Unlocking the Power of Your Heart and Gut: The Science Behind Your Three Brains
Your heart and gut, possessing their unique ‘brains’, influence your decisions and behaviours, and they can overrule your Head.
Have you ever heard or uttered, “Follow your heart” or “Trust your gut”? They aren’t just phrases but reservoirs of profound wisdom.
Your heart and gut, possessing their unique ‘brains’, influence your decisions and behaviours, and they can overrule your Head.
They operate with positive intentions; their only objective is to let us live and flourish. However, based on evolutionary responsibilities and learned lessons, they could steer you towards failure instead of success.
These days, most of the research is still focused on the Head-Brain. We are just beginning to understand how our Brains interact. As we learn more, our ability to apply that knowledge to heal people will grow by leaps and bounds.
We all know what it feels like to have our hearts broken. We have all experienced a gut feeling that doesn’t seem logical — but we understand it to be true.
The science behind our three Brains
Let’s start with the medical proof that the Heart and the Gut are actually Brains and are crucial in understanding your partner. Once this fact is established, we will then discuss how they communicate.
It was not so long ago that Western medical science proved what we already knew (but without proof) about our fantastic heart. Our hearts can be broken and hurt because they store memories of all the good and bad experiences we have had. They influence the Head and Gut-Brains, which have a voice of their own.
The Heart Brain
In 1991, neurocardiology researcher Dr J Andrew Armour of the University of Montreal introduced the concept of a functional Heart-Brain.
In his groundbreaking research in neurocardiology, he established that the heart is a sensory organ and a sophisticated information-encoding and processing centre, with an extensive, intrinsic nervous system sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a ‘Heart-Brain’.
He researched and analysed the heart, which has 90,000 neurons, similar to those found in some areas of the brain.
The interesting fact is that research revealed that there is actually a massive variation in the number of brain cells, somewhere between 40,000 and 120,000 brain cells. People with a more social life and a positive attitude were found to have more brain cells in the heart, and people with a more isolated and depressed life came close to 40,000 brain cells in the heart.
Scientific evidence has shown that the heart sends emotional and intuitive information signals to the brain and body and can learn, remember, feel, and sense.
Even more interesting, our Heart-Brain produces the hormones oxytocin (also known as the love hormone and is involved in cognition, tolerance, trust, and friendship and the establishment of enduring pair-bonds), dopamine (the famous reward and motivation hormone) and norepinephrine (general function is to mobilise the brain and body for action)
Interestingly, he discovered that the heart sends more information to the Head-Brain than the Head-Brain does to the heart.
The proof that the heart can remember is often seen in heart transplants. The fantastic thing is that 10–15% of heart donation recipients experience changes in their tastes, personalities, and memories, picking up on information about the heart’s original owner, which was stored in the heart itself. This is attributed to functional cell memory.
It has also been proven that the heart communicates with the brain and body in four different ways, creating the heart–brain feedback mechanism:
- Neurological communication of the nervous system by the vagus nerve in afferent and efferent loops.
- Biochemical communication with hormones produced in the heart, travelling in our bloodstream to signal body and brain.
- Biophysical communication (pulse wave: waves of pressure sensed by the body and brain. They are similar to sound waves regarding their information-carrying capacity.)
- Energetic communication uses electromagnetic energy that travels through the body and brain. Amazingly, the heart generates a magnetic field 100 times more powerful than that of the brain. It can be measured from more than nine meters away from the body.
It seems surprising that Western medical science didn’t discover that the heart works as a brain until 1991. It had, in fact, already been described in this way 150 years earlier, but the idea had never really been taken seriously by medical science.
French physiologist Claude Bernard wrote already 1865, “In man, the heart is not only the central organ of blood circulation, it is a centre influenced by all sensory influences. They may be transmitted from the periphery through the spinal cord, from the organs through the sympathetic nervous system, or from the central nervous system itself. In fact, the sensory stimuli from the brain exhibit their strongest effects on the heart.”
In 1872, Charles Darwin acknowledged and wrote about the dynamic neural relationship between the heart and the brain:
“…when the heart is affected, and emotions are arising, it influences the brain and the facial expressions, and the brain communicates back to the heart via the vagus nerve on the heart; these two important organs are in constant action and reaction.”
So, it wasn’t really a new discovery in 1991; it was more a rediscovery and a rather important one because now, finally, medical science is accepting as fact that the heart remembers, thinks, and communicates to the Head-Brain.
The Gut-Brain
When we try to swallow this idea, it is essential to describe the other Brain: our Gut-Brain. We all know and use the expression, “I have a gut feeling” or, “I cannot stomach that.” Despite speaking about our other Brains, it still took until 1998 to be described as a fact when neurobiologist Dr Michael Gershon published his pivotal book, The Second Brain. In this book, he described his findings based on decades of research, during which he discovered that the gut contains a complex and fully functional neural network, what we could call a ‘Brain’.
The Gut-Brain is officially called the intricate system and has about the same number of neurons and white matter as a cat’s brain.
This means that approximately 500 million neurons are active in our gut.
Furthermore, research has shown that the Gut-Brain can learn, store memories, and perform complex independent processes.
It might even be more important to us than the Head-Brain, as the Gut-Brain is in charge of producing many hormones that regulate the body’s emotions and mental well-being. For example, it produces more than 90% of the serotonin and is a primary natural medicine factory and warehouse for feel-good hormones.
It’s a common misconception that only the limbic brain, a part of the head, produces and releases the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, norepinephrine, and nitric oxide. In reality, the gut is the powerhouse for these neurotransmitters, and it’s where 90% of your immune system is located, playing a crucial role in your overall health and wellness.
Interestingly, Head-Brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s often arise due to gut issues; every person with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s has a disbalance in their gut bacteria.
Last but not least, peptides and endorphins have also been found in the gut.
What I love to tell my clients and patients who are addicted to antidepressants is that their gut is the best drug dealer in the world. It is a large provider of benzodiazepines, which are the psychoactive chemicals used in popular drugs such as Valium and Xanax.
Michael Gershon’s research showed that in times of massive acute stress, the gut produces enough benzodiazepines to calm and sedate the Head-Brain. In much larger quantities, our own Gut-Brain factory can supply it in those moments, resulting in the down-regulation of the cognitive and emotional stress response.
Our Gut-Brain literally shuts down the Head-Brain, so it does not freak out too much. It is as if your Gut-Brain is telling your Head-Brain, “You are not capable of dealing with this; I’ll take care of it all.”
You might have had the experience of getting choked from being emotional.
This happens when the Gut-Brain regulates the muscles in the oesophagus (the part of the alimentary canal that connects the throat to the stomach) and can stop us from swallowing food during times of danger and high stress. Even if we want to, we can’t eat or swallow.
According to Gershon, as much as 90% of the communication between these two Brains goes from our gut to our head.
In other words, for every signal/command from the Head-Brain to the gut, nine signal commands are sent to the head from the gut.
And, last but not least, of course, we have the remarkable brain in our head, the most capable out of all the three.
Although I refer to that as one brain, it combines three separate centres that work as one.
The part in the back of our head, popularly called the ‘reptilian brain,’ is actually not true. Even reptilians have the same genetic brain setup as mammals, which controls the body’s vital functions such as heart rate, breathing, body temperature, and balance. That part of our brain includes the brainstem and the cerebellum, which connect with the Gut-Brain.
The limbic brain is developed as a centre where all the information about feelings, emotions, social activities, and relationships comes together. The primary structures of the limbic brain are the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus, which are directly connected with the Heart and Gut-Brain.
The neocortex brain controls thinking, memory, and regulation impulses, and culminated in the human brain with its two large cerebral hemispheres that play such a dominant role. These hemispheres are responsible for the development of human language, abstract thought, imagination, and consciousness. The neocortex is flexible and has almost infinite learning abilities. This brain has also enabled us as humans to develop to where we are now.
So why were the Heart and Gut-Brain discovered a long time ago, yet it has taken until now to learn about them?
That’s because all the research conducted over the last 100 years is based on how our Head-Brain functions and how these three layers interact with each other. Psychology is only about the head and dismisses the body as a neural centre.
Evolution of our three Brains
It is good to dive into the strange world of evolution to understand why the Gut-Brain is the Brain in charge and decides when the other Brains can collaborate.
Let’s take a look at how evolution made it from one little cell to 37 trillion cells (although other research suggests we are made up of 100 trillion cells), and why it created the 3 Brains instead of one.
When you ponder your existence, do you ever think about exactly what we are? To answer that question biologically, we are 37 trillion cells, all working together in beautiful harmony in order to exist. To make it easier, I’m not including the 100 trillion alien cells inside our bodies; without those bacteria inside us, we would die within a day. We have about one and a half kilograms of bacteria in our gut, which are all essential for digesting our food; without those, there is no digestion and, therefore, no life.
Research shows that an imbalance of these alien cells in our body can create serious diseases. Nowadays, there is a hypothesis that the gluten and sugars we eat contribute to conditions like autism, stress, obesity, and more because they create inflammation in our gut and alter the population of gut bacteria. In order to understand why the human body has to depend on other life forms to exist, literally, we need to go back further in time. Are you ready for a two-minute evolution ride?
It all started one billion years ago with a unicellular organism, a cell that consumed food and excreted waste material, as it still does today.
When cells started to work together, they turned into, let’s say, ‘living creatures’ (multicellular organisms). Consuming food, digesting, and reproducing became a bit more complicated. If every cell did that, the system could not work, so the cells started to mutate and to specialise. In a multicellular organism, the different cells work together for greater efficiency. Just like individuals in a team, every cell has its own purpose and functionality. Some became skin cells, some became muscle cells, some became intestine cells, some became reproduction cells, and so on.
One of the ‘simple’ examples of a multicellular organism is a sea cucumber. It ideally represents an early stage of evolution.
When you picture a sea cucumber, and we are making incredibly black-and-white comparisons here, does it not share many similarities with our digestive system?
A sea cucumber has a mouth, a stomach, intestines, and an exit, the anus. So, when it wants to process food through its body, it actually needs to think about digesting it. That is what the human gut does.
If this sea cucumber were placed in your body, it would make sense to say there would be a brain in your gut.
Later, fish came to this world, as did the reptiles and a more complex nervous system was required to operate the fins and other body parts. The spine evolved to protect the central nervous system and was the communication pathway to the different organs and ligaments.
All of these creatures — the sea cucumber, reptiles, and fish — have something in common: They’re all cold-blooded and do not possess a limbic brain like humans.
This means that the temperature of their bodies does not stay at a certain level. We can see that in reptiles, they must bask under the sunlight to raise their body temperature.
Mammals came to this world 400 million years ago and introduced the lifestyle of living in social groups. New conditioning was required, resulting in the growth and further evolution of the limbic brain, which became more important as an additional Brain.
Similarly, for humans, 1 to 2.5 million years ago, the neocortex of the human brain, as we know it, became a part of us. Before that, we had a tiny neocortex. We can see this in our domestic cats or dogs; they have a neocortex layer that is relatively small compared to that of a human brain.
Although we have similarities with primates, we also have one major difference that makes us human.
Tetsuro Matsuzawa is a Japanese Professor of Advanced Study at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University. He tells us that the predecessors of the chimpanzees and humans lived in the forest, and, for some odd reason, our ancestors moved to live in the open fields. That is when humans needed to learn to communicate in a better way. Language was essential to survive in their new environment, as was learning from past experiences and predicting the future. This is called the ‘Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis’. Humans lost their extremely short-term memory, which chimpanzees still have. Humans learned the gift of language and developed a more time-related memory. Therefore, the brain became much more significant than it had been, and more brain power and capacity was needed; hence, the development of our human neocortex.
What is the main difference between an animal’s concept of time and consciousness and that of humans? Just observe your pet, and you will see they do not remember yesterday or have any worries about tomorrow. Animals always live in the present; they do not understand what is going to happen next week or what happened last week. I have to say that sometimes makes me jealous as they forget all the bad things from the past. Our pets do not have ulcers from stress.
Learning from the past and planning for the future is an excellent benefit for survival, and that is one of the primary functions of the neocortex: remembering. Our Head-Brain is like one extensive database of memories and experiences of the past, with the capacity and capability to make predictions for the future.
So, returning to our previous question, why would it have taken so long to discover the connection between the 3 brains if we had known this? The answer is simple: Western society has separated the brain from the body. We have psychologists, counsellors, and other professionals who work with mental illnesses, and we have medical practitioners who have their specialities, such as cardiology, gastroenterology, orthopaedics, and around 70 more (according to Wikipedia, there are almost 80 medical specialities). Our human existence is split into more than 80 different sections of medical science, and we have forgotten to notice the holistic view of us as a complete organism.
Nowadays, we identify ourselves primarily with the neocortex, thanks in no small part to the famous words of Descartes, “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), which places great emphasis on our thinking and reasoning abilities, instead of our overall abilities as a living being.
Makeup of our three Brains and how they are connected
Let’s start connecting the dots. We’ll look at the research work that proves the connection and explains how communication goes from the bottom to the top.
In his book In an Unspoken Voice, Peter Levine describes a 1948 paper by the Russian-born neuropathologist Ivan Yakovlev, in which he hypothesised and introduced the concept that the central nervous system structures have evolved from bottom to top as a result of our increasingly complex behaviours.
Yakovlev argued that the most evolutionarily primitive brain structures we have in our head are the brainstem and hypothalamus. They regulate the internal states through autonomic control of the viscera and blood vessels. They form the matrix upon which the remainder of the brain and behaviour are elaborated.
He also describes the limbic system, which is related to emotions, posture, movements, and actions. It also regulates unconscious facial expressions and expresses internal visceral states.
Finally, the neocortex. Yakovlev describes this as the outgrowth of the limbic system, which allows conscious control of movement and actions, perception, symbolisation, language, and manipulation of the external environment while managing our internal visceral states.
He emphasised that these brains are overlapping and integrated parts contributing to the organism’s total behaviour. The limbic system and neocortex are rooted in the primitive Gut-Brainstem, and their functions are elaborated..
Based on his research, Yakovlev believed that the appearance of the more complex and highly ordered Head-Brain (the cerebral cortex) is an evolutionary refinement, which was ultimately derived from emotional and visceral (gut) functions including ingestion, digestion, and elimination. Put simply, the Gut-Brain is in charge.
In her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, Lisa Barrett Feldman provides a nice overview of how we all originated.
She uses the amphioxus, a little worm with gill-like slits on either side of its body as a reference to how we and our brains developed. It lives on the seafloor and is stuck to it as a plant that consumes any minuscule creatures that drift into its mouth. It does not have taste, smell or ears as they are not needed for this, and eyes are just light detectors. It has a few wires that we could call a nervous system and a teeny clump of cells that, if we use our imagination, is a control centre or brain. As she writes, the amphioxus was a stomach on a stick.
Daniel J Siegel, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, writes in his book Mindsight that “the heart has an extensive network of nerves that process complex information and relay data upward to the brain in the skull.” Moreover, he shares that so, too, do the intestines. “This data forms the foundation for visceral maps that help us have a ‘gut feeling’ or a ‘heartfelt’ sense. Such input from the body forms a vital source of intuition and powerfully influences our reasoning and how we create meaning in our lives”.
Besides having a nervous system (which is actually a combination of the axons and dendrites of our brain cells) that is the communication highway between our 3 brains and the rest of our body and communicates bottom-up and top-down, how does the heart or the gut know what is happening?
It is quite interesting to see how our gut communicates. In 2010, neuroscientist Diego Bohórquez of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, made a startling discovery. Enteroendocrine cells, which study the lining of our gut, produce hormones that spur digestion and suppress hunger and have feet-like protrusions resembling the synapses that neurons use to communicate with each other. Bohórquez knew that the enteroendocrine cells could send hormonal messages to the central nervous system. He and his colleagues injected a fluorescent rabies virus, which is transmitted through neuronal synapses, into the colons of mice and waited for these cells and their partners to light up. Those partners turned out to be vagal neurons.
In a Petri dish, enteroendocrine cells reached out to vagal neurons and formed synaptic connections with each other. The cells even gushed out glutamate, a neurotransmitter involved in smelling and tasting. The vagal neurons pick up glutamate within 100 milliseconds, which is faster than the blink of an eye.
These gut sensory cells date back to one of the first multicellular organisms, a flat creature called Trichoplax adhaerens, which emerged roughly 600 million years ago.
Researchers used lasers to stimulate the sensory neurons that innervate the gut in mice. This produced rewarding sensations, causing the rodents to work hard to repeat the reward. The researchers also found that laser stimulation increased levels of a mood-boosting neurotransmitter called dopamine in the rodents’ brains. So, light is used as communication in the gut.
We know that the Gut-Brain and the Heart-Brain are in constant and extensive communication with the Head-Brain. Ninety percent of the communication goes bottom-up, and that information is first collected in the brainstem. Then, it is redirected to the Cerebellum, Brain Stem, and limbic brain before it is sent to the ‘right’ parts of the human brain. Therefore, the Head-Brain is the last one to know.
How do the Gut-Brain and the Heart-Brain sense? How do they collect their data from the outside world or even from the inside world? How does neuroception work?
Just think about a flock of birds flying. Thousands of birds fly together as if they are one living organism. How about shoals of fish in the sea that move like one organism?
How do these birds or fish communicate? They cannot move as one without having effective communication with each other, but they don’t communicate in the ways we know. It is like they know without knowing; they communicate without communicating.
To understand how your Gut-Brain or Heart-Brain know without knowing is based on this principle.
Science has not yet found a definitive answer to exactly how this works, but progress is being made via the strange world of energy fields and even quantum physics.
It has been found that we have ‘radar’ for this in our heart and gut.
Scientific proof for this is published in the meta-research of predicting the unpredictable, critical analysis, and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity.
These studies also prove that humans can predict what will happen one to ten seconds before it actually happens.
How is that possible if we can only use our known senses, such as smell, eyesight, or hearing? It occurs because we have receptors, like a radar or an antenna, that can detect energy from the outside and inside world.
In his book Kinesiology and Applied Kinesiology, Robert Frost describes the five methods of communication in our body with which we can interconnect internally and externally:
- Chemical signals: hormones
- Electric impulses through the nervous system
- Electrochemical synapses (between functional organs, cells helping them act together)
- Electromagnetic vibrations (sent out by the heart, can be measured nine meters outside the person)
- Light, biophoton emissions (sent out by every cell)
Examples of Electromagnetic vibrations can be found in the book Clinical Applications of Bioelectromagnetic Medicine, in which Rollin McCarty, PhD, wrote a chapter about electromagnetic fields generated by the heart.
He describes the electromagnetic fields generated by the heart and permeating every cell in our body. These fields may act as a synchronising signal for the body in a manner analogous to information carried by radio waves. He demonstrates that this energy is not only transmitted internally to the brain but also detectable by others within its range of communication. The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body.
He explains that when this electrical field is measured in an electrocardiogram (ECG), it is about 60 times greater in amplitude than our brainwaves recorded in an electroencephalogram (EEG). The magnetic component of our heart’s field, which is around 5,000 times stronger than that produced by the brain, is not impeded by tissues and can be measured several feet away from the body with Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID)-based magnetometers. They have also found that the clear rhythmic patterns in beat-to-beat heart rate variability are distinctly altered when different emotions are experienced. These changes in electromagnetic, sound, and blood pressure waves produced by cardiac rhythmic activity are ‘felt’ by every cell in the body, further supporting the heart’s role as a global internal synchronising signal.
In the book “The Science of the Heart” by Heartmath, it is researched that the heart has ways of communicating with the brain and body:
- Neurological communication (nervous system)
- Biochemical communication (hormones)
- Biophysical communication (pulse wave)
- Energetic communication (electromagnetic fields): As shared before, the Amygdala lights up 7 milliseconds after every heartbeat, as if the heart is sharing whether it is alright or not.
In the same book, evidence now supports the perspective that a subtle yet influential electromagnetic or “energetic” communication system operates just below our conscious level of awareness.
In her books, The Intention Experiment and The Bond, Lynne McTaggart shares research and examples of the power of connection and how we can communicate without obvious communication methods. She shares scientific experiments in which people were somehow able to receive the thoughts and emotions of another person, even when they were in different rooms separated by concrete walls.
The ‘issue’ with all of this is that in medical science when they cannot find real evidence of how it works, how the body cells emit or receive the electromagnetic vibrations or the biophoton energy, they find it hard to believe that we can receive and communicate in this way. If you would like to know how it is possible that we can communicate in that way, quantum biology or quantum mechanics provides some insight.
The most insightful and convincing example is the entanglement theory. This theory is based on the premise that photons (light/energy) start off connected as one, hence an electron, are sent away in exactly opposite directions and move with the speed of light whilst staying connected.
When the rotation changes in one photon, it precisely happens to the other photon. According to Einstein, the speed of light is the fastest speed in this universe. And still, when those two photons move at the speed of light in opposite directions, they are still able to communicate with each other. Research is already being conducted on this. In the USA, they can send information from one atom to another without them being physically connected. They entangle the atoms by synchronising the photons in the atom, and then the information from one atom is sent to the other without any perceived communication or connection between the two atoms.
Photons are extremely small particles that are perceived as light or a little bundle of energy; they have no receptors, no mouth, no nose to smell, and nothing of that sort, and they can still communicate with each other.
Although we cannot explain exactly how this works, our body reacts to energy from the outside world and communicates with itself similarly. Every cell sends out photons, and other cells receive this information and take action.
In the YouTube series, The Secrets of Quantum Physics: Let There Be Life, Professor Jim Al-Khalili shows how plants use quantum physics to pursue energy when light enters their chlorophyll cells.
In The Bond, Lynne McTaggart describes the research of the German physicist Fritz Albert Popp and his work with biophoton emission. I can tell you that this is mind-blowing.
Fritz Albert Popp was investigating a cure for cancer in the 1970s and found that all living organisms, from single-celled plants to human beings, emit a tiny current of photons or light. He introduced this phenomenon as ‘biophoton emissions’.
Popp theorised that living organisms could use this faint light as a way of communication between the cells of the organism and also with the outside world.
After 30 years of research by Popp and more than 40 other scientists around the globe, it is now completely believed that this faint radiation of energy is the primary conductor of all cellular processes in the body. Therefore, our DNA or biochemistry is not entirely responsible for cellular processes.
“Cohen and Popp have also discovered that biophoton emissions happen within our DNA, setting off certain frequencies within the molecules of individual cells.”
In one of their experiments, they discovered something peculiar. When ointment was applied to one part of the body, the light emissions from that part of the body changed massively, and other parts of the body started to send out the same light.
From that moment on, Popp knew for sure that he had discovered a communication channel within living organisms, namely, using light as a means of instantaneous communication.
In further research, Popp proved that these light emissions act as a communication system between living things. In several experiments from plants to humans, he discovered that an individual living thing absorbs the light emitted from the other and sends back wave-interference patterns as though they are having a conversation. Once another organism absorbs the light waves of one organism, the first organism’s light begins trading information in synchrony.
This is the way our gut bacteria communicate with our Heart-Brain or Head-Brain, or other parts of our body. These ‘conversations’ also occur between different species, although the loudest and the best are reserved for members of the same species.
In conclusion: regarding communication, our Heart-Brain and our Gut-Brain communicate with our Head-Brain, with the release of hormones/neurotransmitters, via the nervous system. The heart is also able to use electromagnetic vibrations to communicate. And if that is not enough, the Heart and Gut-Brains are well-developed to communicate with biophoton emissions.
I think it is fair to say that what Ivan Yakovlev hypothesized in 1948, namely that the appearance of the more complex and highly ordered Head-Brain as an evolutionary refinement, is entirely accurate. Ultimately, the Head-Brain is derived from the emotional Heart-Brain and survival Gut-Brain. And if it were the other way around, the Head-Brain would be in charge of the other two Brains, and other parts of the body.
