It is seriously tempting to think that the heart, in any real sense, is just the organ whose steady beat helps keep us alive. Any other metaphorical usage simply stands for something else such as the emotional brain, the right hemisphere, the soul or spirit.
My own brush with heart problems in terms of the physical go back to May 2011 when a particularly stressful situation caused my blood pressure to burst through acceptable barriers. Fortunately, amlodipine has helped bring things under control since then so there’s nothing I need to do much, apart from pop the pills, take my BP regularly and make sure I exercise regularly and control my diet. That’s the heart taken care of.
I’ve then taken the easy step, perhaps especially in the light of Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight, of concluding that the heart is at most just another more accessible word for the right hemisphere. All that’s needed is for my impatient chatty head to quieten down enough for my whispering ‘heart’ to make itself heard, and also to slow down enough to give my ‘heart’ time to convey its perspective. My heart – no, let’s be clear my right hemisphere – is wiser but slower than my head. I was faintly troubled by the total lack of language. The right hemisphere is not totally speechless. Perhaps something else was going on.
Even at the purely physical level, before we go on later to explore the transcendent, there may be good reasons for doubting that. Things might be a touch more complicated even at the physical level. It seems important to take these into account in any attempt to understand the heart.
The ‘Little Brain’ Hypothesis
Wolfgang Klebel, in his recent book The Human Heart, argues that the heart has a more significant role in human cognition and experience than previously thought. Chapter Three explores this in some detail and is where the quotes I am about to use come from. It will make an easier read if I do not keep interjecting footnote numbers after the frequent short quotations I’ll be making.
In terms of his own life course he reports on experiences of inexplicable certainty about significant choices, comparable to the ones I describe in my sequence on my journey towards the Bahá’í Faith, which I call leaps of faith. My apparently impetuous decisions to leave teaching and work in mental health, and to commit to the Bahá’í path within a week of discovering it, seemed blind and irrational, but have proved to be absolutely correct and life affirming. I attributed them to what I call deep intuition, a probably right hemisphere capacity. Klebel is sure they come from the heart.
I’ve picked up warning signs over the years about the possibility that the heart may be more involved than I ever gave it credit for, but have never really bothered to explore them in any depth. I’ve read anecdotal evidence of people who hated classical music suddenly becoming passionately fond of it after receiving a heart transplant from a violinist. I knew of the research into how triggering an emotional state in one close friend, partner or family member led to a similar heart reading in their close connection.
Klebel goes much further.
Based on the work of McCraty and Childre, Klebel is convinced that ‘the heart is a sensory organ and a sophisticated information encoding and processing center . . . Its circuitry enables it to learn, remember, and make functional decisions independent of the cranial brain.’[1]
He argues that ‘In the last twenty years, evidence has accumulated for the presence of a functional heart brain’ termed the ‘little brain of the heart,’ explaining that ‘the heart, is made up of populations of neurons capable of processing information’ which is ‘sent to neurons in the base of the brain via afferent axons in the vagus nerve and to the spinal column neurons via afferent axons in sympathetic nerves.’
There is therefore, in his opinion, a ‘newly emerging view of the heart as a sophisticated information processing center, functioning not only in concert with the brain but also independent of it.’ He accepts that more work needs to be done to establish the exact nature of this possible system.
He tries to provide examples of what has already been established.
He asks, ‘How do we understand the intellectual functioning of the heart?’ and suggests that ‘One way that might help us is to make the assumption that dreams are developed primarily by the heart.’ This is clearly still speculative.
The absence of language in the heart poses a problem because ‘while the brain has consciousness and we know what we think, the heart does not have this.’ The heart, he argues, ‘can only express itself in feelings.’ However, ‘its decision has to become conscious in the brain, has to be translated from the language of the heart into the language of the brain, so to speak.’ Dreams are one way this might happen. He uses the anecdotal evidence that ‘dream memories can be transplanted together with the heart from one person to another’ to arrive at the possible conclusion ‘that the language of the heart is similar to the language of dreams.’
In a way that has parallels with but goes far beyond the rigorous work recorded by van der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score, he shares another conclusion which he arrived at from seeing many patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): ‘memories heavily loaded with emotions seem to be located in the heart and not in the brain.’
He comes back to an earlier question and asks ‘is this little brain of the heart involved in dreaming?’ He picks up on evidence gathered from heart transplant patients, which suggests that ‘some of them experience dreams of the previous owner of the heart,’ which in turn strongly implies that ‘the dream memory was transplanted with the heart.’ He quotes a piece of anecdotal evidence from a conference[2] where it was reported that the dreams of an eight-year old girl who had received a transplant from a murdered ten-year old girl led to the conviction of the murderer because of the accurate details of the murder contained in the dreams.
From the same source he adds that Paul Pearsall also:
cites a heart transplant patient who had ‘surprisingly accurate dreams about her donor’ together with other changes experienced by a number of patients, such as food tastes, music preferences, and emotional states these patients had never experienced before.
He feels it probable that ‘memories which happened under severe emotional stress appear to be located in the heart and remembered in dreams or intrusive memories, as is known in post-traumatic stress disorder.’
I found myself wondering at this point whether, somewhat in line with Alexander and Newell’s conclusions after his NDE, would reducing brain activity while awake increase access to the heart as the sleep/dream association might suggest? More on that later possibly.
Klebel feels that ‘the heart is used by the mind of the dreamer when she is dreaming’ but ‘when dreams are remembered, they are remembered in the brain and translated into the normal language of the brain, which makes it difficult to interpret them.’
My inner sceptic was beginning to kick in quite strongly at this point, but I reined it in because there is other alleged evidence pointing in a similar direction.
Transpersonal Possibilities
For starters a short paper by Professor Mohammed Omar Salem on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ website summarises research as going some way to confirm this kind of possibility:
After extensive research, Armour (1994) introduced the concept of functional ‘heart brain’. His work revealed that the heart has a complex intrinsic nervous system that is sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a ‘little brain’ in its own right. The heart’s brain is an intricate network of several types of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells similar to those found in the brain proper. Its elaborate circuitry enables it to act independently of the cranial brain – to learn, remember, and even feel and sense. The heart’s nervous system contains around 40,000 neurons, called sensory neurites (Armour, 1991). Information from the heart – including feeling sensations – is sent to the brain through several afferents. These afferent nerve pathways enter the brain at the area of the medulla, and cascade up into the higher centres of the brain, where they may influence perception, decision making and other cognitive processes (Armour, 2004).
The heart’s role in the regulation of emotion, rather than simply responding to it, seems potentially significant:
Research has shown that the heart’s afferent neurological signals directly affect activity in the amygdala and associated nuclei, an important emotional processing centre in the brain. The amygdala is the key brain centre that coordinates behavioural, immunological, and neuroendocrine responses to environmental threats. It compares incoming emotional signals with stored emotional memories, and accordingly makes instantaneous decisions about the level of perceived threat. Due to its extensive connections to the limbic system, it is able to take over the neural pathways, activating the autonomic nervous system and emotional response before the higher brain centres receive the sensory information (Rein, McCraty and Atkinson, 1995 & McCraty et al, 1995).
There’s McCraty again.
In his summary of the conclusions he has reached, Salem seems to go in some respects at least as far as Klebel reaches in the end (more on that next time):
It has long been thought that conscious awareness originates in the brain alone. Recent scientific studies suggest that consciousness emerges from the brain and body acting together (Popper & Eccles, 2000). As has been shown, a growing body of evidence now suggests that the heart plays a particularly significant role in this process. The above findings indicate that, the heart is far more than a simple pump. In fact, it is seen now as a highly complex, self- organizing information processing centre with its own functional ‘brain’ that communicates with, and influences, the cranial brain via the nervous system, hormonal system and other pathways. The involvement of the heart with intuitive functions is another interesting piece of information. However, as persons with transplanted hearts can function normally, the heart can be considered here as a medium or tool, for an underlying more sophisticated integrating system that has the capacity to carry the personal identity of the individual. These new visions might give better understanding to the concept of mind as a multi-component unit that is not only interacting with the physical environment through demonstrable means, but also has the capacity to communicate with the cosmic universe through non-physical pathways (Lorimer, 2001). This gives rise to the concept of the spirit as the non-physical element, or the field, of the mind that can communicate with the cosmos outside the constraints of space and time. The evidence for such communication comes from the reported phenomena of extra-sensory perception (telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance), psycho-kinesis, psychic healing and religious experiences (Radin, 1997 & Henry, 2005).
So, it came to seem that I need to dig a bit deeper into the transpersonal possibilities hidden in the heart in spite of my inner sceptic’s protestations. I don’t want to fall short of as full an exploration of this topic as I can manage.
More on that next time, then. We will eventually get to the completely mystical stuff, believe me.
References:
[1]. McCraty and Childre, The Appreciative Heart: The Psychophysiology of Positive Emotions and Optimal Functioning – page 1.
[2]. Pearsall, The Heart’s Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy. The New Findings About Cellular Memories and Their Role in the Mind/Body/Spirit Connection, pp. 7–8.
Everybody Means Something 