The Heart & Brain Connection

Intuitive Development Program

Science has recently discovered startling new possibilities regarding how we think, feel, love, heal, and find meaning in our life. New research suggests that the heart thinks, cells remember, and that both of these processes are related to the mysterious, extremely powerful, but very subtle energy with properties unlike any other known force. If the preliminary insights regarding these prospects continue to be verified by science, we may be taking the first tentative steps to understanding more about what shamans, priests, and healers from ancient traditions have been teaching for centuries the energy of the human spirit and the uniquely coded information that is the human soul (Pearsall, 1998). Our understanding of the heart as a sentient organ is still where our understanding of the miraculous complexities of the brain was more than one hundred years ago. In comparison to the continuing rapid progress in the study of the brain, learning about the heart as more than just a pump is emerging much more slowly. The central hypotheses regarding the information-containing energy communicated by the heart were initially proposed by Drs. Gary E. Schwartz and Linda G. Russek. They are as clearly stated and testable as any other set of scientific suppositions, but the ideas of a thinking heart and information-carrying energy seem excessively difficult for many scientists to accept as starting points for study (Russek, 1996). Dr. Gary Schwartz is a professor of Psychology, Neurology, and Psychiatry and director of the Human Energy Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona. His associate, Dr. Linda Russek, is a research psychologist at the Harvard University Student Health Service and co-director of the Human Energy Systems Laboratory. They are a creative, energetic research team who has always been interested in a systems or interactive view of how life works. They have dedicated their professional lives to the attempt to create one medicine out of many diverse approaches to healing and have never been afraid to challenge and extend the accepted principles of psychology and medicine (Pearsall). Together, they have combined the fields of biology, new physics, and modern cardiology in an effort to explain the info-energetic nature of the heart. They base their field of Energy Cardiology on what they call dynamic systems memory theory (Pearsall, p. 12). This is the idea that all systems are constantly exchanging mutually influential energy, which contains information that alters the systems taking part in the exchange (Russek, 1996). Russek and Schwartz offer four hypotheses to explain how cells might be able to make memories out of the energy constantly circulated through the body system by the heart. 1) Energy and information is the same thing (Pearsall, p. 13). Everything that exists has energy. Energy is full of information and stored info-energy is what makes up cellular memories. Based on theories and research from the field of biology and other sciences, all living systems are by their nature manifestations of energy that contain the information, or memory, of what they are and how they function. To scientists, the word system refers to a set of interactions between inseparable units (Pearsall). From interactions between the tiniest parts within a single cell; to the exchange of information between family members at the dinner table; to the energy bouncing back and forth between the stars and planets; everything exists in a contiguous info-energetic relationship (Pearsall, 1998). 2) What we call mind, consciousness, or our intentions are really manifestations of informationcontaining energy (Pearsall, p. 13). Based on lessons learned from quantum physics, information and mind seem to be one and the same. Energy is the ability to do work and a force that can be measured within the body. Information is what gives a system its form and structure, and energy is the force or function that moves a system, connects all of the aspects of that system, and helps systems interconnect and communicate. For this purpose, memories can be simply defined as retained information. Since all systems are connected and share forms of the same energy, all systems share common memories. 3) The heart is the primary generator of info-energy. The heart constantly sends out patterns of energy that regulate organs throughout the body. Every cell in the body is literally bathed in this energy
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The Heart & Brain Connection

Intuitive Development Program
conducted from and by the heart. Since the heart is the primary generator and transmitter of energy, it is central to our systems recollection of its life its cellular memory (Pearsall). 4) Because we are manifestations of info-energy coming to, flowing within, and constantly being sent out from our total cellular system, who and how we are is a physical representation of a recovered set of cellular memories. Based on cellular biology, we now know that certain molecules have great memories because they can store complex coded information. Ultimately, all cells give and take energy, so all cells contain and share information. All cells store energetic memories, and our heart, by nature of its immense power, with millions of cells throbbing in unison and its central location in our body, is the central organ that constantly pulses energy from, between, and to all other organs and cells. Because of the hearts code and the cellular memories with which it deals, every cell in our body becomes a holographic or complete representation of our energetic heart (Pearsall). The energy of the heart can also be described by its electromagnetic properties. A heart cell is unique not only in its pulsation but in that it produces strong electromagnetic signals that radiate out beyond the cells. For example, close spatial proximity of two heart cells on a microscopes slide bring their respective electromagnetic fields into entrainment, a point at which the two frequencies coordinate in synchronization (Pearce, 2002). All living forms produce electrical fields, but a heart cells electrical output is truly exceptional. Within our heart is a congregation of billions of little generators working in unison, producing two and half watts of electrical energy. With each beat the heart produces enough electromagnetic energy to light a small electric bulb. This energy forms an electromagnetic field that radiates out some twelve to fifteen feet beyond our body itself (Pearce). Brain waves are measured by placing sensitive electrodes on our skull. This process is called an electroencephalogram, or EEG. The individual brain waves recorded on the EEG are miniscule when compared to the waves recorded by the electrocardiogram, or ECG, on the heart. An ECG is done by placing electrodes on the body to pick up the hearts frequency signals, but a reading can also be taken three feet away from the body without any contacting electrodes because the hearts frequency spectrum is quite powerful (Pearce). Physicists and physicians have calculated the pressure needed to force liquid through the fifteen miles of tubing in the average human body. They found the necessary pressure would require a diesel engine with enough power to run a Mack truck. Fortunately, circulation is accomplished not by such power but by the strength of a combination of factors including the synchronous contraction and expansion of the blood vessels. New findings show that blood flows in spiral-like vortices similar to a whirlpool. This whirling action is made possible by tiny grooves in the veins and arteries which aid in creating the powerful electromagnetic field by polarizing and speeding up the flow of blood (Pearce). This electromagnetic, info-energy field can be measured as it creates arcs and forms a torus shape of energy around the body, just like a magnet. This torus function is apparently holographic, meaning that any point within the torus contains the information of the whole field. Just as the electromagnetic field of the earth is a torus, we seem to live in a nested hierarchy of toroid energy systems that extend from a single atom to the planet, the solar system, and ultimately galaxy. One implication of this is that each of us, centered with our heart torus is as much the center of the universe as any other creature or point, with equal access to all that exists (Pearce). Our heart maintains an intricate dialogue with our brain, body, and world at large and selects from the hierarchy of electromagnetic fields the information appropriate to our particular experience. The heart also translates back into that hierarchy of fields our individual response to the reality we experience (Pearce). Thusly, it could be said that our emotional response to our world experience actually changes the nature of the materials we draw on for translation in our world experience. When the brain and heart frequencies entrain,
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The Heart & Brain Connection

Intuitive Development Program
they enter synchronous, resonant, coherent wave patterns. One example of this type of entrainment can be seen between infant and mother during breast feeding. The implication of this type of connection between people is being explored further by researchers studying the effect of heart entrainment on emotional states of being (Pearce). Producing electromagnetic energy is only one of the hearts characteristics that are being explored to reveal deeper, hidden implications. Neurocardiology, is a new medical field exploring how aspects of the brain can be found within the heart. It is estimated that half or more of the cells of the heart are neural cells like those making up our brain. Some reports show that 60-65 percent of heart cells are neurons, all of which cluster in ganglia, small neural groupings connected through the same type of axon-dendrites forming the neural fields of our brain. It has been found that the same neurotransmitters that function in the brain also function in the heart ganglia. Through long axons, the spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, one aggregate of the hearts neural ganglia connects to the myriad of smaller neural ganglia found scattered throughout the bodys tissues, muscle spindles, organs, and so on (Pearce). Therefore, like the brain, the heart also has direct connections to parts of the body and may actually function somewhat independently of the brain as it gives and receives information through the electromagnetic field and produces reactions in the body. These types of sensations in the body may actually account for feelings of intuition, love, sadness and many others that we can generally feel without physical touch or communication. This heart-feeling dynamic may account for how we seem to know how someone is feeling without actually communicating with them. Although glial cells makeup 80 percent of the mass in our brain, very little is known about them, beside their ability to increase the conductivity of the neurons. Researchers have since discovered that the glia are electromagnetically sensitive and help to create the interactive electromagnetic fields of the brain, the heart, and the rest of the body (Pearce). It is through this bio-energetic perspective that we can understand that the brain is, figuratively speaking, an instrument of the heart. Our heart, in turn, is an instrument of the universal function of life experience itself as it interacts with the energies of the environment. The brain and body both respond to the resulting perceptual experience and determine or interpret its quality. This qualitative analysis or emotion is then relayed back to the heart, moment by moment. This influences the hearts own neural field, which responds to the emotional report and relays it to the fields of its origin, subsequently changing those fields if only on a miniscule level. In response to the brains reports, the heart also changes its own neural and hormonal signals to the body and the brain, and to the production of the electromagnetic field of information itself (Pearce). This changed neural, hormonal, and electromagnetic interaction then in turn influences the kind of world we experience. In summary, the hearts electromagnetic field can be described as holographic and draws selectively on the energetic frequencies of the world it experiences. Through the glia and neurons, our neural system selectively draws the materials needed for world-structuring from the electromagnetic fields as coordinated by and through the heart. Our emotional-cognitive brain has direct, unmediated neural connections with the heart. Through these neural connections the positive and negative signals of our response to our present experience are sent to and from the heart moment by moment (Pearce). The dialogue between our heart and brain can be described as an interactive dynamic where each contributor of our experience, heart and brain, both gives rise to and shape the other indeterminably.

References Pearce, J. (2002). The Biology of Transcendence. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. Pearsall, P.(1998). The Heart's Code. New York: Broadway Books. Russek, L., & Schwartz, G. (1996). Energy Cardiology: A Dynamical Energy Systems Approach for Integrating Conventional and Alternative Medicine. Advances, 12, 4-24.
2009 Modern Mystics LLC. All Rights Reserved www.GabrielGraham.com