photo © Kaspars Grinvalds | Fotolia.com
“If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind goes when it wanders.”
Before you dismiss it as sappy -because the heart merely pumps blood, right?- you need to learn something about neurocardiology.
Defined as the study of the “pathophysiological interplays of the nervous and cardiovascular systems,” this field of science studies the close interaction of heart and brain. Turns out, the heart is not just some fleshy organ falsely attributed with our emotions. New research says that the heart controls the brain much more than we thought!
With over 40,000 sensory neurons relaying information to the brain from the heart, it is no surprise that some researchers refer to the heart as the “little brain.” The heart communicates to the brain via nervous system connections, hormones, and biomechanical and energetic information. The heart sends more information to the brain on a daily basis than vice versa, enabling the heart to learn, remember, and make decisions independently on the brain’s cerebral cortex. Plus, it emits greater amplitude of electrical and electromagnetic fields than the brain!
You can read more of these insightful discoveries in researcher Rollin McCraty‘s paper of the HeartMath Institute, “The Energetic Heart: Bioelectromagnetic Communication Within and Between People.” The study also shed some light on the impact of negative emotions and stress to the heart rhythm pattern and how this may lead to physiological damage.
Interestingly, the quote above has a scientific support and not merely a string of poetic lines. The heart does know what it wants but it pays to also listen to your brain 😉
