How the Heart-Brain Connection Affects Your Consciousness

A Post-Modern Post-Materialist Meta-Analysis of Cardiac Coherence and the Teleology of the Central Chakra

Joshua Hehe
7 min readFeb 23, 2021
(Source: The HeartMath Institute)

Thousands of years ago, people believed that the heart was responsible for all of our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors. This hypothesis can be called cardiocentrism, and the idea seems to have derived from the ancient Egyptian belief that the heart is the “house of the soul”. This concept was then later adopted and adapted by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle who believed that the heart is theseat of the soul”. Of course, an opposing theory called cephalocentrism, claims that the brain obviously plays the dominant role in controlling things. That notion was apparently introduced by Pythagoras, who argued that the soul resides in the brain. The thing is that they were all right.

To reframe this in more modern terminology, in 1991, Dr. J. Andrew Armour discovered that the human heart has an “intrinsic cardiac nervous system.” This “heart brain”, as they call it, is composed of approximately 40,000 neurons, meaning that the heart has its own nervous system of sorts. This is really the key to it all because the often underrated life-sustaining blood-pumping organ is able to influence emotional intelligence as well as higher cognitive…

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