DR. ROLLIN McCRATY, Director of Research at the HeartMath Institute, gave an online presentation to the Heartfulness international conference, “An Integrative Approach to Health and Well-being,” at Kanha Shanti Vanam in December 2022. In part 2, he shares more about coherence at the individual, group, and global levels.
Heart to brain to body
It took many years for us to sort out why our heart rhythms have such a profound influence on brain function, but at the end of the day it’s pretty simple.
As I mentioned in “The Science of Heart Coherence,” we have neural traffic coming up through the afferent or ascending pathways to the brain, and once it comes to the brainstem there are strong direct neural connections to every major brain center. The one I’m going to focus on is the thalamus, which is at the very core of our brain.
The thalamus has many roles and functions, but one key function is to globally synchronize the electrical activity of the neural systems in the entire brain. In fact, it’s the brain’s ability to synchronize its own electrical activity that allows us to be awake and conscious. These neural loops between the thalamus and cortex, called the thalamocortical loops, are critical to be awake and conscious. If those loops are damaged, like in a head injury, and they get severed, those people are in a coma. They can’t wake up because the brain can’t organize and synchronize its electrical activity.
When we’re in an emotional state that desynchronizes our system, like when we feel frustration or anger, that neural pattern of activity goes directly to the thalamus. It interferes with and inhibits the thalamus’ ability to globally synchronize the activity in the entire brain. It’s easy to measure in things like reaction times, coordination tasks, visual fields, etc.
The most important parts of the brain that are affected are the frontal and prefrontal cortex areas. These frontal systems of the brain give us foresight, the ability to understand how our actions and behaviors in the now affect the future. That’s very different from memory of the past, hindsight. These neural structures have to be well synchronized to perform optimally, and that’s why when we’re angry or anxious or feeling overwhelmed – the states that desynchronize us –those systems are taken offline. It’s why when we get angry we can often say or do things we later regret, that we probably didn’t even mean. It’s why emotions like anger and frustration lead to us making inefficient choices, make us stupid. Whereas when we’re able to shift to a coherent rhythm, it actually facilitates global synchronization above and beyond our normal walking around states. So we have more options available, we can take that inner pause, and listen to the messages our deeper heart is sending us, and so on.
When we’re able to shift to a coherent rhythm,
it actually facilitates global synchronization
above and beyond our normal walking around states.
So we have more options available,
we can take that inner pause,
and listen to the messages our deeper
heart is sending us, and so on.
There are also many other neural pathways, e.g. to the amygdala, so the pattern of the rhythms has a lot to do with creating our emotional experience, and so on. This synchronization is something we can measure. We developed processes for literally measuring how synchronized the heart and brain are. All of the neural rhythms of the brain, e.g. alpha rhythm, theta rhythm, and so on, are to various degrees naturally synchronized to the heart, to the cardiac cycle.
How to perform optimally
To really perform optimally, it really boils down to getting the heart and brain synchronized. That’s something we can teach, and over 400 studies have been done on health out comes. In terms of brain function, coherence training and increased synchronization is related to our ability to self-regulate, to really make better choices, long-term memory, short-term memory, focus, and faster reaction times.
We work a lot with Olympic athletes and professional athletes, because of the faster reaction times. Higher test scores in children in schools, and improved ability to learn are also directly associated with increased coherence.
Twelve thousand healthcare workers in our larger hospital systems in the United States went through our training to learn how to become more coherent throughout the day. After just six weeks we saw big reductions in exhaustion, tiredness, depression, anxiety, anger, and annoyance. Those results are sustainable. It’s called a baseline shift, where getting our system in sync becomes a new automatic, because we’ve retrained the brain and nervous system so that coherence is a familiar state, which then allows us to self-regulate better.
Shifting gears, we have heard from thousands of people after learning the self-regulation techniques that their intuition is radically increased. Also, that they’ve come to expect synchronicities. So we embarked on a few years of rigorous laboratory-based research to see if we could measure what I now call “non-local intuition,” and the results are summarized in this this one statement. The heart is the first to receive the intuitive information, before we can measure any other changes in the body or the brain. The heart sends a measurably different neural signal to the brain, and we trace that ascending information both in location and in time, how it travels through the different areas to the brain. We can clearly see in these studies that the heart first sends a different neural message to the brain, and then there is a body response. So the gut gets the credit oftentimes, but the real flow of information is heart, brain, body, then it becomes a conscious or felt feeling.
What we feel inside doesn’t stop at the skin.
We are constantly broadcasting, and it has
measurable impacts on those around us.
When we’re in a coherent state,
it helps to lift others into a more coherent and balanced, centered state.
We can’t force people, but we create a field environment
that helps lift people into a more balanced state.
The heart’s wisdom
When I first published these studies back in the late 90s, I said that the heart appears to have access to a field of information outside the boundaries of time and space. I’ve come out of the closet even more since then: what are we talking about when we think of a field of information that’s not bound by time and space? The term I like is the energetic heart. It’s been called the spiritual heart for thousands of years. This is something we can now measure, and these studies are supporting what the world’s great religions have all said all along, that the heart is the access point to greater wisdom, intuition, courage, and deeper understanding.
We can now measure in very rigorous lab-based studies that as we become more coherent it opens that channel to our larger self (that’s what we call it here at HeartMath); we can call it the soul, spirit, higher self. It doesn’t really matter what language we use, we’re talking about that energetic part of ourselves that we can’t put under a microscope. It’s very real. We can’t put a thought or an emotion or an intuition under a microscope, but we all experience them, we know they’re real. We can measure how they manifest in our brain and nervous system and heart.
So we call this heart intelligence at HeartMath, and here is a quote from our founder:
“Picture heart intelligence as the flow of awareness, understanding, and
intuitive guidance we experience when the mind and emotions are brought into
coherent alignment with the energetic heart. This intelligence steps down the
power of love from universal source into our life’s interactions in practical,
approachable ways which inform us to a straighter path to our fulfillment.”
—Doc
Childre
The heart’s magnetic field
Another thing that people find compelling in our research relates to magnetic fields. When we use ECG and EEG machines, what is being measured by the electrodes is the flow of current, but whenever we have a flow of electrical current we also generate a magnetic field. Electrodes don’t measure that, so we use another device called a magnetometer.
One of the qualities of magnetic fields is they easily go through skin and they easily radiate externally into the environment. This is why cell phones work – it’s the magnetic component of the field that goes through walls so that our phones work indoors. It’s something we can measure; we can take a magnetometer and measure the heart’s field many feet from the body. The actual shape of the field is toroidal, a doughnut-shaped field, like you see below.
Gerhard Baule and Richard McFee actually demonstrated this field and got the shape right in 1863. So this has been known for a long time.
I was a communication engineer in my previous career, so I could use the same techniques I used to decode information being carried by a radio transmitter. We can think of this quite literally as a personal field environment that we radiate. When we look at the information being carried by the heart’s field, we can see that it actually directly relates back to our heart rhythm patterns. Vibrational information patterns being carried by the field look very different depending upon our emotional state. We can now measure the field external to the body using these magnetometer probes, with about 75% accuracy of what somebody’s feeling, their emotional state. When we’re in a coherent state, which is associated with appreciation and love, we radiate a more coherent signal into the environment versus incoherent states associated with anger and frustration. We can now measure this information.
The next step was to ask the question: are our nervous systems like big antennas that are sensitive to this information? Are we detecting it and responding to it? The answer is clearly yes.
A number of studies have been published on this. In one of the earlier studies, forty people were divided into groups of four sitting around a table, and their physiology was monitored. One of the participants was naive to the real purpose of the experiment and the other three were trained to shift into coherence. The study was well done and there are many steps to the protocol. When the other three were signaled to shift into a coherent state, even though the naive person didn’t know what was going on, there was a highly significant measurable lift in the coherence of the naïve person.
This study demonstrated that what we feel inside doesn’t stop at the skin. We are constantly broadcasting, and it has measurable impacts on those around us. When we’re in a coherent state, ithelps to lift others into a more coherent and balanced, centered state. We can’t force people, but we create a field environment that helps lift people into a more balanced state.
It’s amazing when we learn these techniques and practice them in group settings. We often see and feel the difference that occurs when we’re broadcasting more love and appreciation into the field environment.
Global coherence
We also take this to the global level, which is another branch of our research called the Global Coherence Initiative. This is a science-based project with a lot of collaborators around the world. While it has a very rigorous scientific side, it’s also about uniting people to radiate heart-focused love and compassion with the intention of facilitating the shift in global consciousness from the current instability and discord we see on the planet to more compassion, care, cooperation, and peace. That’s really what this is all about.
As part of it, we have put magnetometers to measure the Earth’s magnetic field, the resonant frequencies, the vibrating field lines of the Earth, in various sites around the world. A study we published recently had groups of people in California, Lithuania, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and England wearing recorders that reported heart rate variability 24 hours a day for 15 days, and one of the aspects we were able to measure was how synchronized people’s heart rhythms were with the resonant frequencies in the Earth’s field. As it turns out, there’s an exact overlap of one of the primary field line resonances of the Earth. It’s exactly the same as the rhythms of our hearts when we’re in that coherent rhythm.
The green vertical bars rising above all the others is the day when all the people in the groups around the world participated in a 15-minute heart meditation, we call it a “heart lock-in,” where they shifted into that coherent rhythm and then radiated love and appreciation in this case to each other. What these data are showing us is that while they were in that coherent state we measured their coherence, and we saw a significantly increased heart-to-heart synchronization among all the group members.
That’s pretty cool to begin with, but the big surprise came when we looked at the next 24-hour period, and these green bars are showing us that every single group registered a significant increase in being in sync with the fields of the Earth when they were in that heartful state for fifteen minutes.
It’s easy to understand why it’s a good thing to be in sync with each other on Earth, but now more and more studies are emerging that show how and why that’s so important for our own health, our connectivity to others, how we get along with others, and so on. This is really new science; we’re beginning to understand the importance of and the depth of synchronization that we have. I can’t tell you how many times I have said, “Well, on some level we’re all connected,” and science is now starting to show how we are fundamentally synchronized with the Earth.
So let’s all help co-create a world of deeper care and kindness. With the Heartfulness practices and Heart Coherence practices we can establish a new baseline for the creation of a new culture of deeper care, kindness, connection, and more cooperation. It’s up to each of us to take responsibility for what we’re feeding the field, our personal field and how that connects to the global field. It’s our choice and I hope you will all join us adding more love and compassion to the planetary field.
To watch the full talk, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm6MDe_ZwFc.
Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL
Dr. Rollin McCraty
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. ... Read More
