"Pure Science Specials - Of Hearts and Minds."
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Modern Research Reveals Your Heart Does Have a
Mind of Its Own
March 05, 2016
By Dr. Mercola
In the film “Of Hearts
and Minds,” science documentary filmmaker David Malone explores the human
heart, juxtaposing the modern scientific view of the heart as a mere pump,
versus its long history as a symbol of love and the center of innate wisdom and
human character.
The film starts off in
an operating room where open heart surgery is taking place, and Malone
interviews Consultant Surgeon Francis Wells, who talks about the mechanistic
and bioelectrical workings of the heart.
On the other side,
there’s the poetic view of the heart as a source organ of love, with an
intelligence all its own. In Wells’ view, the heart is a pump, and nothing
more.
You can replace your
heart with an artificial one, and it won’t affect your ability to love. Yet the
idea that your heart is somehow an emotional organ
remains.
The Heart — An Organ
of Truth and Emotion
Sayings like “I love you
with all my heart,” and “my heart swelled with joy,” or the reference to
someone being “broken-hearted” or “cold hearted” — how much of this poetic
language is based on something real?
Are these kinds of
sayings references to something biologically true, stated in poetic terms?
This is the question
Malone seeks to answer in this film, and the reason he thinks the answer may be
important is because he believes the way we see our heart is a reflection of
how we view ourselves as human beings.
The ancient Egyptians
saw the heart as an organ of truth. And indeed, your heart does seem to be able
to tell you the truth about how you feel and what you think is right or wrong.
When you lie, for example, your heart rate tends to speed up.
As the film goes on,
Malone scours the latest science, to find out whether ourfeelings and
emotions really come from our brains, or whether they might
actually originate in our hearts.
For starters, Leonardo
Da Vinci discovered how the blood
flowed through the heart, and how the swirling vortexes within the heart’s
chambers worked withthe heart, opening and closing
the valves with each heart beat — a far cry from the mechanistic view of the
heart as a simple single-stroke pump.
Da Vinci’s drawings and
experiments reveal a harmonic beauty — as much a piece of art as a machine.
The ‘Brain’ Within
Your Heart
David Paterson, Ph.D. a
professor at Oxford University, straddles the two areas of the brain and the
heart. His work shows that your brain is not the sole
source of your emotions, but indeed, your heart and brain work together in producing emotions.
Your heart actually
contains neurons, similar to those in your brain, and your heart and brain are
closely connected, creating a symbiotic emotional whole. As explained in the
film:
“When
your heart receives signals from the brain via the sympathetic nerves, it pumps
faster. And when it receives signals through the parasympathetic nerves, it
slows down. “
While this seems to
support the view that the heart simply follows the orders of the brain, the
reality is far more complex. Because your heart also contains thousands of
specialized neurons, predominantly located around the right ventricle surface,
forming a complex network. Why did nature put them there?
Neurons are what allow
your brain to form thoughts. So what are they doing around the right ventricle
of your heart? While much about the neurons in your heart is still unknown, one
thing is sure — the “brain” in your heart communicates back and forth with the
brain in your head. It’s a two-way street.
The Neurons in Your
Heart Makes Decisions Too
In the film, Professor
Paterson shows a piece of heart tissue from a rabbit — not the whole heart,
just a piece of the right ventricle, where the neurons are clustered.
Kept in a tank with
nutrients and a steady flow of oxygen, this suspended piece of heart tissue
beats all by itself, even though it’s not attached to a
living organism, and there’s no actual blood pumping through it.
By sending an electrical
impulse into this tissue via an electrode, Professor Patterson demonstrates how
the heart tissue immediately slows its contractions; a “decision” made by the
neurons in the tissue in response to the stimulation.
This elegant little
experiment shows that it’s the neurons in your heart that decide how the heart
will behave, not the neurons in your brain. What Professor Patterson is finding
again shifts our view of the heart back toward its more poetic and
philosophical origins.
As Malone says:
“The
heart is a pump that does respond when the brain asks it to, but it is not
enslaved to the brain. Its relationship to the brain is more like a marriage
... with each dependent on the other. It seems science is now restoring to the
heart something that rightfully belongs to it: Our emotions.”
Intense Negative
Emotions Puts Your Heart Health at Risk
The interplay between
your brain and heart can be seen when looking at how your emotional and mental
outlook colors your health — especially your heart health. Intense anger, for
example, boosts your heart attack risk
five-fold, and your stroke risk three-fold.
Intense grief after the
loss of a loved one also raises your risk of having a heart attack. The day
immediately following your loss, your risk of a heart attack goes up by 21
times, and remains six times higher than normal for several weeks.1
Research also shows that
people exposed to traumatic experiences, for example, combat
veterans, New Orleans residents who went through Hurricane Katrina, and Greeks
struggling through financial turmoil, have higher rates of cardiac problems
than the general population.
In one such study,2 which involved nearly 208,000 veterans
aged 46 to 74, 35 percent of those diagnosed with post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) developed insulin resistance in two years, compared to only 19
percent of those not diagnosed with PTSD.
PTSD sufferers also had
higher rates of metabolic syndrome — a collection of risk factors that raise
your risk of heart disease, such as high body fat, cholesterol, blood pressure,
and blood sugar levels. More than half (about 53 percent) of veterans with PTSD
had several of these symptoms, compared to 37 percent of those not suffering
with PTSD.
A Positive Outlook
Reduces Your Heart Attack Risk
If negative emotions
have the potential to harm your heart, it would stand to reason that positive
emotions may heal it, and this indeed seems to be the case. In a study3 of nearly 1,500 people with an increased
risk of early-onset coronary artery disease, those who reported being cheerful,
relaxed, satisfied with life, and full of energy had a one-third reduction in
coronary events like a heart attack.
Those with the highest
risk of coronary events enjoyed an even greater risk reduction of nearly 50
percent. This was true even when other heart disease risk factors, such as smoking,
age, and diabetes,
were taken into account. Separate research has similarly found that:
·
Positive psychological
well-being is associated with a consistent reduced risk of coronary heart
disease (CHD)4
·
Very optimistic people
have lower risks of dying from any cause, as well as lower risks of dying from
heart disease, compared to highly pessimistic people7
Yes, Your Heart Also
Affects Your Mind
In one test, Malone is
shown a series of images of neutral and frightened faces, some synced in time
to his heartbeat, and others not synced to his heart. Interestingly, when the
frightened faces were shown in sync with his heartbeat, he perceived them as being
more intensely frightened than when shown out of sync with his heartbeat.
What this test showed
was that how his mind processed the perception of fear was affected by his
heart. When his brain processed the image in sync with his heart, there was a greater
“resonance” in the emotional output.
By looking at the brain
scans taken during the test, the researchers are able to pinpoint the precise
brain region affected by the heart, namely the amygdala — an area known to be
associated with threat perception. Your amygdala processes fear in combination with the signaling from your heart.
This brain-heart connection is also at work when you experience feelings of
compassion and empathizing with other people’s emotional states.
As Malone says, “it is our heart working in tandem with our brain that allows us
to feel for others ... It is ultimately what makes us human... Compassion is
the heart’s gift to the rational mind.”
