Heart's Role in Intuition and Emotion

The heart has its own intrinsic nervous system, which can sense,

feel, remember, and process information that's

independent from the brain.

We always think of the information input

system as being entirely in the brain,

but we're now discovering information that the heart receives

information first and then relays it to the brain.

Studies have shown that the heart responds faster than the

brain to

outside stimulation.

One of the more recent studies we did, uh, in our labs was looking

at the, what we ended up titling the

electrophysiology of intuition.

And there was some, uh, previous research that had been done

showing that the body would respond in a way that would

predict a future event if the future event was

emotionally significant and relevant to the person.

Participants were attached to sensors to record their brainwave

activity, heart activity, and heart-brain

interactions.

Person would be sitting at a computer, push a button, and then we're recording

physiological data, and six to eight seconds later,

you would be shown a, a

photograph, okay? And then the photograph would be from two

opposite ends

of the spectrum of emotional arousal.

Participants were shown pictures of car accident victims, snakes

attacking, and other disturbing images.

On the other end of the spectrum, the pictures included flowers or

sunsets.

The photographs were randomly assigned for display to the participants.

What's key here is the computer assigned

not only which photograph, but which type of photograph after the data

was

already recorded. So it was absolutely impossible for

the research subject, the experimenter, to have any kind of foreknowledge of

what photograph it might be. The computer itself didn't even know.

The results were surprising. The body responded

even before the picture was displayed.

What we found was that not only did the body indeed

respond

prior to the event, you know, the seeing the picture in a, in a way

that would

predict it, but it was the heart that responded first.

The heart's response was not only faster, but the signal it sent to the

brain varied depending on the emotional content of the picture.

Looking at the signals that the heart was sending to the brain,

uh, the heart literally sent a different

message to the brain depending on

what the future picture was going to be.

Then you saw a brain response,

then you saw the body response, which is then where it then became

conscious.

So the flow of, of this in, uh, what, intuitive information is

heart, brain, body, and you have to have the body response for

it to become

consciously aware of it.

What these experiments reveal is changing our basic understanding of

how the human body functions.

It appears as though the heart, and brain later,

have access to a field of information not bound by time and

space.

If we're talking kinda quantum holographics or quantum physics,

that's old news.

We're really starting to have ways now of showing that we really do have a, a

energetic or an electronic system,

and, um, that that's really primary, that it's really not bound

by time and space.