“My heart beats”. How many times have we said this phrase, perhaps listening to the song that marked our youth, re-reading the pages of an unforgettable book or even just finding ourselves talking to a person who has not been seen for a long time to whom we are bound by deep affection. Well, if you have found yourself in this condition, know that trying to control the situation with the mind is practically impossible. And not only for the emotional aspect, but also for the involvement that characterizes these moments. It is precisely in these phases that the heart rate can be synchronized in an automatic and uncontrollable way, in spite of our nervous control, through a series of mechanisms that lead the unconscious to dominate the beats. All this, without there being significant alterations in breathing.
Heart door
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I study
This is demonstrated by an original research born from the collaboration between experts from the City College of New York and the Paris Brain Institute, coordinated by Lucas Parra, published on Cell Reports. The study wanted to evaluate how much what we are experiencing is able to influence biological functions, such as heart rate, trying to understand how far consciousness can be pushed into control and when instead the autonomy of the heart rate is totally abandoned. ‘unconscious. The study involved several experiments, all conducted on healthy volunteers.
In the first it was seen that listening to the story of the novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, by Jules Verne, induced accelerations and slowdowns of the heartbeat (controlled by electrocardiogram) in all the participants at the same time, based on the pathos. A similar trend was also observed while following instructional videos without particular involvement, but when participants were asked to fix their minds on a mathematical thought, in front of the same videos, heart rhythm synchronization did not occur. Finally, when the volunteers listened to children’s stories, who were following with attention those without particular interest, the more one was involved in the story, the more significant were the variations in heart rate. to a synchronization failure. For the third step, the subjects listened to short children’s stories, some attentively and others distractedly. According to the research team’s findings, fluctuations in heart rates were associated with attention and level of involvement in the story.
It must be said that the relationship between beats, attention and emotions has already been studied in various researches. Some time ago a search appeared on British Medical Journal showed that the classic mantra of Tibetan monks helps not only the soul, but also the body, because it helps to make the heartbeat more regular and to slow down breathing, also due to the repetition of the litany that becomes music. And, even earlier, come on Circulation a study had appeared which demonstrated how the heart and lungs tend to synchronize their activity with the notes of the staff. Heart and lungs, in fact: in the study of Cell Reports, the great novelty is given by the fact that in the face of an unconscious synchronization for the heart rate, the same is not observed for the respiratory function. The heart, therefore, would have its own rhythm, unconsciously also governed by the attention we pay to what is happening.
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Future applications
Obviously, a research like this has a lot of fascination in terms of knowledge, but it should not be underestimated how this knowledge combined between cardiology and neuroscience can affect both treatments and attention to lifestyles. “We are well aware that in some pathologies the control of heart rate can affect survival, we have very effective drugs but this work leads us to think that a lot can be done even with non-pharmacological strategies – he points out Carlo Tumscitz, of the Cardiological Center of the University of Ferrara. Another field of interest for these studies is represented by the negative effects on the heart of some sounds and noises, which somehow represent the constant soundtrack of our hectic life. This is why we always advise our patients to spend time outdoors, in the green, where physical activity is combined with relaxation derived from the silence and noises of nature. ” We seek “peace”, therefore, to improve our well-being. And above all we keep in mind that often activating attention and listening, even if we do not realize it, means offering a stimulus that has a meaning for the heart.
The advice is therefore to be involved as much as possible in what is happening and can interest us, whether we are talking about music, words, images. This simple attention can cause fluctuations in the heart rhythm. In the future, as a fourth experiment explained in the study demonstrates, this knowledge could also be useful for dealing with very serious conditions, such as vegetative states, in order to measure brain functions by monitoring the heart rate response based on a stimulus. In the meantime, if our heart is beating, let’s remember that the brain can guide it. Without affecting the breath, speeding up or slowing down based on how much we are hearing. Let’s always do it carefully also because when we are subjected to pleasant stimuli, such as those of the music we like best, the brain releases endorphins or compounds with similar action, which in turn can promote the release of nitric oxide. And it fights stress.
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