In March’s opening section of this extended feature, we looked at the discovery that the heart’s electromagnetic field extends several feet from the body – that we don’t stop at our skin, that our apparent separation is more complicated than it seems – and appears to carry emotional information that can be picked up by another person.
Experiments overseen by The HeartMath Institute’s (HMI) Rollin McCraty suggested that the better the person’s physiological coherence – which can be aided by positive, loving emotions – the more able they were to “read” those signals.
But how about literal heart-to-heart entrainment? Can cardiac rhythms synchronise?
Yes, writes McCraty, for people in close relationships – not just intimate or familial, either, but also between work colleagues. The below graph shows the heart rhythms of two women, sat four feet apart, consciously feeling appreciation for each other. They used the HMI’s Heart-Lock-In technique, detailed in part one, to juice their coherence.
Cardiac rhythms can also synch between sleeping couples. The next chart shows how a married couple’s readings converge and diverge over a three-minute period (possible cause of divergence: duvet hogging).
And a striking example, pictured below, shows measurements from McCraty’s son Josh, then 15, and his dog Mabel. Their heart rhythms converge after the first couple of minutes when the teenager enters the room where Mabel is. Once he leaves, a few moments later, Mabel’s reading goes all over the shop, plausibly with separation anxiety.
There’s a real elegance to the model proposed by McCraty and like-minded thinkers, with the EM fields helping regulate the coherence of the system – such as the brain – which generates them. In a 2017 paper, he quotes quantum physicists Larissa Brizhik and Emilio Del Giudice as suggesting that magnetic fields govern the “dynamics of not only individuals, but of the whole ecosystem to which the individuals belong”.
This points at the direction of much of his work in the last 15 or so years – the Global Coherence Initiative (GCI), which investigates the relationship between human physiology and consciousness, and the earth’s EM environment.
In effect, he’s proposing a model of how each person’s move to a more loving state of being can physically manifest, via a planetary network, improving the state of the world, little by little.
As in his earlier work, study sizes are rarely statistically significant and he hedges many arguments. But his hypothesis that a feedback loop exists between humans and the earth’s energetic systems is a physical idea and should be testable. And given the current state of the world, it’s a train of thought worth examining.
It’s also fascinating to see the parallels between the effect of the heart’s and the earth’s EM fields on the body. Both have a regulating effect. Both distribute information, one driven by the heart’s pulsations, the other by variations in the sun’s emissions.
As above, so below.
In a special 2021 edition of Cardiology and Vascular Research, edited by McCraty and Abdullah Al Abdulgader, the founder and chief cardiologist at Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Cardiac Center, the two guest editors discuss the four main hypotheses of the GCI.
Ultra-sensitive magnetometers at six sites – the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Lithuania and South Africa – are sampled 130 times a second, enabling a continuous record of changes in the earth’s magnetic fields. Another six are on the drawing board.
The authors argue that their research indicates that behaviours and numerous physiological rhythms are affected by solar and geomagnetic (GM) activity – both positively and negatively. They also propose that the earth’s magnetic fields interconnect and non-locally distribute information to every living system, somewhat like a gaia-net.
“Life on Earth ultimately owes its existence to the sun,” they write, “which has a very large and complex magnetic field that affects us in many unseen ways.”
Hypothesis one: human and animal health, cognitive functions, emotions and behaviour are affected by solar activity and planetary geomagnetic fields
A dizzying number of adverse effects are caused by disruptions in the GM according to cited studies. Such storms can alter the hormone balance of the body, blood pressure, breathing, immune system, reproductive, cardiac and neurological processes.
They’re associated with “significant increases” in hospital admissions for depression, mental disorders, psychiatric issues, suicide attempts, homicides and traffic accidents. And they’re correlated with “significant increases” in myocardial infarction and death, cardiovascular disease, and other heart-related disorders.
A review of health effects concluded that disturbances were more likely at higher GM latitudes; unusually high or low GM activity affected health, but only in 10 to 15 per cent of people; and that they are negatively correlated with heart-rate variability (HRV).
The authors ran a five-month study on 16 women to investigate correlations between solar and magnetic factors and HRV. Heart rate increased with solar wind, indicating a stress reaction, but the autonomic nervous system regulated other changes.
In a self-reported study of 1643 participants from 51 countries, fatigue, anxiety and mental confusion increased with higher solar wind speed. And levels of happiness and well-being dropped as GM field readings amplified.
And the interaction between the earth and humans extends to brains. The authors cite research brainwaves can synchronise with what’s known as the Schumann resonance (SR), EM waves triggered by lightning that circle the earth, poetically described by NASA as a “repeating atmospheric heartbeat”. One six-week study compared the SR with EEG readings, concluding that the highest correlations occurred during heightened solar and magnetic activity – suggesting some degree of harmony.
The authors measured HRV on 30 consecutive days, concluding that autonomic nervous system activity was linked to solar and GM influences. They unexpectedly found that the 10 participants’ HRV rhythms synchronised with each other for much of the study length, despite them being situated in different parts of California.
Something external was triggering this non-local effect, but what? Early indications suggested the earth’s magnetic field, so they held a bigger, more significant study with 104 subjects in five countries which confirmed their theory. Not only do humans sync with each other, but also with the earth’s GM systems.
To avoid an overlong post, I’ll cover the remaining three hypotheses and their implications in next Monday’s Weekly Witness.