By Dr. Mercola
In the film “Of Hearts and Minds,” science documentary
filmmaker David Malone explores the human heart, juxtaposing the
modern scientific view of the heart as a mere pump, versus its
long history as a symbol of love and the center of innate wisdom
and human character.
The film starts off in an operating room where open heart
surgery is taking place, and Malone interviews Consultant
Surgeon Francis Wells, who talks about the mechanistic and
bioelectrical workings of the heart.
On the other side, there’s the poetic view of the heart as a
source organ of love, with an intelligence all its own. In
Wells’ view, the heart is a pump, and nothing more.
You can replace your heart with an artificial one, and it
won’t affect your ability to love. Yet the idea that your heart
is somehow an emotional organ remains.
The Heart — An Organ of Truth and Emotion
Sayings like “I love you with all my heart,” and “my heart
swelled with joy,” or the reference to someone being
“broken-hearted” or “cold hearted” — how much of this poetic
language is based on something real?
Are these kinds of sayings references to something
biologically true, stated in poetic terms?
This is the question Malone seeks to answer in this film, and
the reason he thinks the answer may be important is because he
believes the way we see our heart is a reflection of how we view
ourselves as human beings.
The ancient Egyptians saw the heart as an organ of truth. And
indeed, your heart does seem to be able to tell you the truth
about how you feel and what you think is right or wrong. When
you lie, for example, your heart rate tends to speed up.
As the film goes on, Malone scours the latest science, to
find out whether our
feelings and emotions really come from our brains, or
whether they might actually originate in our hearts.
For starters, Leonardo Da Vinci discovered how the
blood flowed through the heart, and how the swirling vortexes
within the heart’s chambers worked with the heart,
opening and closing the valves with each heart beat — a far cry
from the mechanistic view of the heart as a simple single-stroke
pump.
Da Vinci’s drawings and experiments reveal a harmonic beauty
— as much a piece of art as a machine.
The ‘Brain’ Within Your Heart
David Paterson, Ph.D. a professor at Oxford University,
straddles the two areas of the brain and the heart. His work
shows that your brain is not the sole source of your
emotions, but indeed, your heart and brain work together
in producing emotions.
Your heart actually contains neurons, similar to those in
your brain, and your heart and brain are closely connected,
creating a symbiotic emotional whole. As explained in the film:
“When your heart receives signals from the brain via
the sympathetic nerves, it pumps faster. And when it
receives signals through the parasympathetic nerves, it
slows down. “
While this seems to support the view that the heart simply
follows the orders of the brain, the reality is far more
complex. Because your heart also contains thousands of
specialized neurons, predominantly located around the right
ventricle surface, forming a complex network. Why did nature put
them there?
Neurons are what allow your brain to form thoughts. So what
are they doing around the right ventricle of your heart? While
much about the neurons in your heart is still unknown, one thing
is sure — the “brain” in your heart communicates back and forth
with the brain in your head. It’s a two-way street.
The Neurons in Your Heart Makes Decisions Too
In the film, Professor Paterson shows a piece of heart tissue
from a rabbit — not the whole heart, just a piece of the right
ventricle, where the neurons are clustered.
Kept in a tank with nutrients and a steady flow of oxygen,
this suspended piece of heart tissue beats all by itself,
even though it’s not attached to a living organism, and there’s
no actual blood pumping through it.
By sending an electrical impulse into this tissue via an
electrode, Professor Patterson demonstrates how the heart tissue
immediately slows its contractions; a “decision” made by the
neurons in the tissue in response to the stimulation.
This elegant little experiment shows that it’s the neurons in
your heart that decide how the heart will behave, not the
neurons in your brain. What Professor Patterson is finding again
shifts our view of the heart back toward its more poetic and
philosophical origins.
As Malone says:
“The heart is a pump that does respond when the brain
asks it to, but it is not enslaved to the brain. Its
relationship to the brain is more like a marriage ... with
each dependent on the other. It seems science is now
restoring to the heart something that rightfully belongs to
it: Our emotions.”
Intense Negative Emotions Puts Your Heart Health at Risk
The interplay between your brain and heart can be seen when
looking at how your emotional and mental outlook colors your
health — especially your heart health. Intense anger, for
example, boosts your
heart attack risk five-fold, and your stroke risk
three-fold.
Intense grief after the loss of a loved one also raises your
risk of having a heart attack. The day immediately following
your loss, your risk of a heart attack goes up by 21 times, and
remains six times higher than normal for several weeks.1
Research also shows that people exposed to traumatic
experiences, for example, combat veterans, New Orleans residents
who went through Hurricane Katrina, and Greeks struggling
through financial turmoil, have higher rates of cardiac problems
than the general population.
In one such study,2
which involved nearly 208,000 veterans aged 46 to 74, 35 percent
of those diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
developed insulin resistance in two years, compared to only 19
percent of those not diagnosed with PTSD.
PTSD sufferers also had higher rates of metabolic syndrome —
a collection of risk factors that raise your risk of heart
disease, such as high body fat, cholesterol, blood pressure, and
blood sugar levels. More than half (about 53 percent) of
veterans with PTSD had several of these symptoms, compared to 37
percent of those not suffering with PTSD.
A Positive Outlook Reduces Your Heart Attack Risk
If negative emotions have the potential to harm your heart,
it would stand to reason that positive emotions may heal it, and
this indeed seems to be the case. In a study3
of nearly 1,500 people with an increased risk of early-onset
coronary artery disease, those who reported being cheerful,
relaxed, satisfied with life, and full of energy had a one-third
reduction in coronary events like a heart attack.
Those with the highest risk of coronary events enjoyed an
even greater risk reduction of nearly 50 percent. This was true
even when other heart disease risk factors, such as
smoking, age, and
diabetes, were taken into account. Separate research has
similarly found that:
- Positive psychological well-being is associated with a
consistent reduced risk of coronary heart disease (CHD)4
- Emotional vitality may protect against risk of CHD in
men and women5
- Cheerful heart disease patients live longer than
pessimistic heart patients
6
- Very optimistic people have lower risks of dying from
any cause, as well as lower risks of dying from heart
disease, compared to highly pessimistic people7
Yes, Your Heart Also Affects Your Mind
In one test, Malone is shown a series of images of neutral
and frightened faces, some synced in time to his heartbeat, and
others not synced to his heart. Interestingly, when the
frightened faces were shown in sync with his heartbeat, he
perceived them as being more intensely frightened than when
shown out of sync with his heartbeat.
What this test showed was that how his mind processed the
perception of fear was affected by his heart. When his brain
processed the image in sync with his heart, there was a greater
“resonance” in the emotional output.
By looking at the brain scans taken during the test, the
researchers are able to pinpoint the precise brain region
affected by the heart, namely the amygdala — an area known to be
associated with threat perception. Your amygdala processes fear
in combination with the signaling from your heart. This
brain-heart connection is also at work when you experience
feelings of compassion and empathizing with other people’s
emotional states.
As Malone says, “it is our heart working in tandem
with our brain that allows us to feel for others ... It is
ultimately what makes us human... Compassion is the heart’s
gift to the rational mind.”