February 13, 2016

What Does It Mean When Your Heart Skips a Beat?

If seeing the one you love makes your heart skip a beat, should you see a cardiologist?

By Benjamin Meyers, David Sherman MD & Eliene Augenbraun

Join Our Community of Science Lovers!

Sometimes love makes your heart go pitter-pat. But other times that funny feeling in your chest can be from something else.

I’m Dr. David Sherman, and this is a special cardiology edition of Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. Got a minute?

A normal heart beats 60 to 100 beats a minute. It beats on average 100,000 beats a day and about three billion times in a person’s lifetime—faster when you run or get excited and slower when you are at rest.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

An arrhythmia is an abnormal heart rhythm. It could be too fast, too slow or uneven.

The heart is the size of a clenched fist.

This is a really beautiful model of a heart that’s around three times the regular size.

The heart has four chambers. This is the right atrium, the right ventricle, the left atrium and the left ventricle. The blood gathers into the right and the left atria, flows through the valves, into the respective ventricles. The blood is pumped from the right ventricle into the lungs, and from the left ventricle into the aorta and then to the entire body.

The electrical impulse of the heart starts here in the right atrium in the sinoatrial node.

This is an echocardiogram machine, which takes digital images of the heart. Each heartbeat represents a sudden squeeze of the ventricles, with both happening at the same time—the right ventricle and the left ventricle. Squeeze! Squeeze!

The heart is a muscle that runs on electricity. The electrical impulse starts in the sinoatrial node, spreads across the atrium, through the AV node, which separates the atrium and the ventricles, and then divides into a bundle that supplies the right ventricle and a bundle that supplies the left ventricle. This normal, orderly sequence of electrical activity insures that the heart muscle works as efficiently as possible.

So is it ever normal for your heart to skip a beat?

If your heart beats 100,000 times a day, it’s not surprising that some of those beats may not be perfect.

So as long as your heart’s anatomy is normal, the heart irregularities are rare and the arrhythmias are not dangerous, it’s probably normal.

Maybe even better than normal!

Thanks for the minute! For Scientific American, I’m Dr. David Sherman.

—David Sherman

[The above text is a transcript of this video.]

Credits:

Presenter: Dr. David Sherman

Writer/Director: Eliene Augenbraun

Producers/Videographers: Eliene Augenbraun, Benjamin Meyers, Lydia Chain

Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism

Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.

When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.

Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber

Thank you,

Jeanna Bryner, Editor in Chief, Scientific American