Howard Martin on Coherence and Heart Rate Variability (Interview Archive)
There are three versions of the technology now. One runs on a desktop computer. Another is a handheld unit, the one you've referred to as the emWave2. And the same approach is available on iOS devices through the Inner Balance Trainer, which is an app you can download at no cost; you then buy a sensor to pair with it. All of this came out of an early wish of ours: to make the heart something real and tangible for people, and to lean on science as the means of getting there.
Erik: Wonderful. For anyone who's never tried one of these, what is it actually like to wear? What do people feel, and what sort of changes should they look for?
Howard: On the desktop or the iOS version, what shows up on screen is your heart rate variability pattern itself. Alongside it you watch a coherence score shift over time, and we split that score into three bands: low, medium, and high. You start noticing where you land, whether you're sitting in the low range or the medium or the high, and how you drift between them based on whatever you happen to be doing.
Reading heart rate variability comes down to the shape of the pattern. If the emotional state produces something jagged and irregular, the heart racing ahead and then dropping back in a choppy way, that points to incoherence, a low coherence state. A pattern that runs smooth and looks like a sine wave is the picture of high coherence. The payoff there runs in several directions.
Some of it is physiological. Raising your coherence level does good things for the body. The autonomic nervous system gets healthier. Signals travel up into the brain and seem to open it up, with the higher perceptual centers waking up and becoming more active. It's a state where less energy leaks away, so you end up conserving it, and that conserved energy feeds back into your health.
On the psychological side things get interesting. A positive emotion is what sets coherence off in the first place. Once you've felt that emotion and your coherence climbs, emotions of a similar kind come to you more easily afterward, which does a great deal for a person's sense of well-being. Here's how it plays out for me. When I use the Inner Balance Trainer, I find a quiet spot, clip the ear sensor onto my ear, put my attention on the area around my heart, and breathe as though the breath were moving through that spot.