The Source of All Things

by Reinhard Friedl

  * * *

  Astonishing research shows how the pure mechanics of the heart, with its contraction and relaxation, influence our perception profoundly via nerve tracts. Faces are perceived more intensely and threateningly when subjects see them during the contraction phase of the heart and the feelers for the pressures in the ventricles are activated. Simultaneously the amygdala, our center for fear and anger in the brain, becomes active and is supplied with more blood. Images are deemed less threatening when the heart is relaxed and filled with blood.5 Because our heart contracts and relaxes permanently (depending on the strain, this process is sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker), what is important is the net effect: the balance of exertion and relaxation across a longer period of time. If we perceive the world as friendly or hostile also depends on the pump function of our heart, the pressures in its cavities, and its signals to the brain. For this reason alone it is important to be balanced in the heart and to feel one’s voice. In a twist on the old saying: Man proposes, but the heart disposes.

  Cardio-cognitive consciousness (are you still beating or already feeling?)

  Regarding the fundamentals of the development of consciousness, scientists take their point of departure at the cerebrum and brain stem and then gradually slide lower, to the organs. That is where its roots are, and it grows toward the brain from there. I want to explain this using simple examples: when we are hungry, this is a feeling which describes a specific bodily state—a falling blood sugar level. When our heart is not properly supplied with blood or its cells are inflamed, pain may occur there. Pain is also a feeling and informs us of the fact that our body is being damaged. Further examples for simple feelings are the sensation of thirst or warmth, or our breathing. A feeling is thus, first of all, a vital sensation of our body. It informs us how the body is and what it needs. To feel one’s own body is the simplest, most basic form of consciousness. There is no clear definition for it anyway, but consciousness does not mean to be intelligent or creative. It is the perception of one’s own bodily existence.6 And that, in turn, is not possible without the heart.

  * * *

  What we can feel with our hearts, however, goes far beyond the perception of one’s own heartbeat. Sometimes when I follow a promising scientific lead and it seems logical to me, my heart goes into resonance, too. I feel in my heart that something makes sense. Or not, as the case may be, even though my arguments may be nothing short of impressive. If I see my children, I feel my heart overflow with love. For me these are not mere feelings, but complex qualities of heart consciousness—something I call “cardio-cognitive consciousness.” And as we all, every now and then, perceive “something” in the heart, these sensations would have to have their organic origin there. But how does heart consciousness get into the heart? Would it even be biologically conceivable that this special heart consciousness is transformed directly in the heart—meaning not in the brain but rather where we feel it?

  What you seek is seeking you

  During a holiday trip I strolled through Saigon’s famous Ben Thanh Market and looked at the goods on offer at a butcher’s stall. And suddenly I saw them. They lay next to each other in two bowls. The heart and the brain of a freshly slaughtered sheep, which are similar in their basic anatomy to those of a human. I stopped and looked at them for a long time.

  I asked the shop assistant in English if he would let me touch them. He did not understand me. I showed him what I wanted. He gave a wide smile, and I saw that he had only two teeth left. One on top, one on the bottom. In this moment this seemed fitting since the recipes he recommended to me with lots of gestures didn’t sound particularly easy to eat. Anyway, he allowed me to touch both the heart and the brain—or were they touching me? Cautiously I held them in my hands …

  * * *

  There are moments in life when you suddenly see something you had not been able to recognize before. I looked at the brain in my right hand and the heart in my left. Both loved freedom above all else. A free heart and a free will are essential ingredients of life. These two organs which seem so different at first glance aren’t so different after all! They are closely related. The words of the Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi came to mind: “What you seek is seeking you.” If we seek the answer to a question with our whole heart, it will sometimes find us halfway.

  “Ten dollars,” said the shop assistant. I would have given him 100. But what should I do with a brain and a heart in my hands? I bought a bag of spices from him instead and did not bargain when he said five dollars, even though it was daylight robbery. He had given me incomparably more. Astoundingly, heart and brain have numerous things in common.

  Self-stimulation

  Brain and heart are autonomous and can each stimulate themselves electrically. This self-stimulation occurs in certain ion channels in cell walls: the so-called funny current. They occur predominantly in the heart and the brain.7 In the brain we find them in an area called the thalamus, which is presumed to be the gate to higher consciousness. But the heart, too, has its own pacemaker with which it stimulates itself for life, the so-called sinoatrial node. This node is made up of heart muscle cells, but they behave like nerve cells and have ion channels built into their walls for self-stimulation. Among other things, they take care that the heart beats continuously. It is assumed that the process of autonomous stimulation plays a role in the generation of our very own inner experience of thoughts and emotions.

  Impulse conduction

  Both heart and brain have their own impulse conduction system through which the stimulation spreads: in the brain via the manifold branchings of the nerve cells, which come together to form a three-dimensional net; in the heart via the heart muscle cells.

  Heart muscle cells are something very special. In contrast to the muscle cells of the skeletal muscles, like nerve cells, they branch out to become a complex three-dimensional net whose fibers form the heart’s organ structure with the chambers. Like the nerve cells, heart muscle cells can transmit electrical stimuli. This transmission works via so-called gap junctions—superfast cell connections which also occur with the brain’s nerve cells. In contrast to the synapses, which are much slower, transmission of stimuli is thus possible in both directions. The lifelong adaptation of the brain, its connections, and synapses to new demands is called neuroplasticity. The heart’s nervous system and its musculature also adapt to new demands throughout life. Scientists speak of the muscular and neuronal remodeling of the heart.8

  Control and communication

  Both organs command both a complex biological perception function (sensor system) and motion control (motor function) and can themselves react to what they feel. This is called autonomous information processing and the heart, too, has its own nervous system to do this. In this way it can control its function in an extremely subtle way, but also continuously passes its data on to the brain, which can only perceive information from the blood in a very limited way because of the blood-brain barrier. One could say that the heart feels for the brain. They like to stimulate each other via nerve tracts, and we see the possibility for their communication also in the synthesis and distribution of identical hormones and the communication via biomagnetic fields.

  Electromagnetic fields

  The heart generates an electromagnetic field that is by far the strongest in the body; it is 100 times stronger than the brain’s. Electromagnetic fields can store unlimited amounts of information. Without them, modern communications technology such as mobile phones and the Internet would be unthinkable. Even before this, biomagnetic fields were involved in the communication between people, their brains, and hearts; the electromagnetic waves of these organs can synchronize themselves and are in turn influenced by the Earth’s magnetic field. In this way, communication between different creatures within an ecosystem is possible, and the heart is a decisive pacesetter.9 My findings about the heart so far have shown me that it can send out messages of various kinds—for example hormones, pressure signals, or nerve impulse
s—but it also has antennae to receive. I would be very surprised if that were not also the case for electromagnetic waves and if they would not allow us to receive “heart information” (for example, to determine whether someone is being honest with us). We are also exposed to influences from the universe; a current long-term study, published in Scientific Reports in 2018, proves the influence of cosmic radiation on our autonomic nervous system and heart rate variability.10 At the moment we can only speculate what specific meaning that might have for us.

  Therapy

  Neither organ works without electrical stimulation, which always has its own rhythmicity. Not only the heart is sometimes off-beat; the brain can display disturbances in its rhythm too. If the heart is continuously too slow, stimulation electrodes will be attached to its chambers and connected with a pacemaker implant. And what is good for the heart will often also help the brain. Not to help us think faster, but to calm down the brain’s overexcitability during convulsive fits (epilepsy). For this purpose, the relaxation nerve, the vagus, is electrically activated with a small stimulator implanted in the neck. Thus, for the heart pacemakers hit the gas pedal, while for the brain they hit the brake, and both work with rather gentle electrical power.

  * * *

  That is not always enough—sometimes decidedly more electricity is needed. Nowadays AEDs (automated external defibrillators) are available in most public places as energy disturbances in the heart have become a rather widespread disease. You can recognize an AED by the lightning symbol inside a heart—and that is what they are for: they administer an electric shock to correct fatal arrhythmia. Even a layperson can save a life with this device. They just have to remember it’s there! When a person suddenly collapses, call for help first. Then summon your courage and run or send someone else to get the AED. You don’t have to be afraid; it will speak to you and do it all by itself. You only have to attach the electrodes. It is really simple! And you could save a human life. If you act swiftly, the probability of survival doubles.11

  In the last few years another high-current method has been revived after being forgotten in the junk room of neuroscience for some time: electric shocks. Formerly they were used on convicted criminals and in psychiatry on the brain. It was hoped they would jolt the brain into functioning “normally” again. Today electric shocks are applied to patients with severe depression. The method has been refined: the patients are under anesthetic and the musculature is blocked by drugs to prevent the twitching of the whole body. Several studies testify to successes; how exactly the outcome is achieved, though, is far from being fully explained. What is certain, though, is that not only the heart but the brain, too, is being treated with electric shocks.

  Packaging and networking

  Mother Nature has packaged the two global players of our body subtly, protected them effectively, and connected them extremely well. The brain is swimming in fluid: one could say in a tank of brain fluid encased by bone. This protects it from injury and gives it buoyancy. The heart is surrounded by the lungs and enveloped in bubble wrap, so to speak. Water and air are very permeable mediums for waves and particles, which connect us to our environment through quantum mechanics and energy. Sixty billion neutrinos per second rain through every square centimeter of our body. They come from faraway galaxies with black holes, from the sun, even from the Big Bang itself—and we are not conscious of them, don’t notice them. Therefore it was assumed for a long time that these “ghost particles” have no mass. But they do, and in 2015 the Nobel Prize was awarded for this discovery. The proof happened in gigantic water tanks with the purest crystal-clear water. In very rare cases a neutrino will hit a water atom core or electron and then “blue lightning” will result from the electromagnetic radiation.12 I ask myself what happens if a neutrino hits the fluid tanks around the brain or in the heart? Will the blue lightning be passed on via our 800,000 kilometers of nerve tracts or 100,000 kilometers of blood vessels? And what consequences would that have for our condition? In view of the sheer amount of these particles I think this is a legitimate question, and I hope that it can one day be answered.

  Consciousness

  If it is the case that electrical stimulation in the cerebrum’s nerve cells is involved in the transformation of consciousness, then electrical stimulation in the space-creating, cardioplastic nets of the heart cells must also lead to elements of consciousness. There are numerous theories about how our experience of the self and the world can transform our body cells. Canadian biologist and anesthetist Stuart Hameroff and well-known quantum physicist Roger Penrose assert that our brain’s performance is based on quantum-mechanical processes13—in a subatomic reality (whose existence is no longer doubted by anyone today but which we cannot describe with our classical laws of nature) in which everything is possible, space is given to imagination and creativity, and poetry and logic are intertwined, like heart and brain. We cannot calculate with the heart “what holds / the world together in its inmost folds,” as Goethe put it. But we need a heart that has the urge to make such calculations and which can observe their mathematical beauty. What we feel in the heart also becomes conscious in the heart, as quantum physics does not stop in the brain.

  Welcome to reality

  The heartbeat of time was suspended. I was still standing, spices in hand, at the open-air stall of the organ dealer in Saigon. I was not bothered by the hundreds of flies buzzing around me. And even less by the billions of neutrinos that were pervading me. Neutrinos, by the way, come in three “flavors:” electron, muon, and tau. This is what physicists call the different states which can oscillate into each other. Famous quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli would not have suspected this when he postulated the existence of neutrinos in 1930. He was known for his joie de vivre but bemoaned the neutrinos: “I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.”14 I felt for him, for was I not doing something similar? But I am sure of it, with my brain, my heart, my cardio-cognitive consciousness: the heart is an organ of consciousness.

  “Mister, mister!” Someone was pressing a banknote into my hand. I had not noticed it slipping from my pocket when I paid for the spices. “Thank you,” I said, “thank you so much,” and returned completely to the reality of the market in Vietnam, a country which has ten words for “heart.”

  HEART ENCOUNTER

  My heart had beaten countless times since I had sallied forth in search of the whole heart. The journey had changed me, and sometimes I wondered if I really wanted to keep going “only” operating on hearts. I did not know how to reconcile my new findings with my old profession as a heart surgeon. It was my profession, after all, to operate. I could not very well issue my heart-deaf patients a prescription to use the HeartMath method to tune in to themselves more consciously. But it increasingly pained me when I sensed that a sick heart had been “banged up” like a car by an inconsiderate lifestyle. To avoid the repair shop (operating room), the heart as the motor of our life needs a service every now and then. And ideally it should also be driven lovingly and attentively. As it is always beating and never rests, the service could be a service to ourselves: slowing down! Change into a lower gear and listen to our inner voice. Sometimes when I look into the face of an exhausted heart during an operation, I wish that this motor had been treated more gently and its driver had better listened to its voice. But in the everyday business of a clinic, such therapeutic instructions from the mouth of a heart surgeon would have caused consternation—even though we can demonstrably not only calm our mind with meditation and breathing techniques, but also the heart. The effects on blood pressure, heart rate, and brainwaves can be measured even in beginners and even on the first day. In a current scientific statement, the American Heart Association explicitly supports meditation, as it can lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. You can’t conquer such diseases with technology alone. Even though every year many hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on it, cardiovascular disease remains the main cause of illness and
fatalities.1