The heart has reasons that reason does not know, said Blaise Pascal…

By Malcolm Browne, The New York Times

A young composer and his father, a cardiologist who believes that a healthy heart must "dance" rather than "march", have combined their ideas about art and biological complexity to produce a collection of songs based on heartbeats.

The results, recorded on piano by the composer, Zach Davids, a student at Brown University, are part of an exhibition that opened last month at the Boston Museum of Science, called "The Dance of Chance." The melodies were derived from cardiograms of patients at at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where Mr. David’s father, Dr. Ary L. Goldberger, is director of electrocardiography. Dr. Goldberger's son, who uses the name Davids professionally, added harmony and tempo to the cardiogram melodies...

"The fact that a beating heart can be the basis of pleasing sequences of notes leads to a deeper question," said [Dr. Goldberger.] "Is an act of creativity an externalization of basic biological dynamics?" Dr. Goldberger and his collaborators...have published a series of papers in recent years elaborating on the idea that healthy biological functioning is dependent on a certain kind of irregularity. Their papers...have reported the discvoery of "fractal" mathematical patterns that influence the rhythms of heartbeats and walking strides, the structures of nerve networks, circulatory systems, lungs, DNA, and even the biological changes that accompany aging.

In all of these manifestations of fractal patterns, he believes, a high degree of complexity is linked to healthy functioning, and when complexity is smoothed out, illness, aging and death seem to follow.

Dr. Goldberger surprised cardiologists six years ago with the conclusion he and his colleagues reached--and reported last year in the journal Physica A--that a healthy heart exhibits variations in beats that disappear from a diseased heart on the verge of failure.

Dr. Goldberger says the discovery does not imply that arrhythmias and gross irregularities in heartbeat are healthy. "What we measure is the precise time between beats" he said. "The time interval between one beat and the next varies slightly in the healthy heart."

The mathematics of fractals was developed by Dr. Benoit B. Mandelbaum of IBM in the 1960s and 1970s. Fractal structures are defined as having self-similarity at all scales; for example, a jagged coastline is perceived as having roughly the same irregular shape, whether all of it is seen from a satellite, or a small part from an airplane, or smaller parts still be a sunbather or a microorganism. Each vantage point offers a different scale of view, but at each scale, the same general pattern persists.