Happy Valentines: A Scientific Perspective of the Heart

On Valentine’s Day , a red heart is a symbol for love and romance as seen on cards, notes, websites. A person who uses his/her heart is known as a fool ‘fools rush in where wise men never go….so I come to you my love my heart above head.’ the lyrics say. Another song tags the heart ‘My Foolish Heart’.

I attended a conference where the discussions centered on how to create a computer model to have the functionality of the human brain; the participants came from different fields from A to Z. When viewed under an electron microscope , the brain looked just a mass of cell collections. Even one cell is difficult to model for it is ‘a system of systems, a network of networks, an assembly of assemblies’ ; it will take a very long time for a computer to have the functionality of a human brain. The computer can beat a human with fast calculations but cannot be creative with original ideas. The computer can only create what it was programmed to do. Fox News reported the AI Chatgpt didn’t want to compose a poem for Ex-President. Trump but created a poem for President Biden ‘a heart of gold’ in which they deduced that the programmers must be Dems.

The brain has approximately 100 billion neurons so in previous century that it must be the superior organ for reasoning and logic. The heart has its own anatomy we learned in biology, but until this century, new research from the HeartMath Institute has discovered the heart has also its own 40,000 neurons , hence it has its own heart intelligence; also it was thought of the brain as the one sending more signals to the heart but experiments and research found out the heart is the one sending more signals to the brain on an ongoing basis to the brain higher centers of processing emotions,perception, and cognition.

The human body has circuity for Electron Transport Flow of nutrients, ions, oxygen and to generate energy in the powercell mitochondria. Experiments had shown that heart’s electromagnetic spectrum is far more powerful and stronger than the brain: the heart is 100 times electrically powerful, the heart is 1000 times magnetically powerful than the brain fields. What is the implication of this data? The heart’s electromagnetic spectrum is a superpower wifi router and generator of signals, vibrations, frequencies; the heart has its antenna that can receive and send massive signals data information to its own body systems and to its environment. It can sense signals from another human 3 meters to 50 meters if one is focused or is aware of its surroundings. No wonder one can sense if a person likes you or not or when danger is lurking. HeartMath has training for Heart Brain coherence to make you a better balanced human.

I encountered Blaise Pascal in Mathematics and Physics. To my astonishment, that it was Pascal who said in 1660’s ‘The heart has reason that reason knows nothing .’ How did Pascal know that heart has access to areas that the brain knows nothing about? Pascal knew the the answer by being still and quiet in the room meditating : ‘All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

A person has body, mind, spirit. It is through the heart one can access the unconscious, the invisible, the spirit. No wonder when one has a fuzzy choice, trusting your intuition or gut feeling is better because the heart has expansive data resources than any body part. But majority in the world believe that one has to do a lot of brain thinking and analyses to get to a solution which sometimes can cause analysis paralysis. Now with all these information it is better to join both heart and brain to do the thinking.

What is the most energy-hungry organ in your body? The heart of course; it burns and pumps fuel to energize your different systems. Your heart has an average of 80 beats per minute; 115,200 beats per day; 42,048,000 heartbeats in a year. If you live until 80, you’ll accumulate 3,363,840,000 heartbeats. Majority of humans have less than 4 billion beats in their lifetime.

Though there are at least three Saints named Valentine, legend credits Saint Valentine who lived in the third century AD , a priest, who performed weddings for couples against Emperor Claudius orders.

Edgar Allan Poe, short story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ demonstrates the power of the heart. The narrator thought nobody would discover his crime because he hid the body of the old man he murdered inside the planks. Not even the policemen discovered his crime but the killer started hearing the heartbeats getting louder, Louder, LOUDER— which drove him to confess his evil deed. The heartbeat was his own conscience reminding him of his guilt.

St Therese of Lisieux said “ prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love….” Valentine is not only for couples and romance but for everybody who has a heart. Trust your heart for its electromagnetic field is more powerful than your brain. The heart is also the door to creativity, and portal of the spirit possibilities.