The human animal averages 60 to 100 heartbeat a minute.

To me, that's like the Goldilocks heartbeat.

Not too fast, not too slow.

Just right.

You know, as heartbeat's go.

So steady and reassuring.

But then there's the black capped chickadee,

which beats 480 times a minute.

A tempo so fast, just listening to it makes me feel nervous.

I don't mean to be judgy, but I feel like it would suck to have the heartbeat of a black

capped chickadee, like drinking a truck full of five-hour energy drinks every single day

of your life.

Someone told me recently that the tempo of most animal heartbeats is related to size,

how big an animal is, how small.

The bigger the scale of the animal, the slower the tempo of its heart, like the elephant,

which clocks in at a chill 30 heartbeat a minute.

Most of the time, we don't think a lot about tempo, how fast or slow something goes,

or scale, how big or small something is.

So we're mostly unaware of how tempo and scale affect things.

But recently, I've been talking to this unusual group of people who've made me think about

those two things a lot.

And I've come to understand how important scale and tempo are in determining what happens

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