Listen to your heart-brain

When we make important decisions, we talk about our hearts. Follow your heart. You know in your heart it’s true. What does your heart tell you? Listen to your heart. I’ve set my heart on it. I’ve had a change of heart. Our language is full of idioms about our hearts. But the heart is just a muscle, right? It pumps blood around your body. Those feelings are actually in your head, your brain. Billions of neurons, linked up by synapses, firing electricity back and forth – that’s what’s really happening... Or so we thought.

Then we discovered that the heart has its own brain. We already knew that the heart communicates with the brain, with nerve impulses, pressure waves, and biochemicals. But in 1991, Dr J Andrew Armour discovered that it also has about 40,000 neurons – just like the brain – and that it also communicates using electricity. Neurons + electricity: that’s how we think. The heart is capable of thought.

This is the study of “neurocardiology”, which would have sounded absurd 20 years ago – the study of how the heart thinks and how it communicates with our head-brains. The pathway of information from our heart to our head is very important, because it shapes how we interpret that information. The heart’s pathway to the head goes up the vagus nerve, to the medulla, then the sub cortex (with the thalamus and amygdala) to cascade up to the cortex. Let’s look at this, to see what that means.

The cortex is the “gray matter” around the top of our brains – what we usually think of when we talk about our brains. That’s the place of conscious, logical thought. But deeper inside the brain, other parts don’t think in that conscious, logical way – and are often more powerful. This is the sub-cortex.

The sub-cortex doesn’t deal in thoughts. It’s the arena of instinct, emotion, impulse. The amygdala, inside the sub-cortex, is especially important – it’s a storehouse of emotional memory, comparing what is emotionally familiar with new information. It also manages stressful situations and negative emotions: if something bad happens, the amygdala lights up. The thalamus, also in the sub-cortex, processes our senses, manages sleeping and waking, and is closely tied to consciousness. “These areas are directly connected to the base of the frontal lobes, which are critical for decision making and the integration of reason and feeling,” writes the Institute of HeartMath. The heart’s signals “cascade up into the higher centers of the brain, where they may influence perception, decision making and other cognitive processes.” We really are thinking with our hearts.

The vagus nerve is also important, because it controls the heart rate, and it's all about the heart rate.

But Hope was shaking her head. “Your nervous system, your emotions, everything points back to the heart. You get excited, your heart races. You feel calm, your heart slows. If you’re constantly stressed, you can get heart-attacks; a terrible shock can stop your heart...”
           – Revelations, final book in the Godspeed Trilogy

We already know how important emotions are for health – that stress can cause heart-attacks, that meditation can slow the heart rate and improve health. Now we’re discovering the heart’s role in this. A steady, calm heartbeat is called “coherent”. We know that being calm is good for thought. But now we’ve discovered that our heart rate isn’t just a response to feelings or thoughts.

Our data indicate that when heart rhythm patterns are coherent, the neural information sent to the brain facilitates cortical function. This effect is often experienced as heightened mental clarity, improved decision making and increased creativity. Additionally, coherent input from the heart tends to facilitate the experience of positive feeling states. This may explain why most people associate love and other positive feelings with the heart and why many people actually "feel" or "sense" these emotions in the area of the heart. In this way, as will be explored further in the studies presented in this Overview, the heart is intimately involved in the generation of psychophysiological coherence.
           – The Heart Math Institute

The heart has its own thoughts, it can communicate them to our head-brains, and it can change the way we think. The last post spoke about brainwaves and how adjusting our brainwaves can control our consciousness. The heart’s rhythms can change brainwave patterns. And we know that to reach our head-brain, our heart-brain’s thoughts have to come through the amygdala and the thalamus, the places of emotion and of decisions which run deeper than logic.

Perhaps, to be enlightened as part of the New Age of Enlightenment, we need to listen to our hearts.