Ernest Starling

When more blood flows into the ventricles, the cardiac muscle fibers stretch slightly, and this stretch causes them to contract with greater force, much like pulling a rubber band back further makes it snap forward harder.

The mechanism was named after Otto Frank and Ernest Starling, who described it independently in the early nineteen hundreds.

It is one of the ways the heart maintains balance between the amount of blood entering and leaving, all without any conscious effort.

The heart simply senses how full it is and adjusts accordingly.