(05-19-2024, 12:51 AM)Maxmars Wrote: I had visited an excellent thread topic by Kenzo earlier this year, "The other brain."  When I ran across this article, it seemed a perfect follow-on.

From ScienceNews.org: The heart plays a hidden role in our mental health
Subtitled: The organ sends messages to the brain. How those signals influence it is still unclear

It appears that the heart doesn't simply reserve it's nerve signals for the sole purpose of circulatory concerns.  Scientists have discovered that while the brain does control essential messages to regulate the heart, it also is responding to messages from the heart itself... and those messages have a bearing on our perceptions, emotions, and even thought processes.
 

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Powerful signals travel from the heart to the brain, affecting our perceptions, decisions and mental health. And the heart is not alone in talking back. Other organs also send mysterious signals to the brain in ways that scientists are just beginning to tease apart.

A bodywide perspective that seeks to understand our biology and behavior is relatively new, leaving lots of big, basic questions...

 A deeper understanding of how we sense and use signals from inside our bodies — a growing field called interoception — may point to new treatments for disorders such as anxiety.

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How our hearts communicate with our brains has shown to have an effect on how well we can see.  The heart can also affect what you can recall, and perhaps even have an effect on intuition and decision-making...
 

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Signals from the heart also appear to play a role in memory. In lab experiments, people were shown brief blips of words on a screen. When a word showed up as the heart was contracting, a squeezing phase called systole, people were more likely to forget the word on later memory tests, neuroscientist Sarah Garfinkel and colleagues reported in 2013 in Psychophysiology.

There are hints that the heart can influence intuitions, decision making and emotions. People who were better able to feel their hearts’ rhythms reacted more intensely to emotional images than people who were worse at sensing their heartbeat, for instance.

These results and others suggest the tantalizing possibility that our brains are taking in and using information from the heart — and perhaps other interoceptive awareness — to help us make sense of the world. But findings from people are often correlational. It’s been hard to know whether beating hearts caused the effects or whether they just happened at the same time.

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I would offer the idea that perhaps the old saying "Follow your heart" may have meaning beyond the metaphorical... and maybe even an indicator of some ancient knowledge masquerading as wisdom (I know, s-t-r-e-t-c-h.  ) 

"Gut hunches" may soon follow... maybe.