How Does The Heart Respond To The Brain?

The heart is considered as the center of wisdom, passion, and emotions by many a people. This emanates from the fact that people report experiencing emotional states and the feeling love in the area of the heart. However, these feelings have been conventionally attributed to the brain. Recent studies have disputed this fact with physiological mechanisms being explored to ascertain how the heart communicates with the brain and as such influence the health, emotions, perceptions, and processing of information. Such studies have thus provided ground to explain the phenomena of the heart with regard to emotional balance, creativity, and mental clarity.
Whenever an individual experiences emotional changes in the brain, there are corresponding changes in digestion, respiration, blood pressure, and heart rate. Therefore, upon …show more content…
According to the studies, the heart possesses its own peculiar logic quite divergent from the path of the autonomic nervous system. The heart thus sends meaningful messages to the brain that were responded to. This is attributed to the neural pathway and mechanism from which an input from the heart to the brain works to facilitate or inhibit electrical activity to the brain. As such, the heart is said to contain a functional brain of its own through its complex intrinsic nervous system.
The brain of the heart is composed of an intricate network of different types of neurons, support cells, proteins, and neurotransmitters. This network has an elaborate circuitry responsible for cranial brain’s independent action, for instance, sensing, learning, and memory. Further, the nervous system of the heart consist over 40,000 neurons known as sensory neurites. These enable information transmitted from the heart to pass through several afferents that enter the brain at the medulla area before moving to the higher centers of the