General Education Requirements
Not currently certified for a requirement. Courses are typically considered for Ways certification a quarter in advance.
Course Description
Physical activity generates a lot of heat in the body. If you cannot eliminate that heat, your temperature rises. We live close to the edge—the thermal edge of life and death. Usually, our body temperature is close to 37 degrees centigrade. Only a few degrees above that puts us into heat illness, and not much higher can be lethal. We are partially protected from that terrible fate by our bodies shutting down as muscles and brain get close to the danger zone. But, that gradual shutdown impairs performance. At Stanford, we have discovered previously unappreciated major pathways that remove heat from the body. We developed technology to use those adaptations to efficiently extract heat. The result is that muscles keep working, physical conditioning increases, and performance improves. In our seminar, we will learn about the biology of thermoregulation and its role in athletics and strenuous work in hot environments such as experienced by firefighters and military personnel. We will engage in experiments on ourselves to test the benefits of heat extraction on our own physical conditioning.
Meet the Instructor: H. Craig Heller
"I am a physiologist who loves to study how the human body and those of other animals work. Some of my current work is on sleep and circadian rhythms and their roles in learning and memory. But, this IntroSem will focus on a different research interest—how the body regulates its temperature. We stay close to 37 degrees C even when exposed to extreme environments. How do we do that? I have investigated how the brain regulates body temperature and some of that exciting work has been on hibernating animals including bears. That work led to research on heat exchange in humans including hypothermic surgical patients. And, that work led to the discovery of special heat loss areas of the body that we now exploit to prevent or decrease hyperthermia. The amazing side discovery was that temperature of the muscle is an important cause of muscle fatigue, so if you extract the heat, the muscle keeps on working. That is what we will study in our seminar."
