The heart has neurons that connect directly to the brain.
I try to seek answers to questions that really interest me, such as how does the brain work? What do we have inside our heads? Neuroscience provides many answers to this. What I find very curious is that most of what is known about the brain has only been discovered in the last ten or twenty years. The big discoveries, the major experiments, are happening now. I don't know about you, but I find the topic mind-blowing because understanding the brain is to have knowledge about myself. I try to understand myself, I try to comprehend what I am.
The latest thing I have found out is fascinating. It seems that the idea that we only think with our brains and that the heart only pumps blood is not entirely true. The heart has neurons that connect directly to the brain. In 1991, the neurocardiologist J. Andrew Armour demonstrated that the heart literally has a mind of its own. There is a neural network in the heart that is exactly the same as that of the brain. In other words, there are neurons in the heart that are independent of the brain and can think for themselves.
Your heart creates thoughts, creates intelligence. Moreover, there is a greater amount of information that passes from the heart to the brain than from the brain to the heart. What do you think about that? And we, meanwhile, are creating a society obsessed with the brain... then we go through life without knowing what we want.
How many times have you been told to make decisions with your heart? What does the heart have to do with making a decision or with intuition, which is what we sometimes need to make decisions? Well, it seems like a lot.
There is a study from the University of Cambridge that revolutionized the idea of making decisions with the heart and opened up a huge path in research on decision-making. In this study, some people were asked to participate in a game in which they had to make decisions based on simulated situations on a computer, and there were always two options between which they had to decide. One of them would have a positive or favorable outcome, and the other would have an unfavorable outcome. While they played the game, their heartbeats were monitored to see how the heart reacted just before making a decision. And what the researchers found is that before making a decision that would have a favorable outcome, the heart beat in a specific way, but when they were about to make a decision that would have a negative outcome, it beat in a completely different way. That is, the heart knew before the brain was consciously aware whether the decision was good or not.
That's amazing! The idea of organs, particularly the heart, storing memories and being able to transfer them through transplants is truly mind-blowing. There are many incredible stories of people who experience significant changes in their tastes, fears, diets, personalities, and even acquire new skills after receiving a heart transplant. There are hundreds of such cases, some of which are truly remarkable, like the story of a girl who receives a heart transplant from another girl who was murdered. After the transplant, the girl begins to have very precise nightmares about a man who kills her and tells her a specific phrase before murdering her. She remembers all the details so precisely that she helps the police to identify the killer with her description and eventually they catch him. It's a touching and inspiring story worthy of a movie script.
I would like to end by reminding us that it is important to pay attention to our hearts, but let's do it physically, intentionally, when giving a hug, looking into someone's eyes, or overcoming a difficult situation. Let's listen to our hearts.
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