🍄 The HeartBrain

The Earth's energetic fields are influenced by collected humanity and are the fields where we radiate. So ask yourself at the end of the day, what did I feed the field today?

May 31, 2024

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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. In a healthy individual, our heart rate literally changes with every single heartbeat. No one knows this better than Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., director of research at the HeartMath Institute. McCraty is a psychophysiologist whose interests include the physiology of emotion. One of his primary areas of focus is the mechanisms by which emotions influence cognitive processes, behavior, health and the global interconnectivity between people and Earth’s energetic systems.

In a 2011, ALICE visited with McCraty at the HeartMath Institute. Our conversation touched on his critical research on heart rate variability and heart-rhythm coherence helping to change long-held perceptions about the heart’s role in health, behavior, performance and quality of life.

Coherence

From our 2011 ALICE conversation with Rollin McCraty, Ph.D:

"Within our heart rate variability, when you look at the actual heart rhythm, the heart is actually beating out messages. There are patterns that emerge in these beat to beat changes in our heart rate.”

“This is where one picture is worth a thousand words, but if we get emotionally upset, or irritated, impatient, these kinds of things...what happens is the pattern in the variability is very chaotic-looking. This is reflecting a de-synchronization that's occurring inside of our body and the activity in our nervous system. To help this make sense, there are two main halves of what's called the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is what regulates over 95% of our bodies' internal functions—all the things we don't think about; the hormonal system, immune system. When we're in a positive state, we're really feeling good, the heart beats out a very different pattern and very different message. If you look at it on a graph, it looks like a sine wave, or rolling hills. That's what we call coherence. There are many heartbeats, but they're ordered.”

“Many studies have now shown that what we call the coherent state is really the physiology of optimal performance, optimal function. I'll help unpack that a bit, because it's a big statement.”

“A key here is the autonomic nervous system, which has the two halves. One of the pathways by which the heart and the brain communicate with each other is through this nervous system. The heart is unique in many ways. One is that it's more intimately connected with the brain than any other gland or organ. In fact, the heart sends more neural signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. That's going to be surprising to a lot of people, but that's actually been known since the late 1800s. That is not new, it has been forgotten and kind of ignored. One of those halves of the autonomic nervous system is called the parasympathetic. Those nerves come down through the front of our body and are called the vagus nerves, there are two of them, one on each side of the body. 90 to 95% of those nerve fibers—and there are thousands of fibers in each one—are carrying information from the body to the brain. Only five to 10% are going brain-down. The vast majority of those are coming from the heart and cardiovascular system.”

“What I am talking about is how the heart and brain communicate. There are four primary ways that are well established. One is the nervous system, that I just described. The other is biochemically, so the heart secretes a number of hormones. In fact, the heart was reclassified in the mid-eighties to be part of the endocrine or hormonal system. We now know the heart secretes a pretty wide range of hormones. This is fairly new information. The most recent one is oxytocin. The media loves to call that the love hormone, the bonding hormone. How appropriate is that, the heart secretes as much oxytocin as the brain, actually. Of course, there are receptors all over the body for oxytocin. That's just one.”

“The heart secretes many hormones, so the hormonal system is another way. Physically is what I call ‘pressure waves’. So every time the heart beats it creates large pressure waves that travel through all the arteries. It's what we feel as our pulse. It's not the flow of blood that makes the pulse, it's a pressure wave. That squeezes all the cells and the neurons in our brain and has very real and measurable effects, that pressure wave that helps synchronize all the cells in the body.”

“Then the fourth way we can call energetically, or electromagnetically. The heart creates, by far, the largest rhythmic source of electromagnetic energy in our body. When you put electrodes on the body to make an electrocardiogram, the electrocardiogram measures electricity. They wear electrodes on their head to measure the EEG, or brain waves. We're measuring the electrical component of that electromagnetic energy. There's also the magnetic component, and those little electrodes don't see that. That requires a different kind of device, or detector called a magnetometer.”

Human tissue is fairly transparent to magnetic fields.

“The magnetic field generated by the heart, with today's magnetometers can be measured about three feet away. So we're sitting in each other's right now. Whereas brain waves, you can measure about an inch away.”

“It's a big difference, just in terms of measuring an inch versus three feet, to give you an idea. We know that this field is being radiated, that's just basic physics. Some experiments we did, a long time ago, was asking the question, first of all, is our nervous system able to detect these fields from other people? That ended up being a fairly easy set of experiments, I was shocked that no one else had done them before—it was just so easy that somebody had to have done this. We did all the literature searches and we found out later that another group was doing very similar experiments around the same time but nobody ever really published this before. So we can literally measure, if we had us both wired up, around the room here, that my brain waves might be synchronizing to your heartbeat, or vice versa, and that would go on in this complex dance as we communicate and interact. Nervous systems are definitely extremely sensitive to, and tuned into these biologically generated fields. In fact, we've done these experiments where people are five feet and even farther apart. That's several feet farther than a $50,000 magnetometer can measure. Our nervous systems are really sensitive and tuned into these types of biologically generated magnetic fields. If we do analysis of those magnetic fields, spectrum analysis and these types of things, we find that there is information encoded in those fields. They actually track back to the rhythms of our heart, which are linked back to our emotions and what we're feeling. So if you get where I'm going with this, our emotions are encoding information into these magnetic fields, which are being detected by other people's nervous systems, and animals. We've also shown it with horses and dogs and things like that. Of course, our animals are well known to be tuned into human emotions. In fact, you can actually measure changes in state of an animal or person in response to changing emotions in a person.”

“When we're feeling negative feelings, we're frustrated or we're impatient or anxious, there's a de-synchronization that's created in our nervous system and which is reflected in incoherent or jerky looking heart rhythms. That information is being sent up to the brain. There's a number of direct neural pathways, once it gets up to our brain’s stem. There are very strong, direct pathways from there to a number of key brain centers. One of those is a center that's at the very core of our brains, called the thalamus. The thalamus has a lot of important roles. One of those is that it synchronizes the electrical activity of all the neurons in our cortex.”

“The brain is not like a computer, I actually don't like computer analogies for the brain because we aren't really like digital computers, but where they are similar is that the activity of all of our critical neurons have to be synchronized for information to flow efficiently from one center to another and for us to be able to make meaning out of it.”

“When we have these erratic heart rhythms, that's directly impinging on the thalamus, and that inhibits its ability to synchronize all the critical neurons. The term that was given to this back in the 1970s to explain the causal role the heart has on modulating brain function is called ‘cortical inhibition’. Basically, you're inhibiting your mental functions. When we get upset, angry, anxious, we throw our nervous system into a desynchronized state that desynchronizes the neurons in our brain. We can't think clearly. That's when we react more from automated behavior, so we say or do the stupid thing. That usually ends up creating a lot more stress, takes a lot more time to have to deal with and undo that thing that we probably didn't really mean anyway. That's a kind of a classic example of critical inhibition.”

“On the other hand, if we're in a coherent state, and our heart is beating out those nice coherent patterns, that actually facilitates brain function beyond our normal state. Our neurons are more in sync, so we have more clarity of thought. Our reaction times are significantly faster. Just the difference in being in a normal state to a coherent state is about a 37 millisecond difference in reaction times. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's huge when you're talking about sensory motor integration and sensory skills.”

“When something occurs that could be a stressor, learning to take a time-out, freeze the frame, is one of the techniques we teach in the HeartMath techniques and when you get into a coherent state, your ratios are responding from a much more intelligent perspective and are greatly increased. Instead of coming from that inhibited state, you can come from a more facilitated state. A lot of what we're talking about, what the HeartMath tools are really about, is how to self-regulate from a more intelligent reference point so we make better choices in all things that we do.”

The heart and the brain communicate

“There's a new field that’s emerged over the last 30 years called ‘neural cardiology.’ That's the study of the nervous system in the heart.”

“We now know that the heart itself has a complex, intrinsic nervous system, and that's now called the ‘heart brain’. This isn't just the fact that there are sensory neurons in the heart, that's been known since the late 1800s. But what's new is that there's a very complex intrinsic nervous system and the types of neurons and the way they're all wired together is sufficiently complex to really say that it's a literal little brain in the heart. All the sensory neurons that have been known about forever, really tie into that. That little brain in the heart that's communicating back and forth between the brain up here in our head. Those cells in the heart, in the intrinsic cardiac nervous system, the heart-brain part, the exact same techniques used to show memory effects in the hippocampal neurons in our brain up here, the same recording techniques have been used to demonstrate that these neurons in the heart have both short and long term memory.”

“Some of these cellular memory stuff comes from pretty well documented cases now in heart transplant recipients who start getting the memories from the donor of their heart. I don't talk a lot about that, that's not the focus of our research, but a number of books have been published on that and it's even been studied to some degree, to the point that it's definitely a documented and very real phenomena that can happen in some cases.”

The magnetic fields of global coherence

“In terms of how we interact with each other, at what I'll call the energetic level, certainly one level that mediates that type of energetic interaction between people is the magnetic fields. There is also a growing body of evidence that shows that there's what we'll call non-local interconnections, as well which we're also looking at from another perspective in how we're interconnected with the earth itself. It's called the Global Coherence Initiative. It's a whole other research direction that we're involved in. It's really designed to study the interconnectivity and how we're connected. In the case of the magnetic interactions, it's very clear now that we radiate a magnetic field. It's just basic physics. We measure that very reliably. We all do it. Not only our work, but others have now duplicated showing that our nervous systems are sensitive to those fields, so that there's a literal information exchange going on at this more subtle, energetic level.”

“The way most people can relate to that, most people had the experience, you go visit a friend or just go into an environment and you just get the sense that something's wrong, something's off, somebody's upset or something. Before you catch any body language cues, or before you can see the people sometimes. You know what I'm talking about? That's certainly one of the things that can mediate that. On the other hand, it can feel really good to be around some other people. They have a more coherent field. A study was just completed, it's actually a dissertation study that ended up getting published in a journal. It was a great little study where the basic design of the study was four people sitting around a table. They were all being monitored, their heart rhythms and some other majors. The protocol was for some of the people to shift into a coherent heart state and the experiment was to see, did that affect the people who didn't know what was going on. What the experiment found was indeed it did. In other words, when we're in it, we're able to maintain our coherence. That's really being more positive, actually really appreciating or caring, actually feeling that, not just thinking it as some concept. It has to be a real energetically experienced emotion. That's what brings us into coherence. That's directly then reflected in more coherent fields that we're radiating, our magnetic fields become more coherent, measurable. That creates an atmosphere, or an environment that makes it easier for other people who are within that field. That's exactly what these experiments showed.”

“A lot of clinical studies show as we become more coherent, that reduces our blood pressure, improves our hormonal balance, improves our immunity, reduces health care costs. This has all been published and studies have been done to show that. But I'm also now creating and radiating a more coherent field as we've been talking about. And that makes it easier for others. So I was talking a minute ago about how we can experience that in a subtle energetic level, how it feels really good to be around some people and not so much others. The Global Coherence Initiative project is about really taking that example from the living room, expanding that globally. So where we moved from what we call personal coherence—which is what I was really talking about—to more social coherence. To where we start creating more coherence in our classrooms, in our workplaces, in our communities. And as more and more groups and communities become coherent at that level around the planet, then that moves us more to what we call global coherence. Where we can really start creating enough of a positive wave, emotional wave—these are literal waves in my way of thinking. And we're actually able start measuring this now. And what we're studying in the Global Coherence Initiative is the interaction between the Earth's fields—energetic systems literally.”

We're measuring the Earth-level energetic systems

“And by that I mean the different types of magnetic fields generated by Earth and the interaction between Earth and the ionosphere. But that's whole other topic: how humanity is interacting with our fields and the Earth's fields. And there's overwhelming data once you really look into it that shows that humans, in a mass way globally, are affected by changes in the Earth's field. The amount of correlations to that are really kind of astonishing, of how mass humanities are affected by Earth’s fields. But what we're proposing and will be measuring is how the Earth's energetic fields are also influenced by collected humanity and are the fields where we radiate. I like to ask myself at the end of the day or end of the week, ‘what did I feed the field today?’ How much of it was negativity or how much of it was really being more appreciative and caring and compassionate, accepting of people, and these kinds of things.”

Our heart rhythm is like music

“Our heart rhythm is beating out real messages. It's kind of the language of heart and brain communications. So it is a type of music. In fact, there have been groups that have actually taken heart rate variability data and assigned notes to it and played music from the heart rhythms. It definitely has a musical quality to it when you do that. I used to say the heart is kind of like the conductor—not quite the right word—of the whole body, the symphony of the whole body. Because really it sets the beat for all the cells in the body because it's the synchronizing signal for every single cell in our body. I mean, you can measure the electrocardiogram, the electrical energy of your heart on your toe, your earlobe. You can measure it anywhere. So it is the field that minds and synchronizes all the cells in the body. So it's really setting a musical beat if you will for our inner symphony.”

The electrophysiology of intuition…the sequence is heart first

“What we found was that using skin conductants as a measure, that our bodies would respond in a way that was correlated with a future unknown event. In other words, somehow the body knew before something that you couldn't possibly know was going to happen. So we adapted that and expanded that protocol where we had added EEG, heart measures to really see if we could trace the flow through the neural systems in the body, the flow of this intuitive information. And we were actually surprised by the results. The experimental protocol really determines how long in the future. In our case it was about six seconds that the body would respond in a way that it predicted in this case, what the future photograph that a person is going to be shown was. In other words, whether it was a negative image or a neutral image. The sequence of information was heart first. The heart literally changed and then literally sent a different neural signal to the brain informing the brain. And then the brain informed the body. And when you have the body responses, that's when it becomes a conscious perception. I said a lot there. So what this confirms—in fact, the way I got that published in peer review journals—is to say that it appears that the heart has access to a field of information not bound by the boundaries of time and space. So that's in quantum physics language that is completely accepted and well established now. You know, non-locality and entanglements as it's sometimes called. That's been done in quantum physics now. That kind of broke a barrier. But we predated that by a couple years.”

What do we mean by a field of information not bound by time and space?

“Well to me it's kind of a roundabout way of saying human spirit, higher self, or higher capacities. Whatever you want to call it. We also found in that study that when people are in a coherent state, that the heart was modulating the frontal cortex directly and in a much more direct and profound way than when they're in their normal state. So when we're in a coherent state we're basically creating more coherence in our energetic systems. So we have increased coupling or communication with whether you want to call your spirit or higher self, whatever. It doesn't really matter. So intuition to me is really the flow of information from our higher self via the heart into the mind-brain system. And this is where in-attentional blindness is important because if we don't attend to it, we don't pay attention to it, we don't perceive it. So by learning to maintain our own coherence and pay attention to the voice of the heart, the signals from the heart, it brings in a whole other level of intelligence that we have access to in our choices. And that's really what we mean by heart intelligent. Because it is through the energetic and physical heart that we access our higher capacities.”

Heart intelligence is connected to the Earth’s energy cycles

“More people are coming into more awareness of their heart or heart intelligence or higher self. The first, oldest book known to humankind talks about the heart as a source of wisdom and intuition. There's nothing new there that we're saying. We're just putting science to it and giving very practical tools on how we access that and access it when we need to, just kind of randomly. So how this ties into the solar rhythms and things like that: Research published in 1926 was the first real scientific investigation of the influence of solar activity on human behaviors and major human events. Tchijevsky is a Russian astrophysicist who published this. During World War I he noticed that certain battles were just more bloody and kind of crazy during high solar activity. And I have to give the man credit, he did an amazing body of work. He did a review of human history back to I think 1749, really studying any major human event like the onset of a major war, a new scientific discovery, or flourishing of certain arts, things that had global implication. And then broke those down. And you get a graph that looks wavy. And then below that he plotted the solar cycle. He ended up calling it an index of mass human excitability. So maybe to put a little more modern language on that, the solar cycle is a natural rhythm. Every 10.5 to 11 years, the magnetic poles flip on the sun and you go into a new solar cycle. So that's been going on forever. It's very clear that it drives the Earth's energetic systems. I mean, we can easily correlate changes in Earth's magnetic fields, ionospheric fields, Schumann resonance, all these things that are affected by and driven by the solar changes in the solar wind and all the stuff that goes along with that.”

“So this is like an energetic influx. And one thing that humans do not like is change, especially unexpected change, change that's occurring up or down, it doesn't really matter. Many things have been correlated to the same rhythm, not just major global events like he did, all kinds of things are correlated to the same rhythm, including the greatest periods in human flourishing. The media loves to talk about the negative. And it actually is true that the onset of every major war in recorded history started at a very specific place in that solar cycle. So we get these energetic influxes. If we're not well self-regulated, we don't know how to manage our energy—again from that more intelligent inner reference I'm talking about, our heart intelligent—we go get in traffic accidents or start fights and wars. Or we take that same energy if we are more self-regulated and self-aware, and we use it to create new scientific discoveries, to create collaborative relationships, to solve problems. The greatest periods of flourishing are in the same part of the cycle. As we're getting smarter and hopefully consciousness is evolving, we become more aware and self-directed on how to use these energies. Because they can be a great add on to create more collaborative relationships, how to work together to solve our problems rather than go get irritated and start wars.”

A very real planetary shift going on...a shift in consciousness.

“To make it real simple through my eyes, it's a shift from just operating primarily through mind consciousness, mind-brain consciousness, to integrating more of the heart-spirit consciousness. It's about integrating the spirit-heart consciousness with the mind, mind consciousness. That's pretty much what the shift is about. The next evolution of consciousness will be the integration of head and heart, and heart intelligence. A lot of people are waking up more to their guidance from their spirit. To kind of put it like it is, I see that happening so much more. That's really what the shift is all about. And that's really what the Global Coherence Initiative is about, to help facilitate people through that shift. There are a lot of stressors obviously on the planet right now, environmental changes, earthquakes, volcanoes and a lot to do with water, hurricanes, and floods, and droughts. And that's all part of the planetary shifts at the physical level, and that includes the changes in our political structures, financial systems and structures, educational—I mean it just goes on and on. They are all part of the shift. We have to have compassion for all of that, for the people going through that. Global Coherence is about 30,000 people that come together to send heart—coherent heart focused care—to those places that are going through the stressors to help reduce the human suffering and help people through those times. But that’s also part of the shift. Without some of these structures going through some significant stress, they can't readjust and come into a more balanced perspective. Because let's face it, we're just way out of balance on a planetary level on so many different things that in terms of the heart bringing balance, that's all part of the shift that's going on. And that's going to continue to go on for couple more years, things are going to get worse in terms of planetary stress. And that's really what HeartMath was really designed for—to help people through these challenging times, to be able to manage their stress. Because it's the emotional stress that our medical systems are really starting to finally get, here in the US. Europe and other countries have known this, been on this, a lot longer than we have. That it really is this stress—and especially emotional stress—that's one of the primary causes of ill health.”

“People are starting to learn about the impact of our emotions on our health. The research is very clear in terms of the work we've done teaching HeartMath to different populations using collaboration university—whether it's high blood pressure, or hormonal balance, diabetes, asthma—that as we become more coherent emotionally, that brings in more coherence, more efficiency in our physical systems. And that facilitates the body's natural regenerative processes, and improves our health in almost any place you want to look at it at.”

Creating a society that's addicted to health.

“We're seeing the beginnings of it and it has to do with the planetary shift I was talking about. It's in what we see with people that learn HeartMath. And not that HeartMath is the only solution here, it's not. There are a lot of great systems out there. But as people become more coherent, and then learn that they really can self regulate, that we have a lot more power to be in charge of our own emotions, than we have we ever thought or were ever taught. And they start practicing some simple techniques—and that's actually one of I think the genius things of Doc Childre, who founded HeartMath, his insistence on these techniques being really simple. That's where some of the more cerebral types miss it. That can't be that effective, it's too simple. But it's the simplicity that makes it so effective. Because it means people can actually use it, it's very practical. As they start becoming more coherent, more in charge of their emotions, and they're starting to appreciate life more. They're starting to increase the ratio of their positive feelings and world views from the negative. And that feels good. It's self reinforcing. It's not so much doing it from will power, because you're now doing it out of intelligence. This was is good for me. It's I think those kinds of things that are fundamental to having with the kind of shift you're talking about, where it becomes self addictive. And at the same time, as we become more coherent, we're rapidly increasing our own self awareness and our own level of awareness and consciousness. Because we're increasing our connection back to our own spirit connection.”

“The shift is really from just a head-based, mind-brain based consciousness to heart-spirit based consciousness, the integration of the two. So at the heart intelligence level or spirit level, it's really about love, appreciation, and cooperation.”

“The big gift of intuition is how do we really manage our own life. To really know what's the right thing to eat, the right thing to say, the right choices to make in daily life. In fact, that's one of the most common reported things of people who we end up practicing HeartMath techniques. Is that they say, wow, my intuition has just expanded many, many times. Life becomes more of a flow. That doesn't mean that you don't have the stresses and the challenges that come up, of course, I mean, nothing's going to make that go away. Especially in today's world. But they have a more intuitive sense of the flow around them, through them, with them,. You know, make peace when it's time to make peace with, and these kinds of things. Another thing that's been reported and been my own experience as well, is the increase in synchronicity. I've got something I'm trying to solve, and I'm thinking about it. Well, in next day in the mail comes the thing that—out of the blue—where did this come from? But there's the answer to the thing I needed to know, those kinds of things. It becomes ridiculous after a point, that it's kind of the way of life, and that's the way things flow.”

“People will become more cognizant of, and aware of the planetary and magnetic influences on our health and behavior. How many years this’ll take I don't know. But I don't think it's going to be that many. One of the big issues right now is that, especially in biology, the idea that there is a human spirit is taboo. And I don't mean this in a religious context. I really don't. When one really understands the physiology and the data that we're seeing from so many areas, there has to be something more than just a physical body. So, as we understand it, we are part of an undivided wholeness—David Bohm's words—I think is one of the major hinge points to the new understanding of energetics and medicine. Is that we do have a spirit and it's working with us all the time. And a lot of disease is really being cut off from spirit. Or not following our intuitive inner spirit, intuitive guidance, these are energetic issues that manifest as physical issues. So just trying to treat the physical without really resolving the energetic level keeps us stuck in the paradigm we're in now. But there's a lot of hope here, because this is really starting to shift. It's not shifted as a wholeness yet, but it's a lot of good science that things are moving more that way.”

Thank you for speaking with us, Rollin McCraty and for the work you do at the HeartMath Institute.

What else we are wandering…

❤️ The Inner Balance Coherence Plus uses heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback to help you access a healthy, high-performance state called “heart coherence,” which balances your mind and emotions. This helps prevent stress and clears your thinking for more effective choices.

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