Heart Influences What You Perceive and Fear
Researchers have recently shown that the distinct phases of the heartbeat exert sharply different effects on the brain’s processing of external and emotional stimuli.
We consider the brain the very center of who we are and what we do: ruler of our senses, master of our movements; generator of thought, keeper of memory. But the brain is also rooted in a body, and the connection between the two goes both ways. If certain internal receptors indicate hunger, for instance, we’re driven to eat; if they indicate cold, we dress more warmly.
However, decades of research have also shown that those sensations do much more than alert the brain to the body’s immediate concerns and needs. As the heart, lungs, gut and other organs transmit information to the brain, they affect how we perceive and interact with our environment in surprisingly profound ways. Recent studies of the heart in particular have given scientists new insights into the role that the body’s most basic processes play in defining our experience of the world.
In the late 19th century, the psychologist William James and the physician Carl Lange proposed that emotional states are the brain’s perception of certain bodily changes in response to a stimulus — that a pounding heart or shallow breathing gives rise to emotions like fear or anger rather than vice versa. Researchers have since found many examples of physiological arousal leading to emotional arousal, but they wanted to delve deeper into that link.
The heartbeat provided the perfect means to do so.
The Heart Tips the Seesaw Cardiac activity can be divided into two phases: systole, when the heart muscle contracts and pumps out blood, followed by diastole, when it relaxes and refills with blood.
Beginning in the 1930s, scientists found that systole dampens pain and curbs startle reflexes.