Howard Martin on the Heart as an Information Processor
The work we set out to do was to connect two things. On one side there was what people had understood about the heart for centuries, the philosophical and spiritual meaning of it. On the other side there was what a 21st century scientific view could tell us. Bridging those two was the goal, so we started by examining the physical heart itself.
What turned up was more than our own findings. Going back to the 1970s, studies had been published, scattered across the research literature, pointing to something unusual about the physical heart. It behaved as though it carried its own form of intelligence. That pulled us in, and we kept digging to see the organ from a different angle.
Some of what we confirmed was familiar. The heart is a cardiovascular organ, and as a pump it has no equal for efficiency. The part that caught us off guard was different. The heart acts as an information-processing center. It takes in information, it learns, and it sends signals up to the brain and out across the rest of the body. A real share of its job is handling information, which is not how most people picture it.
To read that communication, we turned to a field already recognized in science and medicine: heart rate variability analysis. The idea is to measure the interval between one heartbeat and the next. A fitness monitor tells you your heart rate; this is something else, the timing of the gaps between beats. Clinicians had used it as a gauge of cardiovascular condition, of the autonomic nervous system, and of how a person ages.
A handful of cardiologists and researchers knew about heart rate variability, though it was far from widespread. Our scientists pushed it well past where it had been sitting and ended up among the people who understood it best anywhere. Read closely, heart rate variability shows you the quality of the back-and-forth among heart, brain, and body. You can start to decode that signal and actually grasp how well the communication inside the body is working.
That understanding drove us to build our own tools. The existing heart rate variability equipment did its job, but it was clinical, technical, and costly. In the year 2000 we put out what was essentially the first version made for ordinary consumers. Alongside it we assembled a very large database of heart rate variability readings.
From that database we wrote algorithms that could score a person's heart rate variability and judge its quality. The word we use for that quality is coherence. Once the algorithm existed, we placed it inside the technology, so people did not just have access to heart rate variability at home, they got a reading of it. The device hands back a score, a sense of how clean the exchange between heart, brain, and body happens to be. That piece has grown into a large part of what HeartMath does.