine that you were in this circumstance and the kid acted out like not in a big way, but they just fell asleep in class and they refused to do their work. What would you do?
And we find that when teachers get that lifting the barred letter, they're more likely to say things like, I would remind the student of his goals, of the kind of person he's trying to become. So you have this kind of image between the two people that is a wonderful and beautiful image or is a terrible and nasty image.
And part of ordinary magic is helping people construct that image that's positive, that can help them become the kinds of people individually and together that they want to be.
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