Intuition and the Heart

 

You have blogged about the close connection between the heart and the brain. Is the heart ever involved in intuition?

 Until very recently the prevailing belief was that intuition was related only to the brain and nervous system. Recent studies have found surprising electrophysiological evidence of intuition with a definite heart component. Researchers discovered that the heart appears not only to receive intuition information but also to respond to it. Furthermore, the heart is directly involved in processing the information about a future emotional stimulus seconds before the body actual experiences the stimulus. At times, the heart seems to receive intuitive information even before the brain. In the brain, the prefrontal cortex, temporal, parietal, and occipital regions all appear to be involved with the processing of the information. So, the brain and the heart may work together—at least sometimes—to produce the flashes of insight or the gut feelings by which intuition is characterized.