The heart beats to circulate blood through the body. Inside the heart are nerves that give off electrical pulses which cause the heart to contract.

Your heart is a vital muscular organ. Without it you could not sustain life. Like a pumping machine, the heart provides the power needed for life. It's small, a little larger than a clenched fist. Relatively simple in function, your heart's primary purpose is to pump...24 hours a day, 70 to 80 times a minute. With each beat, the heart pumps blood that delivers life-sustaining oxygen and nutrients to 300 trillion cells. Each day the average heart "beats" (or expands and contracts) 100,000 times and pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood. In a 70-year lifetime, an average human heart beats more than 2.5 billion times, pumping approximately 1 million barrels of blood. Your heart is at the center of your circulatory system, which delivers blood to all areas of your body. An electrical system regulates the heart and uses electrical signals to contract the heart’s walls. When the walls contract, blood is pumped into your circulatory system. The circulatory system is a network of flexible tubes through which blood flows as it carries oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the body. It includes the heart, lungs, arteries, arterioles (small arteries) and capillaries (minute blood vessels). It also includes venules (small veins) and veins, the blood vessels through which blood flows as it returns to the heart. If all these vessels were laid end-to-end, they would extend for about 60,000 miles--far enough to encircle the earth more than twice. http://www.fi.edu/learn/heart/index.html http://www.howstuffworks.com/heart.htm http://www.advocatehealth.com/system/info/library/articles/heartcare/howorks.html http://www.childrensheartinstitute.org/educate/heartwrk/hearthse.htm

It knows no other way.

Ya the heart pumps blood to and from itself. To send oxygen to the rest of the body or the cells will die. everything is made up of cells. The heart has a nerve...i think it's called a node, anyway, it tells the heart to beat. When someone need a fibulator, that means that that node has gotten out of rhythm and shocking it stunns it for a brief second and then the heart should get back into rhythm.