The mathematics of the heart

Math and the heart – the words sound completely opposed.  We like to divide things into “left-brain” and “right-brain” and never the twain shall meet. I’m this or I’m that.  In fact, that neat distinction isn’t something neurology supports, and we might do better to follow the Renaissance ideal – to achieve in all spheres.  At the moment, most of our respect is reserved for the math side of things – for proof, for science, for good empirical fact, for logic. And the moment we do that, we automatically consign all matters of the heart and emotion to a box labeled unscientific, illogical, unproven, fluffy.  This is a dangerous way to live – and as we start to use math to explore the heart, we find out why.

The maths of being nice

In a recent article in the New Scientist, Martin Nowak explains how he’s used mathematics to explore human cooperation – and been able to show some surprising and powerful results.  For evolutionary psychology, cooperation is fascinating: why would we evolve to help each other, often to our own cost? Why should I tell you about a great job opportunity if you’re more likely to get it than I am, or spend my weekend painting your house when mine needs cleaning?  How does that help natural selection in my favor?  There are five main ways we cooperate that do act in our favor – some obviously, others more subtly:

• Ÿ         kin selection – helping a close relative, I’m painting your house because you’re my mom
• Ÿ         direct reciprocity – tit-for-tat, I help you paint so you’ll help me clean
• Ÿ         indirect reciprocity – if I help you, other people will know and help me later
• Ÿ         spatial selection – we’re neighbors, so we help each other and survive in clusters
• Ÿ         group selection – we’re part of a group who all help each other, plus that means we do better than other groups

Martin Nowak’s mathematical models are a neat, elegant way of showing how these different forms of cooperation work and benefit us.  As a strong religious believer, he’s equally interested in looking at how his work overlaps with religious beliefs:

I see the teachings of world religions as an analysis of human life and an attempt to help. They intend to promote unselfish behaviour, love and forgiveness. When you look at mathematical models for the evolution of cooperation you also find that winning strategies must be generous, hopeful and forgiving. In a sense, the world's religions hit on these ideas first, thousands of years ago.

The power of forgiveness versus punishment is a point to which he returns.  Punishment can be used to police cooperation – cooperate or else! – and most people hold on to the belief that punishment works, or if at least it should, or even if it doesn’t, we still need it, because not to have it would just be… just be…

Not to have punishment would just be forgiveness.  “Who would have thought,” says Nowak, “That you could prove mathematically that, in a world where everybody is out for himself, the winning strategy is to be forgiving, and that those who cannot forgive can never win?”

HeartMath

The Institute of HeartMath has a similar intersection between “left-brain” approaches to knowledge and a “right-brain” subject – except the “right-brain” aspect, emotion, might not be in the brain after all.  As we explored in Listen to Your Heart-Brain, the heart has its own brain.  Neurocardiology looks at how our heart’s thoughts are communicated to the brain and the role that this plays in our thinking, our life, and even our health.  The relationship between stress and heart-attacks has been known for years, but this heart-health relationship is now being explored much more widely and in much more detail.  A healthy metaphorical heart, seat of love and emotions, is intimately tied together with a literally healthy heart.  We weren’t such fools, after all, all those years that we said the heart, not the brain, is the seat of emotion.

Much of the Institute’s work and focus is on individual health and helping individuals deal with their emotions – which is also, inevitably, helping individuals deal with their relationships.  We are too rooted in society, it turns out, to deal with each individual as a separate entity.  And our responses to each other are a crucial part of our health.  Interestingly, the Institute also soon addressed the subject of forgiveness.  A study compared the effect of feeling angry or caring towards other people, by measuring secretory immunoglobulin A (S-IgA).  This antibody is a major part of our immune system, and used to indicate our general immune functioning.  The higher your S-IgA levels, the stronger your immune system.

Anger, it turns out, has an immediate and negative effect on our own ability to fight disease and stay healthy.  Suddenly Michael Nowak’s mathematical findings start to make sense.  Punishment really does hurt us more than the person we punish, because our anger makes us vulnerable to disease and illness.  Forgiveness really is the way to win and those who don’t forgive can never win.

The HeartMath blog has plenty more to say about forgiveness, from the many ways it helps and heals your body, with everything from back pain to depression, and also how to find the capacity to forgive within ourselves, those things that help us let go of our grudges, our pain, and our bitterness, be that music, reflecting on our own faults and mistakes, remembering the feeling of being in love, or simply surrounding ourselves with beauty.

Whatever happened, whoever’s fault, it is time to forgive.  To move forward and evolve as a species, we need to take care of our hearts, we need to cooperate, and we need to forgive.  We cannot move from a fear-based, hate-based society into a society based on love without passing through that crucial arch, forgiveness.  And of all the virtues, the greatest of these is love.

Emotional decisions

Don’t get all emotional about it. He’s tired and emotional. I’m an emotional wreck. I don’t want to make some horrible decision based on out-of-control emotions. You just need to control your emotions. Think logically about it. Make a rational decision.

Emotions get a bad rep. We have a neat binary between emotion, on one side, and rationality and logic, on the other side. There’s no contest over which one wins! We value logic and rationality far above emotion, especially when it comes to making decisions. Even when it comes to relationships, which are defined by emotion, we want to be rational and logical. Because that’s good and emotion’s bad. So we draw lists, we weigh up the pros and cons, we conjure up various scenarios, we do everything in our power to make a purely rational decision. But there’s no such thing.

Decisions are emotional

The neurologist Richard Cytowic started off looking at people with synaesthesia (when one sense is stimulated but you experience another, like The Man Who Tasted Shapes). His research led him to some extraordinary discoveries about the brain – particularly about where we make decisions, and how we make decisions.

To make decisions, we have to evaluate what factors to include, how important they are, whether they’re positive and negative – all that list-making pro-and-con stuff. Neurologists call this “valence”, we call it decision-making. But here’s the thing. It’s not the nice, logical, rational cortex that’s in charge of calculating valence. It’s the limbic system – the “emotional core of the human nervous system”.

The limbic brain has retained its function as the decider of valence [during the evolutionary process]. What the cortex does is provide more detailed analysis about what is going on in the world so that the limbic brain can decide what is important and what to do. (Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes)

You can send your logical brain off for more information, you can demand lists from it, you can order up a detailed evaluation of pros and cons. But your logical brain can’t make the decision: biologically, it’s just not capable. It doesn’t have the wiring. The logical brain is the adviser; emotions are king. But the adviser is trying to get at the throne – and overthrow the king.

We make decisions behind our own backs

Since 1965, we’ve known that decisions somehow escape our conscious minds. Kornhüber ran experiments to test people’s decision-making. He wired them up, then all they had to do was move their finger, whenever they felt like it. He discovered that the brain built up its activity, its “readiness potential” to make the decision, almost a whole second before they made the conscious decision. (In neurological terms, that’s years!) By the time they made a conscious decision, the decision was already made. As Cytowic describes it…

Such a decision is an interpretation we give to a behavior that has been initiated someplace else by another part of ourselves well before we are aware of making a decision at all. In other words, the decision has been made before we are aware of the idea to even make a decision. If “we” are not pulling the strings, then who or what is? The answer is, it is an unknown part that is unfathomable to introspection. … Our conscious self is the tip of an iceberg.

We all know the feeling: that mad decision that got made almost behind our own back which we now have to explain to the world – and ourselves! Logically we think it’s the wrong choice; somehow we made that choice. Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance”, the horrible feeling of holding two opposite ideas, and we try to smooth it over by explaining it all away, rationalizing it. We come up with logical reasons after the choice was made.

Getting access to our decision-making

If you consider that we all want to make rational decisions, and all our decisions are actually emotional, then we’re all suffering cognitive dissonance. Maybe, in this case, emotional dissonance is a better phrase. Emotions are going to make our decisions anyway, so instead of trying to ignore them or write them out the equation, perhaps it’s a good idea to look at them. Which emotions are going to make your decisions?

After a lifetime of dismissing our emotions from decision-making, it’s hard to learn to hear them again. The logical brain keeps jumping in and shouting. In her forthcoming book on Energy, Carol Hautot describes a range of access tools that let you make contact again with your emotions, with your energy, and with the universal energy. One of the simplest is just this:

Does it make me feel light or does it make me feel heavy?

Your logical cortex can still do its job – gathering information, giving a detailed analysis – and it can learn its place. It doesn’t have the power to make decisions and no amount of stern self-control will rewire our brains. The ultimate decision is emotional: access the emotion.

The king is dead... Long live the king!

The reason emotions get such a bad rap is that we let the wrong emotions rule the day.  With the goal of creating heaven on earth by December 21^st, 2012, isn’t now the time overthrow the king and crown a new king?  With fear-based emotions such as anger, hatred, misery and rage ruling our existence for so many years, isn’t it about time the human species evolved to a more vibrant existence and crowned “Love” as the new king?  Aren’t we tired of bowing to grief and guilt, sadness and suffering, hostility and hysteria?  The problem isn’t living by your emotions: the problem is what emotions we choose to live by.

Aren’t we, as a race, ready to live by emotions that lifts our spirits?  Emotions like awe, euphoria, gratitude, hope, joy, and love – emotions that make us feel vibrant and light, and not dark and heavy. In our April 5^th blog, But the Greatest of these is Love, we looked at out how all major religions preach love without always creating much actual love: fear-based emotions toward people who don’t share their beliefs can override the conscious belief that love is the answer.  So how do we resolve such an issue?  By crowning a new, all-powerful king: unconditional love.

Now is the time to have an emotional rescue and let love make our decisions for us, without any conditions.  The first decision is to make a more vibrant and loving planet by letting unconditional love rule the day – especially on December 21, 2012 and onward.

Cosmic attraction

Electromagnetic attraction

In the last two posts, we’ve explored the important role that electromagnetism plays in the existence of the human species. We learned that the heart-brain sends electromagnetic signals to the head-brain, communicating through our emotional center (the sub-cortex) rather than directly with our logical thoughts (the cortex). We also looked at how electromagnetism resonates throughout our bodies and compared that to the way organized religions and spiritual movements talk about inner light. We can’t say, definitively and scientifically, “Electromagnetism is inner light!” But the connection between the two can offer us a great deal.

On the Science & Spirituality website, we talk about the relationship between science and spirituality. It’s complex and occasionally fraught, but still useful. Science offers spirituality new models of how the world works (think of how quantum physics has transformed our assumptions). Meanwhile, spirituality offers science a safe haven for unproven ideas – some of which, once dismissed as “old wives’ tales”, have since been proven. Of course, the two argue – mainly about how you know something is true.

With electromagnetism, science offers us an incredibly useful model for thinking about inner light, magnetism, and attractiveness. But why do we need a new model? Let’s look at what’s currently on offer.

Cosmetic Attraction

Today, whole industries fund themselves with the sole purpose of making us appear more attractive, “vibrant”, “shining” with that “youthful glow” (on the premise that young people are shiny – rather than the matt peachiness of actual young skin). Face-lifts and botox injections promise a vibrant, youthful appearance (and deliver a frozen, stretched look). People go to tanning saloons and apply tanning creams so to keep the “glow” of a deep, dark tan (which risks being matt erring on leathery). Teeth-whitening products are being sold to create “radiant smiles” (no toothpaste can actually make you smile) and men can turn their gray hairs dark in only five minutes to give them back their appearance of vim and vigor (as opposed to still tired, but now with dark hair).

We want to feel vibrant – and there’s nothing actually wrong with that. Feeling that you look good and youthful can raise your confidence, which in turn helps you keep your head up, your shoulders back, and a smile on your face - which certainly enhance your vibrant appearance. The sense of attractiveness and confidence lifts your spirits, which enhances your attractiveness more. At today’s level of evolution, the feeling we get from cosmetic attraction can be important to our wellbeing – if it all works as the marketing says. But there’s a fatal flaw in looking for our vibrance this way.

Fatal Attraction

Most marketing campaigns for cosmetics promise confidence-through-beauty. What they actually deliver is insecurity – which creates market “need”. They can’t be credited with the birth of physical insecurity, but they demonstrably fuel its flames. The fatal flaw of trying to maintain a youthful, vibrant appearance is that, eventually, it will be gone. There is no product that will make you look young and vibrant forever. Yes, you can alter or adjust aspects of your appearance in cosmetic ways, but if you want to live to a ripe old age, you’re going to look old one day. So if you rely on your physical features to bring you love, attention and self-worth, your life story will have a sad ending. But all this is assuming these multifarious products work. Most products don’t even make you look young and vibrant today. They don’t even make the model, usually selected for her youth and beauty, look like that. Dove recently ran a campaign showing the evolution from original model to billboard ad. (Watching this video has since been shown to reduce physical insecurity in young women.) They also ran a pro-age campaign, showing a selection of beautiful middle-aged and older women, all considered “too old to be in anti-ageing ad”.

If you are recognized in this world because of your vibrant spirit, there are no worries or mid-life crisis: your spirit does not have an expiration date. There is no shelf-life for being a loving and compassionate person. The ability to resonate electromagnetism can come from a 91-year-old as easily as a 19-year-old. Your true vibrant spirit should be your measure, not your ability to not-look-your-age.

So how about a different model of attractiveness – one which links attractive to light, not to body? Look back at Cosmetic Attraction. What are we really after? We want to look “vibrant”, “shining”, “glowing”, “radiant”… and feel confident. That’s not youth. Young people aren’t shiny! And they’re famously insecure. “Face-lift + shiny teeth + heavy tan + dark hair” doesn’t equal vibrant, smiling, relaxed energy. What are we actually chasing here?

What we’re actually after is vibrance – the kind of attraction that is both possible and genuinely attractive. Physical beauty and youth don’t necessarily offer that. But the cultural model, which tells us they do, is so powerful and entrenched. It’s hard to abandon that way of thinking, unless we can find a different model to replace it with. And that’s what the model of electromagnetism, in our heart-brain and in our bodies, offers us: a new way of understanding attractiveness, at a deeper and lasting level. We know the experience of seeing someone’s inner light: this gives us a way to conceptualize it.

Cosmic Attraction

When we see inner light in another person, it makes them more attractive – “magnetic”, we say, “shining”, “vibrant” – and someone we want to be around. It’s not so hard to move beyond physical appearance. After all, our brain only stores the bare basics of what someone’s face actually looks like, and quickly matches it up. People we love become more beautiful to us. Perhaps, by concentrating on someone’s inner light, even thinking of it in terms of electromagnetism, we can learn to step past physical appearance – and concentrate their true spirit, their inner light. In many Eastern religions and in the New Thought Spiritual movement, one person will greet another person by saying, “Namaste.” By saying this, they are actually honoring the spirit in you, which is also in me. Namaste also has been referred to as “the light in me sees the light in you”.

Imagine that the light in me, which sees the light in you, is the electromagnetic energy that comes from our heart-brain and that resonates in our bodies. Imagine that the electric impulses inside you are generating a magnetic field around you. This cosmic connection of honoring one’s spirit can give us a sense of depth far beyond our standard reaction to a physically attractive person. It shows us an option of evolving past our animal and materialistic instincts to a deeper spiritual connection.

Coming Attraction

At one stage of our evolutionary process, reproduction was the number one priority for keeping the existence of the species alive. Because of this collective agenda, the ability to reproduce strong, healthy offspring was the basis for picking a mate. Theories of beauty are very quick to trace our current standards of beauty back to this biological imperative (happily ignoring the very different standards of beauty across the centuries – compare the size zero debate to a Botticelli beauty!). But that biological imperative is something we need to rethink. Survival of the species is survival of the species – not the individual or even the individual’s genes. With the Earth population approaching 7 billion people, all of us reproducing offspring actually deters our survival. To insure the existence of our species, it’s not reproduction we need – it’s the ability to co-exist. A dark tan or a glowing smile will not enhance our co-existence. The ability to listen to our heart-brains, to radiate our inner light, will. And as part of the New Age of Enlightenment, this is where the human race is heading: past the level of skin-deep beauty to resonating our inner light, the same light that will illuminate this planet and create Heaven on Earth.

The soul's electric light

Every day we hear expressions like “He’s got a magnetic personality”, “She has a radiant smile”, “The performance was electrifying”. Each of these is an example of raising our spirits – as individuals and in groups. We know these energies are contagious. A magnetic personality does raise the vibration of the group. A radiant smile can light up a room. The electrified performance does energize the audience. So what does all this talk of energy mean? And why does it impact us like it does? Perhaps we can shed some light on the subject by understanding electromagnetism.

We know the brain – the head brain and the heart brain – works with electricity. We also know that our brains react to electricity, whether that’s from its own chemical processes or from an external source. The New Scientist recently ran an article on how skull electrodes can boost our memory. Stimulating the brain with electricity can also make people recall memories, sometimes in astonishing detail. The Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found that with some of his patients, when he stimulated the temporal lobes, “The patient ‘re-lived’ all that he had been aware of in that earlier period of time as in a moving-picture ‘flashback’.” (Creative Memory).

But electricity is also magnetism – or rather, they are part of the same thing, electromagnetism. Electric currents creates a magnetic field, and magnetic currents create a magnetic field. The electromagnetic spectrum is already familiar to most of us – from radio waves to the colors we see to x-rays and gamma rays.

We’ve always known about visible light and color, though we may not have known about its relationship with electricity. It was only in the late 19^th century, though, that we discovered the other parts of the spectrum – the radio waves, on the low energy side, the x-rays and gamma rays on the high energy side. These high-energy rays are invisible, useful, and dangerous.

Try to imagine how we would have thought about these dangerous, powerful, invisible “rays” before we could prove their existence. Would we call it magic? Would we be skeptical about their existence? Would it be some “flakes” insisting they’re real and powerful and scientifically-minded people shaking their heads wisely? What if I said that electric currents are evil, so people shouldn’t live near power stations? Most people would laugh. But electric currents create a magnetic field. And you can apply a magnetic field to part of the brain, you can destroy someone’s moral judgment – says MIT.

Ask yourself this question: is it worse to try to kill someone, and fail, or to kill someone by accident? Most people say it’s worse to try to kill someone. Intent is essential. Apply the magnets – and the same people will say it’s worse to kill someone by accident. It’s fine to try to kill someone and fail. After all, no-one died! Moral judgment is usually seen as the domain of the soul.

What we can’t prove yet isn’t necessarily wrong.

‘That’s argument by analogy.’
‘So? You’re arguing ad ignorantiam. Analogy doesn’t make it wrong!’
‘It’s not proof, either!’ Ray was adamant.
‘I am talking about not having proof for everything – that there’s a whole world of stuff out there that we can’t yet prove!’
‘So we can just make up what we like in the meantime?’
‘No!’
– Godspeed

We can’t just make it up – but perhaps we can admit that we don’t know everything. The limit of our knowledge isn’t the limit of the world. And sometimes, while we wait to prove things scientifically, we have other ways of knowing.

Think of how we talk about spirituality:

“People are always talking about light when they talk about spirituality – God being blinding, angels shining, Paul’s Damascus road experience, the word enlightenment, chakra light meditations, auras as colored invisible light, all that stuff. The Gnostics and Manicheans believed that our spirits were particles of light, trapped in a dark universe. Then all the hippy talk about vibrations and vibes, and a lot of that originally comes from Eastern religion … So all these different traditions of spirituality come back to the same metaphors about light, magnetism, and vibration.” – Ray of Light

The human body really is a vast energy system, storming with electro-magnetism. In Russia in 1939, Semyon Kirlian took the first photograph of the human energy field. An electromagnetic field surrounds all living and inanimate things. Our health, the level of stress in our lives, and environmental factors all affect that field. This life energy has been recognized for centuries by many healing traditions. We can call it an “aura” and depending on the level of someone’s vibration, it changes color – just like the color spectrum. In Chinese medicine, it's called qi; in India, it’s called prana.

So, what if the electromagnetic spectrum offers us a way to look at, even to measure, spirituality? How would that change our view of it? The electricity that our brains – head and heart – use, the electromagnetism that fills our bodies, might just be the inner light we’re looking for.

Throughout this blog and the Science & Spirituality website we speak about creating Heaven on Earth by December 21^st 2012. What we mean by that is creating a vibrant planet full of spirited, compassionate, and loving people – a human race experiencing light, love and an energetic existence. By quieting the mind (lowering our brain waves) and open our hearts (accessing the heart brain) we can, as a human race, create the age of new enlightenment, where spirit creates spirit, magnetism creates electricity, and Heaven is created on Earth.

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.