The patient who received the "extra" heart felt that his perception of the world had changed. How exactly? BBC Future has found interesting facts about how the human body works.
Every second Carlos felt a small lump throbbing in his stomach. It was the rhythm of his "second heart".
He had this small mechanical pump implanted to relieve the strain on the weakened muscles of his heart, but Carlos (name has been changed) didn't like the sensation. The rhythmic operation of the machine seemed to replace his own pulse and distorted the perception of his body: the pump pulsed above the navel, causing a strange feeling as if the chest had sunk into the stomach.
This sensation turned out to be unusual and disturbing.
However, the neurologist Agustin Ibanez of the University of Favaloro in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who examined Carlos, suggested that even stranger effects would follow. According to Ibanez, by giving the patient another heart, the surgeons also influenced his mind: Carlos, as a result of the operation, will think, feel and act differently than before.
How did it happen? We often use the expression "follow the call of the heart", but only recently have researchers begun to find evidence that there is some truth to this metaphor - the constantly contracting lump of muscles in our chest actually affects emotions and intuition. Feelings of all kinds - from empathy for someone else's pain to suspicion that your partner is cheating on you - can arise under the influence of subtle signals from the heart and from other parts of the body.
The man with two hearts inside gave Agustin Ibanez a unique opportunity to test such theories.
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Insignificant cranial filling
Ibanez's work echoes an ongoing debate for millennia over the role of the heart in thought. Once people believed that it is more important in this respect than the brain. Aristotle, for example, feeling the cool and moist gray medulla, decided that its main function was to cool the passions generated by the heart - and the heart, in turn, he considered the abode of the soul. For the same reasons, the embalmers of Ancient Egypt always left the heart in the chest of mummies, while removing the insignificant "cranial filling".
The modern view of the mind differs from the ancient ideas
The modern point of view of the mind, of course, is very different from these early ideas, but the image of the heart as a source of emotions has proved to be stable: just look how many poetic metaphors exist on this topic. William James, the founder of modern psychology, helped formulate this concept in the 19th century by suggesting that emotions are part of the cycle of interactions between the brain and body.
According to his theory, the brain can recognize a threat on a purely intellectual level - but a sharp pulse and sweaty palms turn this abstract information into a powerful emotion.
James raised an important question: if different people perceive and control their bodies differently, does this affect their emotions? It is quite difficult to find out experimentally, but a hundred years later, scientists took up the challenge.
In the course of the experiments, the subjects were asked to first assess their own pulse, focusing only on the sensations in the chest - without putting a hand on the chest and without feeling for the pulse on the wrist or neck.
Try it yourself, and you will see that this is surprisingly difficult: about a quarter of people are mistaken by 50% (they seem to feel little or no heartbeat), and only a quarter of the subjects fit within an error of 80%. After checking the participants in the experiment for this parameter, the scientists gave them other tests.
It turned out that William James was absolutely right. People who were more sensitive to their bodies reacted more strongly to emotionally colored images and, judging by the reviews, these images caused them more emotional experiences, and they were better able to describe the feelings they experienced.
It is also important that their sensitivity extends to those around them - they better recognize emotions on faces. In addition, they learn to avoid danger more quickly (for example, a slight electric shock in the laboratory) - perhaps because more intense sensations are better stored in memory and strengthen the conditioned reflex.
“Perhaps in this way we learn to more quickly assess the benefits or harms of objects, our decisions and different options for action,” says Daniela Ferman of the University of California at Berkeley.
In other words, people who have a good sense of their own body lead more emotionally rich and vibrant lives - this applies to both its good moments and bad ones. “Even if we are not able to accurately describe the physiological sensations corresponding to some pleasant life experience, we will recognize these sensations if they visit us again,” Ferman notes.
Emotional barometer
These same secret body signals may explain how our intuition works - the inexplicable foresight that, for example, you have a winning poker hand (just such an exquisite experiment set up by Barney Dunn at the University of Exeter in England). The task was simple: volunteers were asked to choose a card from one of four decks, and they won money if the suit coincided with another, already open card.
The decks were rigged in such a way that two of them gave a slightly higher probability of winning, and the other two gave a slightly lower probability. Dunn found that people with better heart rates were more likely to choose cards from certain decks, while those with less fine tuning tended to choose cards at random.
The participants in the experiment who felt their bodies better did not always choose the right decks (some of them won the most, others lost the most), but they clearly trusted their intuition.
Perhaps Aristotle was right in saying that the heart is the abode of the soul?
So, it seems that popular wisdom is not wrong: people who feel their heart are more likely to follow instincts - with both good and bad results. All of this research made Agustín Ibanez wonder: what about patients with artificial hearts? If important new traits were discovered in Carlos' behavior, one could conclude that human consciousness is really not limited to the brain.
This is exactly how it turned out. When Carlos was counting his pulse, he was guided by the rhythm of the machine, not his heart. Therefore, it is not surprising that the implantation made him feel his body differently (for example, to feel that the chest was significantly enlarged). In some ways, the psychological effect of his operation resembles the well-known "rubber hand illusion", when the subject, through a series of manipulations, manages to convince that the artificial hand is in fact his own.
Importantly, Carlos has significantly changed the social and emotional perception of the world. For example, he did not show much sympathy when looking at photographs of people suffering painful injuries. He also had difficulties with understanding the motives of the actions of others, intuition was not expressed.
All of this confirms the theory that the body strongly influences the emotional state. “A very interesting and promising study,” commented Barney Dunn on the results.
Lifeless Case
Unfortunately, Carlos died as a result of complications from further treatment, but Ibanez hopes to continue the experiments with other subjects. He is now conducting tests with patients receiving heart donations, hoping to understand how the transplant is changing their bodily sensations. Damage to the vagus nerve should hinder the transmission of signals from the heart to the brain, and therefore affect consciousness.
In addition to cardiac surgery patients, Ibanez also works with people who have a strange feeling that they do not live in their own body - and is trying to find out if this is due to a violation of communication between the brain and the rest of the body. “I feel lifeless, like my body is an empty, lifeless case,” one such patient told researchers. - I wander around the world, I recognize it, but I don't feel it.
Ibanez found that such people usually feel worse about their bodies, and, judging by the results of magnetic resonance imaging of their brains, this is due to a violation of connections in the anterior insular lobe - a deep fold of the brain that responds, respectively, to bodily sensations, perception of emotions, empathy, decision making and general self-awareness.
How often do you feel like a lifeless case?
As a clinical psychologist, Barney Dunn is more interested in the relationship of these factors to depression. “At present, therapy is mostly about the head: we change the client’s train of thought and hope that his emotions also change accordingly,” he explains. "But I often run into an obstacle: clients say that they understand everything with their minds, but they cannot feel it at the level of emotions."
For example, even if a patient has learned to think more positively during therapy, he may still not feel joy as such. Dunn suspects that this is due to an insufficiently subtle sensation of his body. He gives another example: when you walk in a park, the body sends out all sorts of signals of satisfaction with what is happening.
“But depressed clients seem to wander through the park without taking part in this sensory experience, and then come back and say that everything was dull and sad,” he says.
Reasoning in the same vein, Daniela Ferman found that patients with severe depressive disorder (but without other complications such as anxiety) do not feel the rhythm of their heart, and the worse they feel the signals of their body, the less often they report any positive experiences in life.
And if you remember Dunn's experiment with a deck of cards and the like, you will notice that low sensitivity to what is happening in the body is also associated with indecision - and this is what many patients with depression suffer from.
Ferman, however, stresses that depression comes in many different forms, and the subtlety of how you feel about your body can only affect a few of them.
It has not yet been established exactly why some people feel their bodies better than others, but Dunn believes that this ability can be strengthened by exercise. He is going to use for this purpose already developed methods of developing psychological awareness, when clients are taught to concentrate on their own feelings.
According to him, the main difficulty is to learn to recognize feelings, even unpleasant ones, and at the same time not to react to them in the heat of the moment. Then you will learn to use your body as a kind of "emotional barometer" that lets you know what mood you are in and helps you make decisions.
Another group of scientists has developed a simple computer game in which you have to press a key every four heartbeats. If you are mistaken, the red light flashes - in theory, such feedback should help to better feel the body.
So what are we waiting for? After all, a person can lead a rich, emotionally rich life, tune in to the wave of sensual pleasures offered to us by the surrounding world, and make better decisions. To do this, you just need to follow the call of the heart.