Quantum


HEALTH


Issue 9 February 2011


coherence in a matter of minutes, inducing all the health benefits that go with improved heart coherence. The image below shows the heart’s waveform when a person is intentionally generating feelings of frustration or anger through the heart centre and when that same person shifts to feelings of appreciation. The change happens in only minutes, and it’s certainly dramatic! In this case, a picture is definitely worth a thousand words about the benefits of focusing on positive feelings, undertaking a daily practice of meditation, or regularly using stress-relief techniques throughout your day.


smaller circular structures, which are individual neurons. A closer view reveals that in the centre of each of these cells are clusters of dendrites, which interconnect individual neurons. These types of cells process incoming signals to the heart. That’s not too surprising, since we know the heart has to receive signals to know what to do and how to respond to changing conditions in the body. However, researchers have also found “afferent” intrinsic cardiac cells. This type of cell is sensory in nature, sending signals to other neuronal cells, including the brain. Discovery of these types of neuronal-cardiac cells reveals that, much like the brain, the heart is, as HeartMath scientists have concluded, “an independent neural processing unit.”


Image Credit: Google Images/heartmath.org The Feeling Heart


Among the most exciting research into the heart is its role as our “second brain.” Evidence is mounting that our heart not only processes many of the same neurochemicals as the brain but may manufacture them as well. Discoveries about how the heart is like the brain have spawned an entirely new scientific-medical discipline called neurocardiology. While we usually associate the prefix “neuro-” with the brain, it now has to be applied to the heart, because the heart has been found to contain some of the same type of neuronal cells as are in the brain. On the HeartMath website you can view images— highly magnified images made with a confocal microscope—of a type of heart cell called a cardiac intrinsic ganglion. Ganglia are groups of nerve cells (somata) that exist outside of the brain and spinal cord. In the ganglia, you can see


42 Quantum Health


The heart produces a much larger electrical field than does the brain—a field that is detectable up to three or more feet from the body—so it is in greater electrical interconnectivity with the environment than is the brain. Neurocardiologists have also discovered that the heart is a major endocrine gland and is intimately linked to the limbic system, so it has profound control over hormones and emotions. Some of the most vocal scientists at the frontier of the new biology of the heart are now claiming that the heart can learn, remember, and direct the body, just as the brain/mind can.* And HeartMath has conducted a series of clinical studies that are proving these claims to be true in ways most researchers never thought possible. An unexpected result from these studies is that the heart not only is able to “feel” (process emotions) but it also appears to be intuitive.


The Intuitive Heart


The Institute of HeartMath conducted controlled studies that reproduced some previous brain experiments carried out by other researchers, only this time they focused on the heart. The brain experiments went more or less as follows: a series of volunteer subjects were brought individually into a lab and hooked up to various kinds of monitoring equipment that detect various aspects of brain activity and involuntary stress responses in the body. The researchers were seeking to know more about evoked response


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