Your Heart Has a Brain

Beating inside your chest right now is a very sophisticated pump. Its rhythmic contraction and release—ba bum, ba bum, ba bum—generates an electromagnetic field that can be measured several feet away from your body.

This vibrational field receives information from the environment and people surrounding you, and feeds it back to the heart. Your heart, with its own intrinsic nervous system, uses this information to make constant, fine, micro-adjustments to your heart function.

Stop for a minute and consider the beauty of this self-contained sensing-and-adjusting-mechanism seated in your heart, the very epicenter of your survival, heartbeat by heartbeat.

Clusters of nerve cells there—just like ganglia in your brain—directly sense and respond to external vibrational information without the involvement of the brain in your head. Additionally, in the two-way communication that occurs between the heart and the brain, the heart actually sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart! In other words, 80-90% of communication between head and heart is FROM heart to head.

With every heartbeat, your heart is sensing your immediate surroundings and sending signals to the brain. These heart signals influence the brain’s emotional processing and higher cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving.

In many cases, the heart leads the brain. Your heart has a direct impact on assessments of safety and danger; on levels of connection; on brain and cognitive function; and perhaps even memory.

Check in with your heart right now. Tune in to the feeling of it beating inside your chest. There is wisdom there for you, just for you, if you only learn to listen.

I strongly recommend “The Heartmath Experience,” a free video course that will help you “Connect with the Heart of Who You Truly Are.” Check it out here: The HeartMath Experience – HeartMath

[References and Resources: Embright’s Body=Brain course; The HeartMath Institute]

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Whole-being well-being expert, Liz Garrett, supports leaders in deepening embodied self-awareness so they can change their lives, their relationships, their work and, ultimately, the world.