The regulation of any individual process in the body is a rube goldbergian nightmare of hormones and neurotransmitters and things that just happen to fire under the right conditions.
I have absolutely no doubt that something in the body relies on a periodic heartbeat in some fashion, but it seems so far to not be anything particularly critical.
Agreed. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if some part of human neurology used heartbeat as a clock signal (particularly aspects that would benefit from speeding up in same situations the heart does).
>The regulation of any individual process in the body is a rube goldbergian nightmare of hormones and neurotransmitters and things that just happen to fire under the right conditions.
Yeah, it makes me wonder if would be possible to re-engineer some of this stuff to reduce the needless complexity and improve performance and reliability and service life. The problem is that there's so much spaghetti code that any change you make could have unintended consequences.
I have absolutely no doubt that something in the body relies on a periodic heartbeat in some fashion, but it seems so far to not be anything particularly critical.