@@tuxsbro Not sure there's solid evidence for people drawing just an i to represent a person, at least not as far back and as cross-culturally as with the heart.
"I'm glad that we have the shape that we do, not because it's perfect or because it looks like a human heart, but because it's ..." "... stacked." -- A spleenwarming quote from casting director John Green.
I was watching brotherhood 2.0 “Nerdfighters never surrender” you were asked to take every 8th week off, your response was “Does injustice take every 8th week off? Does despair take every 8th week off? Does global warming? NO! and nor shall we.” It’s amazing to me that you still feel the same way 16 years later.
@@mykadassano438 “I genuinely cannot believe how long Hank and I have been making TH-cam videos. January 1, 2007 was FOUR PRESIDENTS AGO. 6,500 days. 37% of my life. What a nice thing to be able to do for all that time.” Quoting him, he just tweeted this a few weeks ago.
@@abdullahenani9670 I could be wrong but I think myka was probably talking about the whole “Does injustice take every 8th week off? ..... NO! and nor shall we.” with John and Hank's almost complete silence on the current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. But if myka wasn't talking about that, I am.
@@niamh-tardigradethey made a video a while back about choosing not to address every (or even most) conflicts and global tragedies. I wish I could remember the details but it's a long standing decision.
One of my favorite modern artistic takes on the heart shape is that it looks like two human hearts stitched together, representing that love is combination of two wholes
Sometimes, when a couple are kissing, the space between them can look like a heart, with the chins creating the top of the heart, and the point where their chests meet are the bottom. But using the negative space in art seems like a modern art concept, so my money is on the seeds.
I'm always surprised that people don't mention lips. From the side, especially when kissing, they look exactly like a heart. And when the person is light skinned and, um, excited... they turn red
1:23 i once read someone in a comment saying that it's really noticeable when john is having too much fun with something because his voice makes a specific inflection. it sounds like he's smiling even if he's actually not. i think this is one of those moments. i hope you're feeling better john, and that you're having more fun these last few weeks.
Oh that one I'm pretty sure we do know the answer to. People with astigmatism see points of light as actually pointy things rather than like... A dot. Combine that with pre-magnification and ⭐. I would also bet that the diffraction spikes from Hubble (and now JWST) probably contribute to that too. Hence why this one has 4 points rather than the traditional 5. ✨
@DasGanon I remember the first Christmas after I got glasses as a kid and being deeply disappointed that the lights just looked like light bulbs instead of magical bursts of color.
As a biology major who has drawn many anatomically correct hearts in my time, stick with the simplified hearts! It's quicker to get your point of love across, although it won't help you identify any atriums/ventricles ;)
Your comment made me remember a comic I saw when I was a kid/teen, where a guy was with his girlfriend, and she was complaining to him, saying "not even with me can you take out of your mind for 5 minutes that you're a cardiologist?" because the guy was expressing their love by carving on a tree an anatomically correct heart instead of the traditional symbol 😂😂
Also...shapes language. Soft round symmetry gently joining at a point oriented toward the viewer (or down to the earth if on a wall) reads in a way as a shared experience, a seamless merging of shared hemispheres directing attention to the viewer. The shape/sound association study about round versus sharp visuals/words comes to mind. Motion - eye movements - attention to variations in environment.
@@arielsalinger-kraft6197HBomberGuy exposed some medium to big youtubers for blatantly plagiarizing other peoples work and passing it off as their own in a multiple hours long video that details exactly how, where and who they copied and how that is a bad thing and how they lied to their audience about it to continue to make lots of money. It absolutely ended the youtube careers of everyone who was exposed as maliciously and intentionally plagiarizing.
@@Enkrod Thank you for your concise, clear response. (And for giving me this week's long TH-cam video to watch. I swear, TH-cam is sometimes like [I imagine] the History Channel [was like] twenty years ago.) My confusion stemmed from what appears to be a colloquialism I have not heard before.
I kind of want John to write a story where an alien talks to a human and tries to understand human things. he has developed an uncanny eye for this kind of stuff. For that alien love is represented by an aura and a symbol like this: () . and so they talk and find how history has shaped their cultures and the shape of love is different for everyone and that tuberculosis also kills the aliens or whatever gets him to write a conversation between an alien and a human.
My last name is Hart which derives from a male red deer of the UK. Our family crest going back several hundred years features a ❤. I've always wondered if there is some connection between the deer and the symbol.
❤❤❤ you know when you showed some of the pictures of the human heart...I sorta saw our heart emoji/charicature of it, just remove the ventricals/pipes. I was interested to see it goes back to some of our earliest civilizations though, that's so heartfelt ❤❤
Same. The human heart is really blobby and connected to a ton of tubing, so it's not self-evident where to draw the line between it and the blood vessels. I can absolutely see a person or culture deciding that only the bottom part is the heart, and the rest is something else. It's similar to other parts of the body. E.g., sides: where the hell do they start and end? Where do you draw the line between the stomach, the sides and the back? Same for shoulders: sometimes "shoulder" means the joint, other times the part between te joint and neck, and sometimes even the part between the elbow and the shoulder joint.
Same... the heart, minus the tubes sticking out of it, is pretty clearly heart shaped, and I have never really understood the perseption that it isn't, except possibly an intentional attempt by anatomy textbooks to depict it differently.
Silphium is super interesting! It's been believed to be extinct since antiquity (due to a combination of climate conditions and overharvesting- it's considered the an early example of a plant driven to extinction directly by human pressures) but botanists and food historians keep searching for a surviving population, like the thylacine of the food plant world. They might (might) have found a surviving wild population (or at least a population of plants that are closely related)- it's unlikely that we'll ever be able to be 100% confident given that we've only got descriptions and illustrations to go on and no specimens from when it was a popular commodity to compare modern candidates to, but the potential is still exciting. (It's also unlikely that it if it was used as a contraceptive, it actually did much. There's also debate about whether it was even regularly used as one- I think the sources that refer to it as one are under debate, because historians love a good debate).
hey john! small correction - at 1:31 you say "Sappho's mad heart" but the word 'heart' is actually a modern translation to encompass modern ideas of where love originates in our popular metaphors. the word is θυμός (thumos) which does get translated to heart but more commonly could be translated to spirit or soul. (Consider θύω which means to sacrifice, esp to the gods). The word heart, one that you would more likely see in medical texts and not poetic ones, is κάρδια (kardia) which is where we get words like cardiovascular. Ancient greeks used a lot of different organs for emotions, most notably, people often felt things from the liver, which seems weird but is just as arbitary a choice as the heart. I would probably translate the poem as heart too, but it's important to remember in the (translated) words of Vardges Petrosyan that translation is a "half-eaten apple where the translator has already devoured the first half."
John, this was deep, and thoughtful, and powerful, and if you make a youtube channel where you tell us about things that are "stacked" I will be your first and forever subscriber. I will join that channel. Highest tier on the patreon.
thank you for making this video! 💕 heartshapes are an important sigil to me in my life. i draw one on my calendar when i say my daily affirmations, take a walk or meditate. ive doodled them my whole life, sometimes repetitively in times of distress. a lot of the things i wear and own have hearts on them. they are something i love deeply but had not yet taken the time to get to know to this degree. so thank you for teaching me about them 💖
@@etialpti9930 It's a good name. A takotsubo is a jar shaped octopus trap. Someone with Takotsubo cardiomyopathy has diminished contraction of the apex (bottom part) of the heart, so when the heart is squeezing, it stays large at the bottom and squeezes toward the top, making it look the same as that type of octopus trap
As a kid I remember learning from my dad that the Chinese term for "Darling" is 心肝(Xīngān). The first character is "Heart" and the second character is "Liver", which is a distinct and romantically under-appreciated vital organ.
I am so excited that I have news to contribute to this! Silphium was recently rediscovered in Turkey, the biggest reason it was believed to have gone extinct was because it is very difficult to grow as a crop. They think that it was transplanted there and forgotten about until recently. National Geographic has a big write up from 2 years ago for anyone interested.
The taro leaf is also heart shaped. I'm from Hawaii, and I was taught that the taro plant is like humanity's "older brother" and if we care for it, it will care for us, a type of familial love. You can use/eat every part of the taro plant, and the heart shape of the leaves is good at collecting fresh water from rain and dew.
Emotions do have seats in the body. A lot of the feelings associated with love are felt in the chest. It isn't just a metaphor to say your heart is full of love or that your heart is breaking because those phrases evoke real-world sensations in the body shared by most people. It was basically inevitable that we would associate the heart with love when the experience of love is associated so strongly with tension in the sternum.
Some languages have multiple words for heart. Like in Indonesian, there's "jantung" which refers to the anatomical organ, and "hati" that is more metaphorical, closer to the english word of "heart". As an Indonesian myself, I've intuitively associated hati with ❤, but jantung with just the organ in my chest. Even used in a general context, there is a clear dividing line. The english phrase "In my heart" is "Dalam hatiku" in Indonesian, meaning what I truly believe, but another phrase like "My heart dropped" meaning surprised or shocked, we would say "Jantungku copot", and not "Hatiku copot". (-ku is a possesive suffix) My theory is that it doesn't look like a heart because it's not supposed to. English just doesn't have a different word to refer to the metaphorical heart, and uses the same word to refer to the literal/anatomical heart. Thus, ❤ is a heart symbol. When it's supposed to be a love symbol, but English doesn't have a different word for it so it's stuck together. Like two people in love.
The idea that emotions are felt in the heart rather than the brain is old enough to be found in many non-proto-indo-european languages, supporting the final theory. Humans the world over have associated the heart with emotion at least far enough back that it shows up across languages. e.g. "Kokoro" in Japanese means "heart" and also touches on how you feel about things.
In Northern Europe there is also a connection between the plant Nyphoides Palteta, and the heart shape. It is commonly known as the "floating heart". In it has long been used in heraldry, especially in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. Some of those depictions have now morphed into read hearts, like on the Danish coat of arms: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_Coat_of_arms_of_Denmark.svg
it tickles me that hbomberguy sent a chill down the spine of every single responsible person on youtube in regards to sourcing articles for videos not saying you guys were ever bad about it specifically, it's just funny to me that no matter who I'm watching, everyone's taking extra steps so as not to be hbomberguyed
Thank you for answering a question I've always had! I have another one for you: why is the popular concept of "star" always a five pointed one? There are stars with many numbers of vertices, from four-pointed shuriken often called Ninja Stars, the six-pointed Star of David, to an eight-pointed star often used in Buddhism. But if you ask someone to draw a star, they'll probably draw a pentagram. How did five end up as the default?
If I had to guess, I'd say it's because you can draw it with one continuous line. With the other stars, you have to lift your writing stick off the paper. (Granted, you can do the same thing with a four-pointed star, but it's harder to make the angles look good.)
Medical animator here with my own hypothesis: The four chambers of the heart are shaped like the iconic heart shape. The point is the apex of the ventricles. The curves are the atria. I really wish I could upload an image. Just google four heart chambers. 😁 If you remove the arteries and veins connecting to the heart and cut it in half it’s easier to see.
I've watched/listened to some deep dives about sylphium (I think on Tasting History and Sawbones podcast) and apparently people use asafetida as a replacement for sylphium in recipes (since sylphium is extinct). This amuses me because asafetida smells like garlic farts so I like to imagine that love smelled like garlic farts in antiquity. ❤
So many twists and turns through millennia, leading up to my 3-year-old opening the lid on a heart-shaped pizza tonight and delightedly saying "It's for love!"
The feelings of love occurring in the heart isn't entirely unfounded, though. There was a study done where they discovered that when you're experiencing heartbreak, your brain is actually sending pain signals to your chest. So while it may not be in your heart specifically, there is real pain happening in that area of the body.
Thanks for doing the heavy lifting on this. I was just thinking about this yesterday. Then your video popped up, and I thought for sure the heart shape was somehow related to tuberculosis.
Excellent point on the emoji theory. Scott McCloud (in his excellent book Understand Comics) points out that the smiley face is in a way the universal face, the face ANYONE can relate to, understand, identify. We see "faces" like that everywhere too, as many image threads show - in electrical outlets, leaves nibbled by caterpillars, rusting old trains, and more. As a symbol it cuts right past language barriers. Plus it's a shape we can make with our hands, becoming even more practical as a form of communication of an idea that has one word but requires many, many words to REALLY explore it. And yet the feelings it can show - from lust to adoration to simple affection - that's a simple shape with a helluva lot of range! Though one of my favorite theories, from my childhood, remains "frog hearts." It was middle school, we'd just done dissection of a frog, and I could NOT help but be struck by the shape of a three-chambered heart; plus I'd only just learned the slang for a French person. I was a very cheeky child.
I googled it; animal heart dissection/images And, he's right! THEY DO LOOK LIKE HEARTS!! Edit: that woman's heart in the picture 1:55 is exactly what an animal heart looks like too, so you don't have to google it. You're welcome.
My thing with this is like... everybody says the heart shape doesn't look like a human heart, but to me it actually does? Human hearts are kinda pointy at the bottom and the top has a complex multichambered shape, which in the heart symbol is simplified to two bumps. To me there's no mystery here. But everyone else seems to think there is, so I guess it's just me!
also I heard that ❤ comes from what two hearts put together would look like, which is sweet but very gruesome (and maybe that’s really what romance is)
A theory I saw (I think on tumblr) a long time ago was the heart symbol is shaped like that because it’s what two hearts look like stitched together (although this was also early internet and the hearts in the original photo weren’t even human hearts so who knows lol)
“Heart to Heart” By Rita Dove It’s neither red nor sweet. It doesn’t melt or turn over, break or harden, so it can’t feel pain, yearning, regret. It doesn’t have a tip to spin on, it isn’t even shapely- just a thick clutch of muscle, lopsided, mute. Still, I feel it inside its cage sounding a dull tattoo: I want, I want- but I can’t open it: there’s no key. I can’t wear it on my sleeve, or tell you from the bottom of it how I feel. Here, it’s all yours, now- but you’ll have to take me, too.
It's also noteworthy that in the past people used to think the heart was like the brain, that is the part of the body which processes our emotions & memories
I'm so surprised that the explanation I've seen is not in this video. Said explanation is that the heart symbol is two hearts put together, hence the symbolizing love. I am glad to now know more possibilities thanks to this video.
The heart is a place where I feel changes in emotion as it increases its rate and heat seems to come from it. I don't feel anything in my head. So I think it's fine to sat, at least, that emotions can be experienced there. It's all connected, man!
Two things: 1) The seat of emotion representation thing is interesting. As a linguist, I've encountered several languages where the people group uses a different organ as the source of emotion--their liver, their spleen, their guts. The heart as an emotional symbol doesn't work for everybody but works really well for people who use it. 2) In my high school anatomy class, my teacher started the cardiology unit by using a ❤ drawing to show us how to draw an actual heart. It was amazing
4:22 "Your heart does not actually break when you are heartbroken" - actually, sometimes it does, it's called Broken Heart Syndrome! It's a real medical condition in which extreme emotional stress, such as the loss of a loved one, causes physical problems with the heart. Heartbreak really can break your heart.
Fun fact, many African cultures consider the stomach to be the seat of emotions as opposed to the heart. Which honestly makes a lot of sense too when thinking about physical reactions to strong emotions.
I'd like to see an unedited version of this video to better understand when and why John moved left, middle, and right frame, because a) I like how the sausage and b) I'm an amateur video editor. Is it the camera that's moving after every cut or John. Either way it seems like a lot of work, but ultimately it's natural. Great content, btw.
For those of you fortunate enough to have not yet experienced the death of a loved one, I can 100% attest that it *does* feel like your heart is breaking.
I was just re-listening to the Cabinet of Curiosities episode "Wonder Drug" (August 2022) where he talks about the silphium plant! I just finished reading the wikipedia article about it before coming on youtube and seeing John's face next to the coin and I'm struck by how often this keeps happening. I'm looking up something and suddenly "oh look, today one of the vlogbrothers made a video about that VERY THING" lmao
The Malaysian/Indonesian word hati usually means heart in translation. Unless you mean the organ, which is jantung. The organ hati refers to is the liver. They placed the seat of emotion in the liver, and metaphorical uses of heart correlate perfectly to hati.
I just wanna point out that the medieval drawing at 1:11.... yes, it does show a person with a "heart" shaped heart, but it also shows them with 3 lungs. For a "here be dragons" sort of vibe.
I mean, we typically draw anatomical hearts with a chunk of the veins/arteries and aorta connecting to it because that's what's most useful when describing how the heart operates, but if you pare it back to just the left and right ventricles and atriums, then it's substantially more "heart" shaped.
Funny that "bowels" were also seen as part of emotions. One instance would be "bowels of compassion" that is in the NT Bible. I think bowels were used as a symbol of inner emotions at least 3000 years ago.
On the subject of historical facts being more mundane and less interesting than you’d hope, I recently spent a lot of time googling the etymology of the word “guy,” only to find out that it is unequivocally attributed to effigies of Guy Fawkes. Like. It literally just comes from a guy named Guy.
Hey John Green, just wanted to let you know my History teacher ripped your entire History crash courses as a teacher. SO I WANTED to tell you thank you for making History 2 amazing and fun!!!!
I think another important point of giving a heart to someone was the importance of the heart in anatomy. Our knowledge of the brain and what it does is (contemporarily speaking) really new. But the heart was understood that if that stops, you die. Greek philosophers also believed the heart was the seat of the soul. This, giving a heart could be viewed as a gesture of “I give this to you: the very embodiment of my existence”
Part of the association with the heart to emotion comes from the physical chest pain experienced with intense emotion. Now we know it’s from increased heart rate, blood pressure, changes in breathing… but ancient people would have no knowledge of the internal workings and simply felt the connection between the pains in those moments.
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 89 | คู่เอก "ยอดไอคิว vs คิริลล์"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Z3vYkHJ_5Ig/mqdefault.jpg)
I like the idea that the heart is the world's oldest surviving emoji.
With honorable mention to 🐴 from the Lascaux cave paintings
I bet the pile of poo came first
What about the letter i? (lowercase, it looks like a person)
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@@tuxsbro Not sure there's solid evidence for people drawing just an i to represent a person, at least not as far back and as cross-culturally as with the heart.
I prefer metaphorical heart flutters to the horrifying alternative of brain flutters when seeing a crush
She stroked him.... No wait.. not that one..
What about microbiome flutters?
@@matthewbrach4922 They're why silphium is the preferred medicinal herb. :p
Fair enough! 😂
Metaphorical Brain Flutters would make for an awesome band name.
Not gonna lie, half expected a "I give The Valentine's Heart 3 and a half stars" at the end there
Okay I don't know if this was intentional, but half, or well part of a star would be one of it's points, like this '
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👍👍
"I'm glad that we have the shape that we do, not because it's perfect or because it looks like a human heart, but because it's ..." "... stacked." -- A spleenwarming quote from casting director John Green.
was not expecting john green to say "stacked" but was pleasantly delighted
I laughed so loud at that.
It rivals "Flameo, hotman?"
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Samee
I was watching brotherhood 2.0 “Nerdfighters never surrender” you were asked to take every 8th week off, your response was “Does injustice take every 8th week off? Does despair take every 8th week off? Does global warming? NO! and nor shall we.” It’s amazing to me that you still feel the same way 16 years later.
Ehhh.... does he though?
@@mykadassano438 “I genuinely cannot believe how long Hank and I have been making TH-cam videos. January 1, 2007 was FOUR PRESIDENTS AGO. 6,500 days. 37% of my life.
What a nice thing to be able to do for all that time.” Quoting him, he just tweeted this a few weeks ago.
@@abdullahenani9670 I could be wrong but I think myka was probably talking about the whole “Does injustice take every 8th week off? ..... NO! and nor shall we.” with John and Hank's almost complete silence on the current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
But if myka wasn't talking about that, I am.
@@niamh-tardigrade genuine question: what do you want them to say? and, who do you want them to address it to?
@@niamh-tardigradethey made a video a while back about choosing not to address every (or even most) conflicts and global tragedies. I wish I could remember the details but it's a long standing decision.
One of my favorite modern artistic takes on the heart shape is that it looks like two human hearts stitched together, representing that love is combination of two wholes
Sometimes, when a couple are kissing, the space between them can look like a heart, with the chins creating the top of the heart, and the point where their chests meet are the bottom. But using the negative space in art seems like a modern art concept, so my money is on the seeds.
I'm always surprised that people don't mention lips. From the side, especially when kissing, they look exactly like a heart. And when the person is light skinned and, um, excited... they turn red
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@@notyrpapa You could've just said 'blushing' or something, you know (/j)
Two hearts together isn't modern artistic
I paused at "the heart shape is a little bit, to use contemporary parlance, stacked" to audibly laugh for a solid minute. Great video.
1:23 i once read someone in a comment saying that it's really noticeable when john is having too much fun with something because his voice makes a specific inflection. it sounds like he's smiling even if he's actually not. i think this is one of those moments. i hope you're feeling better john, and that you're having more fun these last few weeks.
It always makes me happy to hear his voice like that (like in his policy genius ads) so I agree!
I'm an old fuddy-duddy...this is one of the types of Vlogbrothers videos that I, particularly, like. Thanks!
"don't tell hbomberguy I did this" wow even John Green is afraid of being in an hbomberguy video now
0:23 "(Sources in the dooblydoo. I'm not trying to get an Hbomberguy vid on me.)" 😂
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It's kinda of terrifying the weight a man who posts once a year carries in the TH-cam collective consciousness
I have to imagine it's similar to why this ⭐️ isn't shaped like an actual star.
Oh that one I'm pretty sure we do know the answer to. People with astigmatism see points of light as actually pointy things rather than like... A dot.
Combine that with pre-magnification and ⭐.
I would also bet that the diffraction spikes from Hubble (and now JWST) probably contribute to that too. Hence why this one has 4 points rather than the traditional 5. ✨
@@DasGanon as an astigmatism sufferer, i can confirm that lights do indeed look like this ✨ and this ⭐ interchangeably lol
@DasGanon I remember the first Christmas after I got glasses as a kid and being deeply disappointed that the lights just looked like light bulbs instead of magical bursts of color.
@@DasGanonit took me a long time figuring out not all people see lights that way 😢
@@KH-tt3wv I was sad too!
As a biology major who has drawn many anatomically correct hearts in my time, stick with the simplified hearts! It's quicker to get your point of love across, although it won't help you identify any atriums/ventricles ;)
“You fill my ventricles and atria with hormonal stimulation…”
Oh yeah. Go on…
I like the organ as representing love in my art, but I’m pretty sure I’m alone in that, lol
Your comment made me remember a comic I saw when I was a kid/teen, where a guy was with his girlfriend, and she was complaining to him, saying "not even with me can you take out of your mind for 5 minutes that you're a cardiologist?" because the guy was expressing their love by carving on a tree an anatomically correct heart instead of the traditional symbol 😂😂
@@Alfonso162008 That sounds amazing
@@Alfonso162008 That is simply awesome.
I love that one of our oldest references for heart-based love is Sappho.
It's amazing, Sapphic love hits different, truly 😊
Lesbians unite!
Also...shapes language. Soft round symmetry gently joining at a point oriented toward the viewer (or down to the earth if on a wall) reads in a way as a shared experience, a seamless merging of shared hemispheres directing attention to the viewer.
The shape/sound association study about round versus sharp visuals/words comes to mind. Motion - eye movements - attention to variations in environment.
Exactly, symbolism! It looks like uniting to me, 2 becoming 1.
This was a lovely little video I’m glad you made it.
❤💕
Dat HBomberGuy ref tho. Talk about a fucking hit-piece. That dude made it so easy and HBomber STILL went all-out hard in the paint on it.
Er, would it be unwise to ask what happened?
@@arielsalinger-kraft6197HBomberGuy exposed some medium to big youtubers for blatantly plagiarizing other peoples work and passing it off as their own in a multiple hours long video that details exactly how, where and who they copied and how that is a bad thing and how they lied to their audience about it to continue to make lots of money. It absolutely ended the youtube careers of everyone who was exposed as maliciously and intentionally plagiarizing.
@@Enkrod Thank you for your concise, clear response. (And for giving me this week's long TH-cam video to watch. I swear, TH-cam is sometimes like [I imagine] the History Channel [was like] twenty years ago.)
My confusion stemmed from what appears to be a colloquialism I have not heard before.
@@Enkrod Right, but what does that have to do with *this* video?
@@Nicoder6884John made a quick reference in a note on the screen when giving credit for info and people were laughing about it
I kind of want John to write a story where an alien talks to a human and tries to understand human things. he has developed an uncanny eye for this kind of stuff. For that alien love is represented by an aura and a symbol like this: () . and so they talk and find how history has shaped their cultures and the shape of love is different for everyone and that tuberculosis also kills the aliens or whatever gets him to write a conversation between an alien and a human.
I would watch that movie.
i would recommend the book The Humans by Matt Haig!
Read The Monk and Robot series by Becky Chambers 😊
i think you're thinking of homestuck
@@EtchJetty after a thread of serious, pondery suggestions, this made me giggle, thank you ❤
(or possibly, ♥️♠️♦️♣️)
My last name is Hart which derives from a male red deer of the UK. Our family crest going back several hundred years features a ❤. I've always wondered if there is some connection between the deer and the symbol.
Puns and wordplay like hart/heart are common enough in heraldry that they even have a name: canting arms.
Don't a lot of deer have white behinds- with a little brown stubby tail in the center- those look fairly heart shaped.
That conclusion felt very much like an Anthropocene Reviewed episode. Thanks for the cool video.
❤❤❤ you know when you showed some of the pictures of the human heart...I sorta saw our heart emoji/charicature of it, just remove the ventricals/pipes.
I was interested to see it goes back to some of our earliest civilizations though, that's so heartfelt ❤❤
Same. The human heart is really blobby and connected to a ton of tubing, so it's not self-evident where to draw the line between it and the blood vessels. I can absolutely see a person or culture deciding that only the bottom part is the heart, and the rest is something else. It's similar to other parts of the body. E.g., sides: where the hell do they start and end? Where do you draw the line between the stomach, the sides and the back? Same for shoulders: sometimes "shoulder" means the joint, other times the part between te joint and neck, and sometimes even the part between the elbow and the shoulder joint.
Same... the heart, minus the tubes sticking out of it, is pretty clearly heart shaped, and I have never really understood the perseption that it isn't, except possibly an intentional attempt by anatomy textbooks to depict it differently.
the hbomberguy note made me lol
What hbomb note?
@@The8BitPianist 0:23
Literally had to rewind
@@DeanCovert Hilarious. Thank you for the time stamp!
I'm amused that having hbomberguy make a video about them is now something prominent TH-camrs dread.
You know, I always wondered this too, so this was really interesting to watch.
Thanks John ❤
I like the fact that it’s one of my most used emojis.
Huh, I didn't know there was so much behind the heart symbol. Loved it!
Silphium is super interesting! It's been believed to be extinct since antiquity (due to a combination of climate conditions and overharvesting- it's considered the an early example of a plant driven to extinction directly by human pressures) but botanists and food historians keep searching for a surviving population, like the thylacine of the food plant world. They might (might) have found a surviving wild population (or at least a population of plants that are closely related)- it's unlikely that we'll ever be able to be 100% confident given that we've only got descriptions and illustrations to go on and no specimens from when it was a popular commodity to compare modern candidates to, but the potential is still exciting. (It's also unlikely that it if it was used as a contraceptive, it actually did much. There's also debate about whether it was even regularly used as one- I think the sources that refer to it as one are under debate, because historians love a good debate).
hey john! small correction - at 1:31 you say "Sappho's mad heart" but the word 'heart' is actually a modern translation to encompass modern ideas of where love originates in our popular metaphors. the word is θυμός (thumos) which does get translated to heart but more commonly could be translated to spirit or soul. (Consider θύω which means to sacrifice, esp to the gods). The word heart, one that you would more likely see in medical texts and not poetic ones, is κάρδια (kardia) which is where we get words like cardiovascular. Ancient greeks used a lot of different organs for emotions, most notably, people often felt things from the liver, which seems weird but is just as arbitary a choice as the heart. I would probably translate the poem as heart too, but it's important to remember in the (translated) words of Vardges Petrosyan that translation is a "half-eaten apple where the translator has already devoured the first half."
John, this was deep, and thoughtful, and powerful, and if you make a youtube channel where you tell us about things that are "stacked" I will be your first and forever subscriber. I will join that channel. Highest tier on the patreon.
thank you for making this video! 💕 heartshapes are an important sigil to me in my life. i draw one on my calendar when i say my daily affirmations, take a walk or meditate. ive doodled them my whole life, sometimes repetitively in times of distress. a lot of the things i wear and own have hearts on them. they are something i love deeply but had not yet taken the time to get to know to this degree. so thank you for teaching me about them 💖
Well, there is the so called 'Broken-Heart-Syndrome' so in extreme cases your heart literally breaks when you're brokenhearted.
The condition is named after the expression, so your heart does not literally break. (Also named Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, in my opinion much funnier)
@@etialpti9930 It's a good name. A takotsubo is a jar shaped octopus trap. Someone with Takotsubo cardiomyopathy has diminished contraction of the apex (bottom part) of the heart, so when the heart is squeezing, it stays large at the bottom and squeezes toward the top, making it look the same as that type of octopus trap
@@etialpti9930 As broken doesn't mean fully disfunctional I disagree with you.
@@etialpti9930 cardiomyopathy is as close to a heart literally breaking as you can get. How much closer do you want it to be?
@@etialpti9930 its called takosubko because the ventricle enlarges and looks like a squid octopus pot used in japan
As a kid I remember learning from my dad that the Chinese term for "Darling" is 心肝(Xīngān). The first character is "Heart" and the second character is "Liver", which is a distinct and romantically under-appreciated vital organ.
+
Interesting…
my soggy bacon of a brain shaking violently when seeing my crush is a new concept i'm terrified of and need to desperately implement in a story
I am so excited that I have news to contribute to this! Silphium was recently rediscovered in Turkey, the biggest reason it was believed to have gone extinct was because it is very difficult to grow as a crop. They think that it was transplanted there and forgotten about until recently. National Geographic has a big write up from 2 years ago for anyone interested.
This is exactly the type of question why I ❤ this channel
flutter means move quickly! your heart absolutely does literally do that when around someone you’re into!
The taro leaf is also heart shaped. I'm from Hawaii, and I was taught that the taro plant is like humanity's "older brother" and if we care for it, it will care for us, a type of familial love. You can use/eat every part of the taro plant, and the heart shape of the leaves is good at collecting fresh water from rain and dew.
Emotions do have seats in the body. A lot of the feelings associated with love are felt in the chest.
It isn't just a metaphor to say your heart is full of love or that your heart is breaking because those phrases evoke real-world sensations in the body shared by most people.
It was basically inevitable that we would associate the heart with love when the experience of love is associated so strongly with tension in the sternum.
Some languages have multiple words for heart. Like in Indonesian, there's "jantung" which refers to the anatomical organ, and "hati" that is more metaphorical, closer to the english word of "heart". As an Indonesian myself, I've intuitively associated hati with ❤, but jantung with just the organ in my chest. Even used in a general context, there is a clear dividing line. The english phrase "In my heart" is "Dalam hatiku" in Indonesian, meaning what I truly believe, but another phrase like "My heart dropped" meaning surprised or shocked, we would say "Jantungku copot", and not "Hatiku copot". (-ku is a possesive suffix)
My theory is that it doesn't look like a heart because it's not supposed to. English just doesn't have a different word to refer to the metaphorical heart, and uses the same word to refer to the literal/anatomical heart. Thus, ❤ is a heart symbol. When it's supposed to be a love symbol, but English doesn't have a different word for it so it's stuck together. Like two people in love.
"This shape is, to use contemporary parlance, stacked." 💀 May John never change
The idea that emotions are felt in the heart rather than the brain is old enough to be found in many non-proto-indo-european languages, supporting the final theory. Humans the world over have associated the heart with emotion at least far enough back that it shows up across languages.
e.g. "Kokoro" in Japanese means "heart" and also touches on how you feel about things.
There is evidence that the heart plays a role in emotions: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/
In Northern Europe there is also a connection between the plant Nyphoides Palteta, and the heart shape. It is commonly known as the "floating heart". In it has long been used in heraldry, especially in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. Some of those depictions have now morphed into read hearts, like on the Danish coat of arms:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_Coat_of_arms_of_Denmark.svg
Thank you to Bluey for introducing me to the apparently common Aussie phrase "love heart"
Great Video John. Felt a bit like old school vlogbrothers. Happy Valentine’s Day.
it tickles me that hbomberguy sent a chill down the spine of every single responsible person on youtube in regards to sourcing articles for videos
not saying you guys were ever bad about it specifically, it's just funny to me that no matter who I'm watching, everyone's taking extra steps so as not to be hbomberguyed
Thank you for answering a question I've always had! I have another one for you: why is the popular concept of "star" always a five pointed one? There are stars with many numbers of vertices, from four-pointed shuriken often called Ninja Stars, the six-pointed Star of David, to an eight-pointed star often used in Buddhism. But if you ask someone to draw a star, they'll probably draw a pentagram. How did five end up as the default?
If I had to guess, I'd say it's because you can draw it with one continuous line. With the other stars, you have to lift your writing stick off the paper. (Granted, you can do the same thing with a four-pointed star, but it's harder to make the angles look good.)
I was literally wondering this exact question the other day. Bless you.
Medical animator here with my own hypothesis: The four chambers of the heart are shaped like the iconic heart shape. The point is the apex of the ventricles. The curves are the atria. I really wish I could upload an image. Just google four heart chambers. 😁 If you remove the arteries and veins connecting to the heart and cut it in half it’s easier to see.
I've watched/listened to some deep dives about sylphium (I think on Tasting History and Sawbones podcast) and apparently people use asafetida as a replacement for sylphium in recipes (since sylphium is extinct). This amuses me because asafetida smells like garlic farts so I like to imagine that love smelled like garlic farts in antiquity. ❤
good news it might not be extinct! researchers think it might be Ferula Drudeana
I have a feeling in the past before modern plumbing, smelly herbs were the least of their problems
@@tonydelamancha5513 the ancient Romans actually had plumbing, more or less. Check out the ruins of Pompeii for some ancient toilets!
John (and Hank!) giggling over the word fart like innocent children will never fail to make my day 😂
Just a week ago, I was wondering about this question and made a note to myself to look it up...but lo and behold, John was one step ahead of me!
So many twists and turns through millennia, leading up to my 3-year-old opening the lid on a heart-shaped pizza tonight and delightedly saying "It's for love!"
The feelings of love occurring in the heart isn't entirely unfounded, though. There was a study done where they discovered that when you're experiencing heartbreak, your brain is actually sending pain signals to your chest. So while it may not be in your heart specifically, there is real pain happening in that area of the body.
I love this channel for so many reasons and one of them is content like this
Thanks for doing the heavy lifting on this. I was just thinking about this yesterday. Then your video popped up, and I thought for sure the heart shape was somehow related to tuberculosis.
Excellent point on the emoji theory. Scott McCloud (in his excellent book Understand Comics) points out that the smiley face is in a way the universal face, the face ANYONE can relate to, understand, identify. We see "faces" like that everywhere too, as many image threads show - in electrical outlets, leaves nibbled by caterpillars, rusting old trains, and more. As a symbol it cuts right past language barriers. Plus it's a shape we can make with our hands, becoming even more practical as a form of communication of an idea that has one word but requires many, many words to REALLY explore it. And yet the feelings it can show - from lust to adoration to simple affection - that's a simple shape with a helluva lot of range!
Though one of my favorite theories, from my childhood, remains "frog hearts." It was middle school, we'd just done dissection of a frog, and I could NOT help but be struck by the shape of a three-chambered heart; plus I'd only just learned the slang for a French person. I was a very cheeky child.
Nevermind the fact that the ♥ shape can be formed by our hands as well.
I googled it; animal heart dissection/images
And, he's right! THEY DO LOOK LIKE HEARTS!!
Edit: that woman's heart in the picture 1:55 is exactly what an animal heart looks like too, so you don't have to google it. You're welcome.
My thing with this is like... everybody says the heart shape doesn't look like a human heart, but to me it actually does? Human hearts are kinda pointy at the bottom and the top has a complex multichambered shape, which in the heart symbol is simplified to two bumps. To me there's no mystery here. But everyone else seems to think there is, so I guess it's just me!
prediction: it’s because of TB (haven’t finished the vid yet but come on, John’s talking)
also I heard that ❤ comes from what two hearts put together would look like, which is sweet but very gruesome (and maybe that’s really what romance is)
I was just thinking about this yesterday. Incredibly important video for me at this time in my life.
I fully thought John was going to explain how TB helped shape the valentine's heart
"to use contemporary parlance" is my new favorite phrase
I'm fond of the phrase "to borrow the colloquialism".
A theory I saw (I think on tumblr) a long time ago was the heart symbol is shaped like that because it’s what two hearts look like stitched together (although this was also early internet and the hearts in the original photo weren’t even human hearts so who knows lol)
Good morning, John! Happy almost Valentine's Day and almost P4A!
“Heart to Heart”
By Rita Dove
It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.
It doesn’t have
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely-
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want-
but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now-
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.
I find it more interesting, that separated by thousands of miles, each culture began to draw this symbol.
Being a high school teacher, I was bracing for “gyat,” so I’m glad it was the tamer term “stacked.” 😅
It's also noteworthy that in the past people used to think the heart was like the brain, that is the part of the body which processes our emotions & memories
I liked the theory that hearts are heart shaped because if you put two human hearts together it forms the emoji heart shape.
"It's not in your heart, it's in your head."
No John, it's an upturned ass and it's in our pants. And I dont think that makes it less cute.
I'm so surprised that the explanation I've seen is not in this video. Said explanation is that the heart symbol is two hearts put together, hence the symbolizing love.
I am glad to now know more possibilities thanks to this video.
It's a Peach. Cleft, soft, fuzzy, obvious enough to get past the monks.
The heart is a place where I feel changes in emotion as it increases its rate and heat seems to come from it. I don't feel anything in my head. So I think it's fine to sat, at least, that emotions can be experienced there. It's all connected, man!
I like how the heart symbol got turned into less than three (
4:57 I was so certain he was gonna say "but because it's stacked"
Two things:
1) The seat of emotion representation thing is interesting. As a linguist, I've encountered several languages where the people group uses a different organ as the source of emotion--their liver, their spleen, their guts. The heart as an emotional symbol doesn't work for everybody but works really well for people who use it.
2) In my high school anatomy class, my teacher started the cardiology unit by using a ❤ drawing to show us how to draw an actual heart. It was amazing
I actually like that we did away with the 4 minute rule. This video was very naturally paced, that crutch probably hasn't been necessary for a decade
4:22 "Your heart does not actually break when you are heartbroken" - actually, sometimes it does, it's called Broken Heart Syndrome! It's a real medical condition in which extreme emotional stress, such as the loss of a loved one, causes physical problems with the heart. Heartbreak really can break your heart.
This video reminded me of seeing "heart" shapes in ancient or old architecture/decor before it was common to use it. It always amuses me.
Fun fact, many African cultures consider the stomach to be the seat of emotions as opposed to the heart. Which honestly makes a lot of sense too when thinking about physical reactions to strong emotions.
I'm mostly relieved we draw the heart like that because drawing a spleen seems a lot harder
I'd like to see an unedited version of this video to better understand when and why John moved left, middle, and right frame, because a) I like how the sausage and b) I'm an amateur video editor. Is it the camera that's moving after every cut or John. Either way it seems like a lot of work, but ultimately it's natural.
Great content, btw.
For those of you fortunate enough to have not yet experienced the death of a loved one, I can 100% attest that it *does* feel like your heart is breaking.
I lost it at “the heart shape is a little, to use contemporary parlance, stacked”
I was not ready for John to say "stacked" in a Vlogbrothers video. Gen Z we have risen! 😂 3:43
Lol that's not Gen-Z, It was definitely around Waaaaay back in my day as a Millenial. I wouldn't be shocked if it was older. 😂
@@mayaenglish5424 Huh, that's interesting. Definitely got to update my lingo lore 🤣
This felt like a mini episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed! Loved it. I give this video, and the ❤ symbol, 5 stars.
I was just re-listening to the Cabinet of Curiosities episode "Wonder Drug" (August 2022) where he talks about the silphium plant! I just finished reading the wikipedia article about it before coming on youtube and seeing John's face next to the coin and I'm struck by how often this keeps happening. I'm looking up something and suddenly "oh look, today one of the vlogbrothers made a video about that VERY THING" lmao
The Malaysian/Indonesian word hati usually means heart in translation. Unless you mean the organ, which is jantung. The organ hati refers to is the liver.
They placed the seat of emotion in the liver, and metaphorical uses of heart correlate perfectly to hati.
I give the heart shape less than three stars.
i seriously thought it was because of two actual hearts squished together
I just wanna point out that the medieval drawing at 1:11.... yes, it does show a person with a "heart" shaped heart, but it also shows them with 3 lungs.
For a "here be dragons" sort of vibe.
I mean, we typically draw anatomical hearts with a chunk of the veins/arteries and aorta connecting to it because that's what's most useful when describing how the heart operates, but if you pare it back to just the left and right ventricles and atriums, then it's substantially more "heart" shaped.
I once saw a theorie that the heart symbol looks like two human hearts combined, representing how two people come together through love
i have been wondering about this recently, thanks for reading my mind and specifically catering to me 👍🏼
Funny that "bowels" were also seen as part of emotions. One instance would be "bowels of compassion" that is in the NT Bible. I think bowels were used as a symbol of inner emotions at least 3000 years ago.
On the subject of historical facts being more mundane and less interesting than you’d hope, I recently spent a lot of time googling the etymology of the word “guy,” only to find out that it is unequivocally attributed to effigies of Guy Fawkes. Like. It literally just comes from a guy named Guy.
Literally 'The Guy [TM]'? That's kinda hilarious
I once saw somewhere that the shape comes from the shape of two human hearts put together and I always like that idea💜
Hey John Green, just wanted to let you know my History teacher ripped your entire History crash courses as a teacher. SO I WANTED to tell you thank you for making History 2 amazing and fun!!!!
I think another important point of giving a heart to someone was the importance of the heart in anatomy. Our knowledge of the brain and what it does is (contemporarily speaking) really new. But the heart was understood that if that stops, you die. Greek philosophers also believed the heart was the seat of the soul.
This, giving a heart could be viewed as a gesture of “I give this to you: the very embodiment of my existence”
Part of the association with the heart to emotion comes from the physical chest pain experienced with intense emotion. Now we know it’s from increased heart rate, blood pressure, changes in breathing… but ancient people would have no knowledge of the internal workings and simply felt the connection between the pains in those moments.
hearing hanks say Stacced in that instance made my day. Happy ash Wednesday y'all