While watching a documentary last month, The Way of Miracles, which looks at the work of holistic healer Dr Mark Mincolla, one of the talking heads said that the heart’s magnetic field could be detected feet away. I jotted down something else he said – “Thoughts not contained in head,” which sounds like me after a few red wines – and figured the topic could make a good monthly feature.
It does. Imagine this: it looks as if the electromagnetic field (EM) generated by one person’s heart can be picked up by another person – a phenomenon called cardioelectromagnetic communication by that talking head, The HeartMath Institute’s (HI) Rollin McCraty, and his fellow researchers. So leaving non-local links aside – The Witness Space’s axiom that we are all one, and are all connected – even on the level of physical reality our bodies might be interacting in subtle ways.
There’s too much to cover comfortably in one post, so it’ll continue next month, and if I can dig up enough material, May’s feature will examine brain-to-brain connections.
By accident – if there is such a thing – this is the second post running that deals with coherence. Last week’s story was on the Global Consciousness Project, which samples a network of random number generators to see how much the results deviate from chance outcomes. The idea is that this shows how coherent the network is, though it’s not clear what that means in practice.
But you can’t discuss cardioelectromagnetic communication without an appreciation of coherence, which measures the internal order of a system. McCraty offers the following comparison in graphs taken from The Energetic Heart, an overview available for download at the HI website: negative emotions produce a disordered heart rate, while positive emotions such as appreciation and love smooth out those jagged edges.
His hypothesis is that the EM fields generated by the heart, which pass through each cell of the body, may synchronise multiple systems in the body – and, with neural and hormonal signals, transmit emotional information. In this case, the heart’s pulsing waves create fields within fields, interacting with tissues and substances that can detect them, giving rise to differing interference waves.
We don’t stop at our skin.
McCraty writes that coherence has physiological and psychological benefits, including more efficient use of energy by the body, and better clarity, mental performance and emotional stability. It gives rise to harmony and is prosocial. In short, being happy is good for you in many ways. The HI even offers its Heart Lock-In Technique as a way of achieving coherence:
1. Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual.
2. Activate and sustain a regenerative feeling such as love, appreciation, care or compassion.
3. Radiate that renewing feeling to yourself and others.
And the more coherent the heart, the more coherent the magnetic field it generates. Such biofields, lead author Richard Hammerschlag proposes in a 2015 paper outlining a framework for the emerging discipline, are “incompletely understood biological signalling systems” and “underappreciated”.
For an example of group coherence, check out this short clip from the Burning Man Festival about the Illumina sculpture. Eight participants using a breathing technique to enter a state of coherence. The greater the coherence, the brighter the lights shine. (The squiggly New Age techno soundtrack does its own thing.)
McCraty suggests that coherence helps individuals tune in to the information being broadcast invisibly by other people – an energetic communication system operating beneath the level of conscious awareness. The below graphs show what different emotions look like.
For information to be transmitted, there must be a signal of some kind. The first biomagnetic signal was detected in 1963, when two researchers used a magnetocardiogram (MCG) to detect the heart’s EM fields. (An ECG now does the work.) While much bigger than the brain’s – 60 times its electrical field’s amplitude, and 5000 times the magnetic field – they’re still tiny, and it took until the 1970s, when super-sensitive Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) magnetometers were invented, for research to begin in earnest.
McCraty and his collaborators have run multiple experiments to see whether the heart’s EM fields and the information contained within can be detected by another person, and whether it has a biological impact. (It’s not clear how many were peer-reviewed, and those run only once or a few times would fall short of being statistically significant, despite being fascinating.) Their measurements tested whether the R-wave peak (the signal) – the highest seen on an ECG – synchronised with another’s brain waves recorded on an EEG (the receiver).
“The subjects did not consciously intend to send or receive a signal,” he writes, “and, in most cases, were unaware of the true purpose of the experiments.”
They first looked at whether the signal could be detected via physical touch, seating pairs of subjects four feet apart, establishing a 10-minute baseline with no contact, and then five minutes spent holding each other’s hand, as if shaking it. Most times the signal was one way, but 30 per cent of trials had two-way transference.
They then tested to see if the signal travelled via electrical conduction or was also radiated, repeating the above test using latex lab gloves. In those cases, a signal was still observed but was reduced 10-fold – so, mostly conduction, but with some radiation.
The next experiment looked at whether heart-brain synchronisation held during non-physical contact, SQUID magnetometers having already shown that the heart’s magnetic field extends several feet from the body.
Two people were placed five feet apart, without being told why, and practised the Heart Lock-In Technique to generate coherence. Instead of the complex patterns seen when the subjects were in contact, the results show a precisely timed alpha wave synch with the R-wave of the signal’s ECG. Alpha waves are known to synchronise to stimuli such as sound or flashing lights, but not to something this subtle.
The averaged plot of the above measurements is even more striking.
But when the same results are tested for alpha synchronisation in the opposite direction, there is no observable effect. McCraty suggests that this is because the initial receiver was in a high state of coherence throughout. The coherence – those positive, loving emotions – enabled them to pick up on the information encoded in the magnetic field of a different person’s heart.
Part two of this feature, posted on April 4, will cover more experiments, look at other factors that determine how well people synch with each other, and see what critics said.
Bonus clip
If you liked this feature, please share on social media for added coherence. Next week: is once a week for a yoga class enough? Science investigates!