APPENDIX A
MIND
The Last to Know
A Summary of HeartMath’s Original Research on the Precognitive Heart
A subject is wired up for both brain and heart electromagnetic activity (electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms), which is recorded and viewed by the person running the experiment, but not the subject. The subject sits in front of a separate monitor on which the computer will show images as selected for each run-through of the tests. When relaxed and ready for a trial, the subject presses a button that activates a ten-second timer, which, in turn will activate a random-selective device in the computer, which will then select and display on the screen a picture available to the subject being tested.
The pictures available for this random selection contain a mixture of pleasant and (seriously) unpleasant images. Ten seconds elapse between the subject pressing the button activating the timer and the selection actually made by the random-selector and displayed on the screen.
Anywhere from four to seven seconds before the selection is actually made by the timed random device, the electrocardiogram of the subject’s heart shows a decisive shift in the heart’s frequency pattern— according to the nature of that upcoming image—which is yet to be selected. This shift of heart pattern activates a near-instant corresponding shift in the frontal brain, which then follows the heart pattern in the frequency action taking place. Note that the heart action precedes, if only by a fraction of a second, the following frontal brain action.
Of major significance here is that the heart-brain shift and resulting pattern of activity is decisively different when a positive image will be flashed on the screen at the end of the ten seconds, rather than when a negative image will be chosen. A negative image activates patterns indicative of a sympathetic nervous system’s emotional-hormonal alert-reaction in the viewer (mild forms of the old “flight-fight” survival patterns in the “reptilian” sensory motor system). Positive precognitive images reinforce a parasympathetic nervous system’s relaxed state of balanced repose. The viewing subject, however, is unaware of his or her heart-brain precognitive responses (occurring anywhere from four to seven seconds ahead), and is personally aware of and responsive to only the actual image itself when that image does flash forth on the screen, the ten-second trial thus completed.
An intuitive or precognitive capacity of the heart to “foretell” a future “machine-made” action is clearly indicated, which triggers the body-brain’s emotional preparation for such action, if action is called for by negative information. Coming from those eventually visible results of an electromagnetically controlled laboratory effect, such intuitive precognition, as the heart clearly shows, is inexplicable within any physical process known. And, cautious about such an unknown enigma, before publishing their first paper on the anomaly, HeartMath ran 2,400 trials of the experiment—all of which verified the precognitive action in question.
As shown by the new heat-detecting brain monitors, when in the negative response pattern the bulk of brain activity shifts into a “hindbrain” defensive position, whereas positive images bring a balance of hind- and fore-brain synchrony in line with prefrontal cortex–heart influence.
This precognitive “alerting response” in heart and brain was an enigma unexpected by the research team. The research had originally grown out of experiments set up by Dean Radin and Karl Pribram to investigate galvanic skin response, also a long-standing enigma to physiologists.
As an intriguing aside, brought to my attention by my friend Robert Simmons, author of two recent books on crystals and their nature, our understanding of this enigma is beginning to unfold in the light of the research of Mae-Wan Ho at the Open University in London. Mae-Wan Ho discovered the crystalline nature of living cells and the resulting coherent crystalline state of our body. This discovery indicates that our body is a singular, whole crystalline state “immersed” in a singular (universal) matrix or frequency domain, from which matrix the various neural organizations making up our body select, according to the crystalline-based resonance making up those various organs of our body.
Paul MacLean first explored the role resonance plays in brain activity, which can now be linked to this crystalline state. This resonant selectivity body—made from a universal matrix of a crystalline nature—enters into the assembly or “putting together” of our sensory impressions of our world-to-view. This takes care of that old problem of galvanic skin response and will prove a major factor in a new and richer view of ourselves and creation that is in the making. Further, it can account for the various levels and forms of resonance sensed by and used in the “world-making” of preliterate societies such as the Kalahari !Kung, Australian Aborigine, Sng’oi, and others, whose world is so dramatically different from ours. Thank you, Robert Simmons—who sensed all this and much more in his two beautifully illustrated and brilliantly descriptive books.
Every bit as significant an aspect of this lengthy and involved experiment at HeartMath was strangely overlooked: the simple fact that none of the various subjects viewing that monitor for those 2,400 trials were aware of the precognitive maneuvers going on within their own heart-brain. Each subject’s only conscious awareness was of the end-product: the eventual image displayed on the screen itself; the subjects had no inkling of what was going on “behind the scenes” within their own conscious processes (an awareness that might, in fact, clutter up the cognitive awareness that is the point of it all—Nature knew what she was doing). Our knowledge of process is not necessary to respond intelligently to the product given us by that process—and our attempts to understand first and respond secondly lead to serious error.
This disconnect between the subject’s conscious mind and the obvious conscious awareness of this heart-brain-sensory system, with its vast complexities, is a dramatic example of mind as an emergent property of the very body-brain-heart processes making mind possible, or giving the mind its sensory world experience, or both.
Letting-Allowing as Key
Since those interactions entering into, perhaps even bringing about, mind’s awareness are not themselves available to that mind itself, we could say in this case that mind is aware only of the product, not the process. And in this regard we might propose that a learned task or discipline of the mind might be to trust process in order to engage in an ongoing interaction with products and the possibilities they afford.
This falls into line with poet Blake’s observation that “mechanical excellence is the Vehicle for Genius.” This stipulation may be a key factor in Rudolf Steiner’s proposal that our great challenge is to allow the heart to teach us a new way of thinking, since through that new way of thinking the heart will find its own next stage of evolution.
Another Mind-Example: An Education Conference in Hawaii, 2001
This aspect of our cognitive state, wherein wired-up subjects are themselves unaware of any disjunct between their personal mind-awareness and the complex of heart-brain precognitive processes giving rise to their awareness, was played out even more dramatically before an audience of some two hundred people at an educational conference in 2001.
A bright sixteen-year-old was wired up for brain-heart activity, the apparatus hooked into a computer which projected the results on a huge screen visible to the audience—but not to the young man, who was facing the audience, his back to the screen. The HeartMath representative running the experiment talked with the young man, getting him into so relaxed a state of mind that the young man’s heart and brain went into “entrainment,” which means they fell into the same synchronous or coherent electromagnetic wave patterns, an infrequent event for most of us, and clearly evident there on the audience’s screen. The HeartMath representative, a British physician, congratulated the young man on his accomplishment, and turned him to look at the results on the screen, then back to the audience. The young man was beaming since he was familiar with HeartMath and knew the synchronous state was an accomplishment. At that point the doctor casually remarked that the young man was in such a coherent state he, the experimenter, wanted to try out a few orally presented mathematical problems used with young people in Britain.
Instantly when the mathematical testing was proposed, the young man’s coherent state, visible to all but the young man, collapsed into an incoherent, chaotic state—similar, I might add, to the one making up or reflected in most of our “thinking” and emotional activity. The collapse of the young man’s frequency-mapping display was so immediate and complete that we, the audience, burst into laughter. The young man looked puzzled and asked the HeartMath person, “What’s up? What are people laughing about?” The good doctor then turned the young man to again view his now incoherent, scrambled heart-brain patterns, at which point the young man’s face fell, as the saying goes.
The issue was clear: the emotional state of the “wired-up” subject had changed instantly and dramatically when the apparently threatening issue of being mathematically tested arose. The lesson for all of us educators and our educational endeavors was compelling: a student’s availability to his or her own full-brain intellectual capacities is determined by his or her emotional state. Thus, the establishment of a nurturing, unthreatening ambient environment for students is the first and most primary principle for any learning situation. That is, whether or not the wired-up subject’s prefrontal cortex–heart connections were fully operative or their attention-energy had been shifted into the ancient flight-fight defensive “hind-brain,” limiting their intellectual capacity, could be easily observed. Thus a student, on being called on to perform—that is, be tested—may well have far less access to his or her own true level of intelligence, while unaware of being “cut off,” in effect, from his or her own actual capacity, and left only with the feeling of inadequacy so many of us, students and teachers alike, feel.
Again, however, the major issue in this episode was neither recognized nor brought up again—the stark fact that the mind, being an “emergent aspect” of the brain, is not aware of that brain’s actions, only the finally emerging cognitive affect-awareness, which can be rather “after the fact.” Nor, I must insist, is the mind supposed to be so aware (at that time). There is a time for “left-hand thinking” and a time for “right-hand thinking.”
This is an issue we must leave hanging here. But, along with the laboratory trials concerning emotional response and heart-brain shifts just mentioned, the disconnect between mind and brain-heart action clearly indicates that the mind is the recipient, not the principal causal factor of thinking and learning, as we generally assume. The mind, as I have said, is like the betrayed spouse—the last to know concerning creative thinking or clear reception of the overall cognitive process within us.
One might ask, then, who is in charge here? In this question we can get a glimpse of David Bohm’s “thought as a system,” and even the Eastern concept of maya—or play of illusions.
To train the mind to receive and translate selectively, rather than the idle meandering of our vague mental wanderings, was a serious issue with Rudolf Steiner. He urged us to differentiate between true creative-imaginative thinking—which demands discipline—and the idle wish-think of imaginary gratifications or disgruntled complaints churning forth in ordinary “roof-brain chatter“ or daydreaming.
The time for idle imaginary-dreaming of the early child and the disciplined imagination of the adult must each have its day in the sun, however, since the latter is built on the former. And we should recall at this point why the mind must be suspended for the Laski Eureka response to function—which is again a matter of “not letting the right hand know what the left is doing.” Since right-hand thinking is the mind as we ordinarily know it, and is critically necessary if we are to develop that Mechanical Excellence needed as the foundation for allowing that “left-hand thinking” of genius to flash forth, all of that behind-the-scene action, which we know not of, is action we do not need to know for the creative function to fulfill itself through us—for through our attempts to “know first” and experience secondly, we fall, time and again.