Howard Martin: The Purpose of Your Heart
Physiological Heart In our research we began to look at the physical heart. We all know that the physical heart is an amazing cardiovascular organ that pumps blood tirelessly from birth to death and it’s the most efficient pump there’s ever been. That’s the way we always saw the heart – at a physiological level.
As we began to do research and uncover other research, we found that the heart was more than that. It’s a very important information processing center in our bodies and it’s sending information to the brain and throughout the entire body. This is essential information. As we dug deeper we were able to see other ways.
Neurological
We found that there was actually a medical discipline called ‘neurocardiology’. It is the study of the nervous system that exists within the heart. Next to the one found in our brain, it’s the most complex nervous system we have. It sends information to the brain through a neural pathway that originates in the heart. That neural pathway continues through the heart and travels into the midlevel brain – into the limbic system, where a lot of our emotional processing takes place. It even goes further, all the way up and it terminates in the higher perceptional centers of our brain, which is called the neocortex. We have therefore always this neurological conversation happening between our heart and our brain. When researchers look at the neurological traffic in our bodies, they’re clearly seeing that the heart sends a lot more information to the brain than it ever receives from the brain. This is just the first way.
Blood Pressure
When the heart pumps blood, the muscle squeezes and creates a wave of energy that pushes the blood through the veins and arteries. That blood pressure wave travels through every single part of our body because our blood gets everywhere. The blood pressure waves change and modulate depending upon how the heart is beating. As the blood pressure waves change, they influence biological functions. The main influence is on the brain activity. The electrical activity in our brain is therefore synchronized to the blood pressure wave. This is characterized as a biophysical communication.
