Rollin is a scientist, psychophysiologist, Executive Vice President and Director of Research at HeartMath Institute, member of the Global Coherence Steering committee, and project coordinator of GCI's Global Coherence Monitoring System. He is a professor at Florida Atlantic University.

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Dr. Rollin McCraty

<h4 style="text-align:justify;">DR. ROLLIN MCCRATY shares the science of the synchronicity between the heart and mind and, when they are in sync, how the love that is created can positively connect us to each other and everything in the world.</h4>&nbsp;It’s a great honor to be here. I’m not going to stand here and try to tell you anything you haven’t already heard or that you don’t already know, but I am going to tell you the same thing in a different language, the language of science.&nbsp;I have been a long-term meditator myself, and I learned about the heart. But if I’m really honest, it was more like a metaphor for emotions; for me it was all about the brain. I even got a degree in Consciousness Studies. Then I had the great fortune to meet the Founder of HeartMath, Doc Childre, and I was introduced to the real Heart, the deeper heart, which it is really all about.&nbsp;I was fortunate to help him found The HeartMath Institute, and a few years later he invited me to found The HeartMath Research Center. He said we have to do rigorous scientific research. The language of science is the new language for many people in the world, and if we’re going to introduce them to getting their hearts and brains in sync, we need that work.&nbsp;So, over the last 30 years, we made a lot of scientific discoveries that validate what we already believed to be true. We started by looking at how emotions affect the body, the physiology. We were measuring brainwaves and hearts in the lab. And what we found back when we started this (at that time, nobody was looking at what happens in our bodies when we love, when we appreciate, it was all about stress, depression, and anxiety), was that when people had heartfelt feelings of love, compassion, kindness, something magical happened. Their heartbeats, the rhythms of the heart, dramatically changed.Today we know this as an optimal state, a state where the mind, emotions, the heart all come into synchronization. We call it heart coherence. There are over 500 studies that show when people are in a heart coherent state, it lifts and benefits almost everything: our health, our performance in sports, etc., but especially our ability to access our inner intuitive guidance.&nbsp;The beautiful thing about the heart and heart coherence is it’s neutral. It’s something we all have. And whenever we’re feeling love, compassion, and kindness, we shift into a heart coherent state. It doesn’t matter how we get there, what technique or practice we do. It increases the measurable synchronization between the rhythms of the brain and the rhythms of the heart.&nbsp;<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:75%;"><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/time_for_love_to_go_viral2_cc837f4577.webp" alt="time-for-love-to-go-viral2.webp" srcset="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/thumbnail_time_for_love_to_go_viral2_cc837f4577.webp 145w,https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/large_time_for_love_to_go_viral2_cc837f4577.webp 554w,https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/time_for_love_to_go_viral2_cc837f4577.webp 554w," sizes="100vw"></figure><hr><h4 style="text-align:center;">The big gift is access to our intuition, our inner guidance.</h4><hr>The big gift is access to our intuition, our inner guidance. This is something we have tested in the lab, and even we were surprised. The takeaway is that the heart can know the future; it all starts in the heart. The heart is the first to get the information. It sends a measurably different signal to the brain, and then there is a brain response, and only then is there a body response to felt emotion.&nbsp;The heart has access to a field of information that is not bound by time and space. I would suggest we have two hearts: the physical heart and the energetic heart, which has been called the spiritual heart in so many spiritual and religious traditions. The energetic heart is the bridge that connects the larger part of our self—our soul, our spirit. It translates that down into the physical world of our bodies. The energetic heart is how we connect with our larger self, our higher self. That’s the real us. As we learn to become more heart coherent, that pathway opens. Becoming more heart-coherent can facilitate anything we do, and any practice we want to take up.&nbsp;The next adventure in our research was to understand scientifically how the heart connects us with others. Our heart doesn’t just stop at the skin. We are broadcasting radiating fields, magnetic fields produced by the heart. We were able to show that those fields carry information about how we feel. When we’re in a coherent state, which we get into naturally when we’re loving and appreciative, it connects us with others in a measurable way. Hearts literally synchronize when we come together in the heart.<hr><h4 style="text-align:center;">When we’re in a coherent state, which we get into naturally when we’re loving and appreciative, it connects us with others in a measurable way.&nbsp;</h4><hr><figure class="image image_resized" style="width:75%;"><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/time_for_love_to_go_viral3_f939f2f819.webp" alt="time-for-love-to-go-viral3.webp" srcset="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/thumbnail_time_for_love_to_go_viral3_f939f2f819.webp 145w,https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/large_time_for_love_to_go_viral3_f939f2f819.webp 554w,https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/time_for_love_to_go_viral3_f939f2f819.webp 554w," sizes="100vw"></figure><figure class="image image_resized" style="width:75%;"><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/time_for_love_to_go_viral4_359bf0fa71.webp" alt="time-for-love-to-go-viral4.webp" srcset="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/thumbnail_time_for_love_to_go_viral4_359bf0fa71.webp 145w,https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/large_time_for_love_to_go_viral4_359bf0fa71.webp 554w,https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/time_for_love_to_go_viral4_359bf0fa71.webp 554w," sizes="100vw"></figure>&nbsp;And that opens a new type of communication where we hear each other deeply. Even when we don’t agree, we still have the heart level connection. It’s the key to how we build social coherence, how we learn to get along with others, even when our minds might not disagree.&nbsp;<hr><h4 style="text-align:center;">The heart really is what is connecting us across dimensions, with the higher self, with others, and with yourself.</h4><hr>The next major step in the research path was understanding how our hearts not only connect us with our higher self and with others, but with the Earth itself. When we measured the heart-coherent rhythm, a rhythm of about ten seconds (we have new technologies that can measure it), we started asking questions like, “How do mothers know their children are in harm’s way when they’re on the other side of the planet?” “What’s connecting us? There has to be something making that connection.”&nbsp;We all live within the magnetic fields of the Earth, the North Pole, the South Pole, the fields of Earth. We discovered that the fields vibrate at the same frequency as the coherent human heart rhythm. When we’re in that heart coherent state, through resonance we connect with the fields of the Earth. We’re all connected too. We’re finding that the interconnected fields of the Earth not only connect us to each other, but with nature, with trees and animals. The heart really is what is connecting us across dimensions, with the higher self, with others, and with yourself.&nbsp;Once we really understood that, we said, “How can we teach this to others? How can we make coherence easy?” So we developed technologies to help us do that. They are inexpensive technologies that allow you to see your heart rhythm in real time. I’m thrilled to say they are being introduced into many schools in the US and other countries, allowing kids to learn this at an early age. I personally think there is no greater gift we can give our children than learning how to sync our hearts and brains so they have that skill for life.&nbsp;When we look at the global field, we have new technologies that can measure it. When we come together at events like this, we get into that coherent state. In other words, we add love and compassion, and we intentionally radiate that into the field environment, the Earth. Love is by far the most powerful energy or frequency bringing coherence into the planetary field. We can measure this. And I’m honored to say that the Heartfulness Institute is one of our partners on this project. We have a lot of these devices here, now, measuring what we’re doing to affect the field.&nbsp;I hope it has been useful to share some science with you. What does this all point to? My parting invitation is: it’s time for love to go viral. It’s what is going to shift the frequency of the planet, it’s what is going to lift the baseline of humanity into our next level of consciousness, where the heart and brain are truly in sync, in a joint partnership.From a talk given at the Global Spirituality Mahotsav, March 14 to 17, 2024, at Kanha Shanti Vanam<hr><h4 style="text-align:center;">Illustrations by JASMEE MUDGAL</h4><hr>

It’s time for love to go viral 

We truly are all connected

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<h4>
 In December 2022, DR.
 ROLLIN McCRATY, Director of Research at the Heart Math Institute, gave an online presentation at the
 international Heartfulness conference, “An Integrative Approach to Health and Well-being,” at Kanha Shanti
 Vanam. Here we share some highlights from his talk.</h4>



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<h4>What Is
 coherence?</h4>



Most people have an intuitive understanding of coherence, but in the scientific community it’s a term and a
 concept used in every branch of science, from the macro to the micro scale. We use it to describe the behavior
 of the parts of a complex system. In a coherent system, those parts have to be communicating and talking to each
 other so there’s connectedness. It’s inherent to the concept of coherence, and it’s really a measure of the
 harmonious order of how all the parts of a system are working together.



A coherent system implies stability and energy efficiency. Another key concept of coherence is that in any system
 – whether it’s a human being, or any other scale we want to look at– there’s a greater wholeness than you can
 derive from the sum of the parts. This is why we chose to use this term in our research so many years ago.



Our research focuses on three primary domains: personal, social, and global. For the personal, we have spent many
 years looking at the coherence within our bodies, especially between the heart and brain. Socially, we can
 define the coherence of a group, whether that’s a family, a work team, a leadership team, or even a community. I
 won’t have a lot of time to go into global coherence, but I’ll give you a teaser.



<h4>The heart profoundly
 affects brain function</h4>



It probably isn’t a surprise to you that the heart sends far more information to the brain than the brain sends
 to the heart, but it is a big surprise for a lot of people in our medical communities in the Western
 world. It is not a new finding – it has been known since the late 1800s: in fact it’s basic anatomy.



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<img alt="the-science-of-heart-coherence"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/science_heart_coherence2_901cc64c37.jpg"
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<h4 class="text-center">There
 are neural channels by which the heart and brain communicate, but the
 heart also communicates with the brain hormonally, energetically, through the pressure waves it
 generates that affect every cell and synchronizes all the cells in the body.</h4>



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In the 1970s, there were some major discoveries that really shifted the paradigm in the field of
 psychophysiology. It was discovered that the neural traffic that the heart sends to the brain has profound
 effects on brain function. Two terms were introduced back then. The first is “cortical inhibition,” where the
 cortex or higher parts of <ins>t</ins>he brain are inhibited when the heart is sending certain types of
 messages. The other term is “cortical facilitation,” which was introduced to describe the global effects that
 the activity of the heart has on the brain. Since then, we have a much deeper understanding of the mechanisms
 and how this all works.



The activity of the heart also has a lot to do with creating our emotional experience. The brain is largely
 interpreting the message that’s being sent to it from the heart, and I think that is why we intuitively and
 innately know when we fall in love with someone. We don’t say, “I love you with all of my brain,” right? We say,
 “I love you with all of my heart,” and there’s a deep physiological reason for that.



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<h4 class="text-center">The
 activity of the heart has a lot to do with creating our emotional experience.
 The brain is largely interpreting the message that’s being sent to it from the heart.</h4>



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What they didn’t know back then was that the heart has its own intrinsic nervous system, which has been nicknamed
 “the heart brain” in the field of neural cardiology. The neural structures in the heart have now been proven to
 have short-term memory, long-term memory, neuroplasticity, neurogenesis – all of the functions of a functional
 brain. There are neural channels by which the heart and brain communicate, so the heart also communicates with
 the brain hormonally, and energetically, through the pressure and electromagnetic waves it generates that
 affects every cell and synchronizes all the cells in the body.



Zeroing in on the primary neural pathways, we have the vagus nerves, which are the two nerves that travel up
 through the front of the body. They are the primary pathways of the para sympathitic branch of the autonomic
 nervous system. They are very large nerves, with thousands of neural fibers, and 90% of those fibers are
 carrying information from the body to the brain. The majority of those afferent or ascending neural pathways are
 coming from the heart and the cardiovascular system, far more than any other system in the body. There are also
 ascending (afferent) neural pathways in the sympathetic branch, so it’s a very complex two-way traffic between
 the heart and the brain.



All of the neural connections coming down from the brain connect into the intrinsic cardiac nervous system, the
 heart brain, and then within the heart there are another 40,000 to 50,000 sensory neurons that are sensing
 things like rhythm, pressure, and about 80% of these neurons are sensing biochemistry.



If you were going to put in a system to detect what’s going on in the blood, to monitor hormones,
 neurotransmitters and so on, where would you put it? The heart makes obvious sense, so that all of the
 information is fed into the heart brain, and then up to the brain in different neural patterns.



The intrinsic cardiac nervous system can and does override the neural signals coming down from the brain, and at
 a functional level a heart has its own type of intelligence. In fact, in the papers from the 70s and 80s, people
 were talking about the heart as though it had a mind of its own before they knew about the intrinsic cardiac
 nervous system.



<h4>Heart rate
 variability</h4>



One of the tools that gives us a window into the dynamic communication between the heart and brain, and the
 activity within our autonomic nervous system, is heart rate variability. At a high level, we can measure the
 amount of variability a person has, and it reflects their health status, their capacity to self-regulate, and
 self-regulate thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.



Our ability to adapt is directly tied to our heartrate variability (HRV). Too little variability reflects a deep
 depletion within the nervous system. One of the leading reasons for that is chronic stress, and the second
 leading cause is pathology, e.g. diabetes, metabolic syndrome, etc. It also reflects inadequate function of the
 various levels of our self-regulatory system.



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<img alt="the-science-of-heart-coherence"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/science_heart_coherence3_fc25af5621.jpg"
 class="lazyload has-img-center" />



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<h4 class="text-center">The
 intrinsic cardiac nervous system can and does override the neural signals coming
 down from the brain, and at a functional level a heart has its own type of intelligence.</h4>



<hr>



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So people who have behavioral management issues such as anger issues or panic attacks, often have low HRV. The
 time intervals between each consecutive pair of heartbeats is always changing. A small amount of variability is
 not a condition we want to see because it reflects system depletion, and is highly predictive of future health
 problems. In fact, low HRV for our age shows up oftentimes several years before the onset of cancer, diabetes,
 and so on, so it has a huge use in clinical assessment.



I want to go a little bit deeper. This graph is from a paper we published in the American Journal of Cardiology
 back in the mid 90s that was the first to show that the most reflective measure of our emotional state is the
 pattern of our heart rhythms, our heart rate variability. So on the left side we can see a jagged, chaotic
 rhythm, which is the rhythm that we have when we’re experiencing feelings like impatience, frustration, worry,
 or anxiety. If we get angry it’s way more chaotic. This quite literally reflects a desynchronization in the
 neural activity in our higher brain systems and within our nervous system. This is actually the type of a rhythm
 or pattern that’s been associated with cortical inhibition, where the brain doesn’t work very well.


<img alt="the-science-of-heart-coherence"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/science_heart_coherence4_ver2_700x343_d71cddd0af.jpg"
 class="lazyload has-img-center" />



The graph on the right shows the same person after they used a technique called heart-focused breathing (we’ve
 developed various different techniques to shift into that coherent rhythm).This rhythm naturally emerges when
 people experience heartfelt feelings like appreciation, gratitude, compassion, love. These types of emotions
 naturally shift us into what we now call coherent rhythm and that’s associated with cortical facilitation.



There’s a lot going on in that coherent state within our body, and it is a measure of the increasing
 synchronization in our higher brain and within our nervous system. It has a lot of benefits. Coherence is not
 the same thing as relaxation. When we’re in a coherent state (and more than 400 independent studies have
 confirmed this), there area broad range of health benefits like lower blood pressure, increased hormonal
 balance, faster recovery from heart disease and diabetes, better outcomes in education, and the list goes on.




We can teach people how to shift into that state very quickly, and we especially want to create those shifts in
 the moments when people are in challenging situations and want their mental faculties to work well.



To be continued.



To watch the full talk, go to <a
 href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm6MDe_ZwFc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm6MDe_ZwFc</a>.




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<h4 class="text-center">Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL</h4>



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