#arrhythmic

Recognizing and detecting the signs that commonly precede sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS) may help to prevent premature deaths, according to research presented today at ESC Preventive Cardiology 2025, a scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).  SADS has not been well evaluated despite being one of the most common underlying causes of sudden cardiac death in young…

Researchers identify protein responsible for keeping the heart beating on time. Thoughts health innovators?

The average heart beats 35 million times a year, 2.5 billion times over a lifetime. Those beats must be precisely calibrated; even a small divergence from the metronomic rhythm can cause sudden death. For decades, scientists have wondered exactly how the heart stays so precisely on rhythm even though it contains so many moving parts.

Now, researchers at the University of Maryland, the University…

Dr. Ray Sahelian, M.D.

     Results published in the journal Circulation indicates that individuals with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids such as EPA and DHA (mostly found in fish oils) have a lower risk of atrial fibrillation, a type of heart rhythm disturbance that often requires medication. Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, from the Harvard School of Public Health, says. "Given the aging of the population, the significant and growing public health burden of atrial fibrillation, and the limited treatment options once this heart condition develops, our results highlight the need to investigate atrial physiological and arrhythmic mechanisms affected by total and individual omega-3 fatty acids and to test their efficacy for preventing new onset of atrial fibrillation among older adults."

Arrhythmic - Not rhythmic, occurring without regularity or rhythm. Rhythm is among my perennially favorite words.  I'd put it in the top 3 without knowing what fill the other two slots.  Yeah, it's that important. There is a nice assonance (at least the way I pronounce it), but the sound of the word has a lyric appeal beyond that simple poetic scheme.  To me, "rhythm" sounds like an accented drumbeat followed by an unaccented beat, a building block for many percussive rudiments.  And in that light, the English word is a fitting metaphor for how I live my life.

Natural rhythms

Circadian rhythms, natural rhythms, examples of ways in which we structure our lives around repeated patterns are all over the place.  Which is why it is so jarring when one of these becomes irregular.  In college, I was sleep deprived nearly constantly.  Sometimes I had the legitimate excuse that I really needed to work, but often, if I am honest, those late nights or work were caused by incessant procrastination in the days or weeks preceding that assignment's due date.  In my most difficult term, when I took seven classes and 24 units, the sheer volume of beats to be organized into the score forced me to arrange them carefully, writing a comprehensive schedule each Sunday to conduct which tasks needed to be completed and by when.  I began to go to sleep at a regular time, even with all of my work.  Again, through careful alchemy, my circadian arrhythmia became rhythm. Structure.  Language relies upon it.  An accessible narrative does, too, and no matter how unique any individual story may seem, you can always identify analogs to the structure that it employs.  This certainly isn't because events order themselves naturally.  Any ecologist can point to isolated instances of structured relationships in nature: the intimate relationship of Our Lord's Candle yucca plant and the moth Pronuba yuccasella, for instance, or the germination of seeds every year in the same season, or most simply, the repetition of those very seasons.  But as soon as you begin to introduce more elements into the equation, it becomes too complex to summarize with a complete system, and you have to look for nodes from which to draw general inferences about how it is behaving. Certainly every natural process can be described this way.  So, how and why do we draw structure, and for that matter, rhythm, from chaos?  Rationally, it's because our systems of comprehension, our metaphysics and our epistemology, rely upon our ability to make something temporarily distinct and fixed out of the amorphous and dynamic universe.  More viscerally, and I think this is the more important explanation, chaos is terrifying.   Encoded in our survival instinct is the inclination toward order, and thus revulsion of chaos.  You want to know where you can get potable water the next day, and the day after that.  Same goes for food, and shelter, and even fulfilling social relationships.  Once you organize into larger societies, the more the universalists (and we all become authoritarian universalists, to some extent, when we have the power to make decisions for more than one person) it seems, see the need to subdivide and order actions to make them fit within the governing structure.  The chaos of governing the United States, as a cohesive whole, presents the same conundrum as my overbooked academic schedule.   Imagine hanging a line of chairs from a slack-line strung between two skyscrapers.  You wouldn't want to place the weight in random clusters, but in an uniform (rhythmic) distribution across the line.  

Hey, look at that funicular line in the support cables.  It's almost as if there's a UNIFORM DISTRIBUTION. But that conception of the chair metaphor considers gravitational force as the only, or at least the primary, variable working against the chairs staying on an unbroken line.  What happens when you introduce wind forces, rotational force of scattered seats, or an earthquake shaking the buildings?  My answer is that you must reinforce the structure in a manner which anticipates and compensates for those irregularly occurring forces, but doesn't disturb the equilibrium in their absence.  Physically, you could achieve that with oblique anchors connected between the cable and a comparatively stable foundation.   I draw the same conclusion about anchoring social organizations, circadian rhythms, your novel's narrative, a piece of music.  In litany: You can have social programs into which people regularly pay a portion of their income to compensate for the times when they can't pay.  You can take a nap to make up for a bit of lost sleep the night before.  Your protagonist can have an epiphany that brings them out of a chaotic series of tragic events.  You can segue back into the motifs of the piece after a long interlude of improvisation.   Yet you'll notice that what all of these plans rely on is a return to a state of rhythmic equilibrium, a hand which grabs the broken metronome and sets it back to tick tick tick ticking.  If you want to be healthy, you have to sleep regularly.  Nobody wants to listen to a story that is simply an unbroken series of unfortunate events.  Neither do they want music that is completely random, arrhythmic, and without melody.  Humans must find ways to structure our lives, because otherwise they aren't human. So why is the absence of rhythm important?  Can't we always read or watch fairy tales, or listen to "Old McDonald" on an infinite loop?  Of course you could, but you'd forever be unrealistically neotonous.  We hate chaos, and yet every one of us, past a certain age, has had a breakup (or a dry spell for those who eschew monogamy), a death in the family, a moment when the record skipped.  Being cognizant of the inevitability of interruptions to your rhythm is what constitutes maturity.  The haters are gonna hate.  What matters is how you react. It is no wonder that great art relies upon conflict.  Somewhere the rhythm must encounter chaos and then overcome it, because that is the artistic manifestation of the great struggle of our lives, the struggle to stay afloat.  One of my proudest creations was the music that I wrote for a performance of The Odyssey on stage titled "The Wanderings of Odysseus."  When Odysseus is in the underworld, I wrote grating, arrhythmic music (difficult for a percussionist), and I think that unnerved the audience, gave them an eerie sense of dread being surrounded by the chaos of the dead.  And yet, Odysseus leaves Hades and returns to his ship.  Though he is storm-tossed some more, he comes back to order.  Creativity comes when we dismantle or destabilize systems, but I think that we will always be eager to see the artist give us something to grab onto again, because humanity itself has a very tenuous grasp on existence. This, really, is the philosophy behind my love for rhythm.  Yes, I am a drummer, and I have that influence, and YES I love to groove on phat riffs, but ultimately it is because I enjoy riding out the smooth patches after struggling through the storm.  And of course, the moments of pleasure, the good flow, and the peace of sleep would not be so enjoyable if it were not for the interruption, for the arrhythm that accompany them. One final thought.  I recognize the value of interruptions to our rhythm.  They help us realize where our structures are weak and come up with ways to abate those weaknesses.  But when things don't have to be bad, I want them to be good.  The example that I am burning to write about is kissing.