The heart starts beating fast. It happens to everyone, perhaps before an exam, when we go to a job interview, when we are about to meet our him or her, when we get excited at the cinema. And immediately we think of the brain, as a guide for these classic anxiety reactions. Well, if you suspect that it is always the nervous system that dominates the situation, you may have to change your mind. As the artists said and as many songs with the classic “heart-love” rhyme remind us, relegating emotional reactions to brain control alone can be reductive.
The engine of reactions? The heart
Just the heart, and just like in the songs, would be able to represent the “engine” and the same activator of the reactions of the body in front of a stimulus. To draw this path, giving the heart what is of the heart, certainly more romantic and less pragmatic, is a research by the bioengineers of the University of Pisa in collaboration with the University of Padua and the University of California of Irvine, which appeared in the magazine ofAmerican Academy of Sciences, PNAS. The study analyzes the mechanism that leads us to experience a specific emotion in the face of certain stimuli, identifying the root of the emotions in the heart, and opens up important perspectives in terms of possible approaches to anxiety and depression, which are often associated with increased cardiovascular risk.
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According to Gaetano Valenzaprofessor of bioengineering at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Pisa and researcher at the “E. Piaggio” Center, “if we exclude some theories proposed at the beginning of the last century, until now cardiovascular activity has been seen as a simple metabolic support to support the brain. And only the brain would be the seat of the biological processes responsible for conscious emotional experience. We have instead evidence that cardiovascular activity plays a causal role in initiating and feeling a specific emotion, and temporally precedes the activation of the neurons of the cerebral cortex “.
The heart rate increases and we get anxious
In short: the research would put in line the famous concept of the egg and the hen, applied to the heartbeat. In short, according to this peripheral theory of emotions, we would not have tachycardia because we are afraid, but rather the opposite would happen. It would be precisely the increase in heart rate to trigger an anxiety reaction which then turns into real fear, with physical and psychological symptoms.
Mathematical models
The study employed complex mathematical models applied to electrocardiographic and electroencephalographic signals in healthy subjects when viewing movies with highly unpleasant or pleasant emotional content. The researchers found that in the first few seconds the stimulus modifies cardiac activity, which in turn induces and modulates a specific response of the cortex. A continuous and bidirectional exchange of information between heart and brain therefore underlies the entire conscious experience of emotion and, above all, of its intensity.
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“Obviously – he continues Valence – the complexity of the emotions we experience derives from a very complex exchange between our nervous system and the various “peripheral” systems, but it is the heart activity, and not the brain one, that triggers the emotional experience “. more prosaic aspects of this study, in any case, behind this sort of cardiac “government” of emotions, with the heart being the fulcrum of the response and not the object of the stimulus of nervous origin, there may be practical applications of great interest Perhaps, thanks to wearable devices, one could come to understand what emotion was felt by the subject under observation, starting from the integrated analysis of what happens in the heart.
The link between affective disorders and heart disease
“The discovery can have very relevant repercussions on the understanding of mental disorders and their relationship with physical health – he confirms Claudio Gentili, of the Department of General Psychology and Center for Psychological Clinical Services of the University of Padua – and can explain why subjects with affective disorders, such as depression, are associated with a greater probability of developing heart disease, or, vice versa, among subjects with heart problems such as coronary heart disease or arrhythmias there is an increase in anxiety and depression. Our work, in addition to reviving the theory of the peripheral genesis of emotions, confirms the most recent neuroscientific positions that propose to overcome the dualism between the brain as an exclusive organ of the mind and the body, suggesting that we are not (alone) our brain. “In short: an extra light shines on the complex relationship between heart and psyche, with the first that could” dominate “over the second so much as to be the source of physical problems related to tension or anxiety.
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