Is Rhythm In Our DNA?

rhythm is all around us it thrills us it soothes us it's within us and removes us from planetary systems to ecosystems the symphonic the harmonic pulses to our pulse the first musical instrument was doubtless the human voice but after that must have come a cushion rhythm is something deep in our soul so does that mean it's in our DNA every culture on earth has its own musical tradition we have evolved to feel and create rhythm and maybe that comes from within in other words is groove really in the heart I teach junior doctors sitting the exams to become internal medicine specialists here in the UK and I'm part all of my medical knowledge it takes about 20 minutes in the practical exam they have to examine patients and find the diagnosis without any modern technology just their eyes their hands and their ears they check the nervous system the abdomen the lungs but the biggest discriminator the hardest skill that often makes or breaks a candidate is listening to heart sounds and so cardiologists are regarded as the Masters of auscultation this is our tool the same way an anesthetist has a laryngoscope a general surgeon has a scalpel neurologist has a tendon hammer and a dermatologist has a share portfolio but what are we actually listening for with our stethoscope ancient Egyptian and Indian physicians documents refer to audible signs of disease and so does the father of Western medicine Hippocrates for hundreds of years medicine men would place their ears directly against a patient which let's just say I'm glad we don't have to do that anymore but then when a the Ophelia saath lennick a bashful young French doctor in 1816 saw a generously proportioned young woman and as linic delicately put it due to her height fatness the conventional method would not work so he reached for a pamphlet rolled it up into a tube and invented the first stethoscope telescope to see far stethoscope to see into the chest medicine would never be the same again now you know what a heart monitor sounds like beep beep beep but that's not how a heart sounds to share with you how hearts actually sound I could use one of the many recordings online but instead an amazing paper from 1910 explains how you can fake heart sounds by placing your stethoscope inside your hand and I'm going to do the same with a microphone a normal heart has two sounds the first made up of the mitral and tricuspid valves closing marking the start of the ventricles pumping they eject the blood and then the aortic and pulmonary valves closed causing the second heart sound it sounds like this you can even change time signature sometimes one sound will split which can suggest a structural problem if the heart fills rapidly one can hear a third heart sound like this it's entirely normal in healthy young people and in pregnant women but it tends to disappear in your early 20s I remember realizing I lost my third heart sound a few years ago I wrote my will that same day if it's present in an older patient it means there's a problem heart failure and fluid overload a fourth heart sound is always abnormal and that's caused by a stiff heart it sounds like this and sometimes a stiff heart starts failing and you get a gallop rhythm this patient is sick obviously named after a galloping horse but always reminded me of a steam train maybe hurtling towards Clayton ravine unless the patient can be saved by all of our magical potions you can also simulate murmurs with this technique although that's much too big a topic for this video is it a coincidence that the human race has evolved this primal urge for rhythm and we've got a metronome sitting in our chests maybe it's not even our heart that sets the beat for our lives the first sound we hear as soon as hearing develops at around 20 to 25 weeks gestation is our mother's heartbeat anybody watching who's looks after a newborn baby will know that one of the tricks to soothing them is playing simulated sounds from inside the womb I don't know if my babies were that into it to be honest but whenever I turned on there you and the dream sheep maternal heart beat sound effect I felt supremely relaxed the maternal heart gradually speeds up and works harder during gestation a magical nine-month accelerant oh and crescendo culminating in the grand finale of birth and then our musical preference for beats per minute slows from 200 beats per minute in a child's 285 in later life again mirroring our resting heart rate which gradually slows as we age I take that all with a pinch of salt as musical tastes have changed over the decades which is a big confounder but getting upset about every tenuous overreaching conclusion in psychology research would make about as much sense as shouting at clouds I disappeared down a very adorable pubmed rabbit hole learning about research into how sounds in the womb affect the developing mind much of it is about external sounds or voice recognition and how your culture can shape your musical mind from before you're even born all very interesting stuff but our first metronome is our mother's heart and recordings of a maternal heart beat played to newborn babies reinforced their first rhythmic action sucking some have proposed that the exposure to the this isochronous fleet imprints a predisposition to isochronous music but this doesn't seem to be borne out by the disparate and complex time signatures found in music all over the world from a simple four to the floor beat to the complex 29 beat dolla of Indian classical music embodied cognition is the theory that many aspects of how our minds work are intrinsically linked to the biological processes of our entire body's embodied musical cognition postulates that certain processes have musical correlates around the same frequency so musical tastes tend to mirror the frequencies of our heartbeats or how our muscles move when we speak as speech frequency is about the same all over the world perhaps you think that you aren't able to follow rhythm because you can't tap a beat or you suck on the dance floor but in fact you're probably more rhythmic than you realize try this count down from 10 to 1 let's do it together 10 9 8 7 without even realizing you probably continued to count at the exact same rhythm with incredibly regularly spaced intervals speech is all about rhythm or cadence sometimes called meter or simply flow you see we all talk with a natural flow to deviate from this can change how we will sound the meaning of our speech is wrapped up in its rhythm to prove my point this whole paragraph is written in iambic pentameter inspired by an Englishman of whom you may have heard William Shakespeare who's not a youtuber because youtubers tend to talk with a strange unnatural cadence pausing on apparently random words in an inexplicable singsong intonation and entirely abandoning normal breathing patterns without realizing that phrasing and pauses are an intrinsic part of how we communicate gradually infecting others until every video essayist and EDD youtuber sounds the same like a malfunctioning AI generated from CGP grey scishow and Stephen Hawking Shakespeare shows ambach Tomita ten syllables with alternating accents as he felt it most accurately reflected natural speech he tended to use it when his characters felt strong emotions and this has been proposed as the reason Shakespeare's writing still feels alive today English scholars frequently refer to the ion pairs of notes with the accent on the second syllable as a heartbeat at the very center of it Shakespeare's writing the dum-dum-dum-dum maybe this is why he used it for emotionally charged speeches when a character is speaking from the heart prepare yourself for the least scientific thing that has ever featured on this channel but something quite fun that I learned from Ben crystal here's one of Romeo's famous soliloquies if you write 8 9 10 11 12 on the side here and then count how many syllables are in each line and then plot them out you get a heart beat alright that's enough of the humanities thank you very much after talking about economics on this channel once I got a nosebleed and vomited for three hours but now I'm talking about English literature truly you either die an unsullied hero of science or you live long enough to see yourself get infected by social sciences I'm joking that's actually a very stupid thing to say because this video is the long overdue second installment in a series called the art of medicine that's the thing that makes me love it so much as a subject is the fact medicine blends together art and science humanities and social studies the physical exam the laying on of hands being with your patient and of course listening to their heart is the very essence of medicine in an era of covert all of those things have been stripped away from patients and doctors but the erosion of the consultation has been happening for much longer doctors are required to click hundreds of boxes on a computer fill out endless forms struggle with infuriating hospital management and administration and see ever-increasing numbers of patients leaving less and less time to dedicate to sitting and talking to their patients where the critics also come from within our ranks as well people who claim the ultrasound probe is more accurate than the stethoscope are correct but they're missing the point we could give every patient a head-to-toe scan and never touch them once but that wouldn't be providing care it would be converting us into technicians we've already lost the skills of the previous generation when I graduated a professor who was just about to retire spent a good hour teaching me about a single physical sign that most doctors don't even check for don't even know how to check for these days he would say that he knew far less than his teachers who of course had none of the modern technology that we have today and relied purely on their examination skills to make important diagnoses when I spent time in South African and Sri Lankan hospitals the doctors at my level ran rings around me when it came to examination skills I'm not saying we ignore advances in our field I'm not ignorant to how medicine has changed but just as a rocket engineer can derive immense enjoyment from hand building a wooden chair using ancient carpentry tools or the captain of a naval battleship can still navigate by the stars doctors should treasure and maintain their traditions this is our history this is our art the art of auscultation you know me as this cynical sarcastic know-it-all here but if you want to see the mask slip then head on over to nebula to see me exposed as a naive trusting fool in Tom Scott's game show money that's just one of many nebula originals I really enjoyed Volks Geist's history of synths as well as rare earths illegal alien nebula is where we creators can experiment with things that might not work on YouTube so by signing up you are supporting me and all the other creators there now you can get membership to nebula free when you subscribe to curiosity stream the coronavirus content on this channel has been important to make but it's videos like this esoteric topics that really bring me enjoyment and it's made possible by curiosity stream as they have consistently supported me for the last year you know the deal thousands upon thousands of high quality excellent documentaries thankfully not everybody is obsessed with the heart as me so you'll find a neurological take on today's topic over at curiosity stream is music in our genes are some people just born musical inside a virtuosos brain is a fascinating deep dive into humans relationship with music click the link below to sign up using my code and get not only a curiosity stream subscription but nebula thrown in for free

Channel: Medlife Crisis

Views: 118,295

Rating: 4.9760771 out of 5

Keywords: Medlife Crisis, Medicine, Science, Education, Comedy, Doctor, Cardiology, Medical School, Music, Rhythm, Psychology, Evolution, Auscultation, Heart sounds, Physical examination, USLMLE, MRCP, Cardiologist

Id: yWtNNzNDwU4

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020