'Decoding' the heart-shaped symbol

The heart-shaped symbol doesn't really look anatomically like the human heart, but why is it still accepted by the majority?

To this day, the origin of the heart-shaped symbol is still a challenge to the scientific community.

According to IFLScience , in the latest effort, a study from the Netherlands has proposed several hypotheses.

The commonly used heart symbol looks nothing like a real human heart - (Photo: Shutterstock)

According to Dutch neurosurgeon Pierre Vinken and study author, the earliest illustration of the classic heart-shaped symbol appears in a 13th-century text , and was probably inspired by philosopher Aristotle's unusual descriptions of this organ of the body.

Another possibility is that the heart symbol represents the leaves of a giant extinct plant called silphium , which once grew along the coast of North Africa and was used as a contraceptive by the ancient Greeks and Romans. grand.

Regardless of its origin, the heart-shaped symbol still does not resemble a real human heart . But no one cares about this, because this symbol is often used to express the image of "heart" in a metaphorical sense, that is, to express emotions, feelings and love.

The heart symbol became popular in the 15th and 16th centuries . It wasn't until the mid-20th century that scientists realized that the simplified shape of the heart could actually be based on anatomical reality.

The heart symbol does not talk about the heart, but about human emotions and feelings - (Photo: Shutterstock).

The first replica of the coronary artery system was created in the 1950s. When plastic was injected into the aorta of a deceased person, the plastic flow suddenly created a shape resembling a heart symbol.

Several decades later, with the development of new techniques, contrast agents injected into the coronary arteries reveal exactly what the circulating heart actually looks like.

These observations raise questions about whether ancient anatomists somehow saw the above pattern thousands of years before it was revealed by modern science.

Speculating about this possibility, the study authors wondered whether these early anatomists created similar postmortem molds of coronary arteries, using primitive materials such as plaster instead of plastic. ?

Admitting that this hypothesis is highly speculative, the research team believes that this may be "the most reasonable hypothesis to explain the exact correspondence between our currently commonly used images of the heart." me with the image of the heart from ancient times".

The study was published in the Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine .