Health and medicine: Heart cells up close!

Get a close-up view of the cardiac cells and see what makes them different from the other (skeletal and smooth) muscle cells. Rishi is a pediatric infectious disease physician and works at Khan Academy.

Health and medicine

The medical world can be a confusing place. Patients, their families, and even students entering health fields might feel overwhelmed by the large vocabularies and complicated explanations. We hope to make understanding the medical world a bit easier. Look around! These videos do not provide medical advice and are for informational purposes only. The videos are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you have read or seen in any Khan Academy video.

Heart Muscle Contraction

Your heart is made of a special type of muscle, found nowhere else in the body! This unique muscle is specialized to perform the repetitive task of pumping your blood throughout your body, from the day you’re born to the day you die. We’ll take an in-depth look of how the heart accomplishes this on a cellular level, and learn about the proteins actin and myosin that are the workhorses that tug and pull on one another to create every single muscle contraction. You’ll appreciate the fact that your heart beat is a fairly sophisticated process!

Topic: Science

Learn about all the sciences, from physics, chemistry and biology, to cosmology and astronomy, across hundreds of videos, articles and practice questions.