Sandeep Jahar

Yeah.

So emotions and the responses that they engender can have a direct effect on the heart.

And the heart can acutely weaken in response to

a heartbreak or grief such as after the death of a loved one or the end of a romantic relationship.

So we told her that very likely this would improve once her emotional state had returned to normal, and that's exactly what happened.

Once the grief had subsided and she came back to her baseline state, we repeated the ultrasound and her heart had returned to normal.

So it's just a fascinating syndrome.

We too often think of

The emotional aspects of the heart is purely metaphorical or symbolic, but emotions can have a direct disruptive effect on the heart.

And there really is such a thing as heartbreak.

It was a summer day in July.

My grandfather was working in a tiny shop in Kanpur, which was a rural community in North India, and he was bitten by a snake.

Now, snakebite is fairly common in India.

And when my grandfather came home for lunch, he was feeling fine.

But some neighbors brought in the snake that they claimed had bitten my grandfather.

And it was a shiny black cobra.

And my grandfather took one look at it and he slumped to the floor and died.

At the hospital, a doctor pronounced him dead on arrival and said that it wasn't a snake bite that killed my grandfather, but it was a heart attack, probably induced by the sudden sort of tremendous fright of looking at the snake that had bitten him and the fear that he was not going to be able to survive the snake bite.

Right.

Yeah.