SOMA: What can the Heart Feel?

Peripheral (Vagal) Nerves regulating Heart Rate (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31028266/)

How often do you stop and feel your heart?  I don’t mean symbolically.  I mean, how often do you have a conscious sensory experience of that space behind your sternum, atop your diaphragm, between your lungs?

And does that sensory field – whatever its origin – inform your emotions, motivations, decisions?  Does your heart-sense inhere somehow in your sense of self?

Clearly a heart can function without a conscious mind’s oversight. It does so in our sleep, in countless creatures simpler than us, and in the embryo its regular beats long precede the development of the cortical brain. Yet we do experience some heart sensations rising into our awareness – its regular drumbeat and the skips and gallumps of its syncopation (arrhythmia).  Famously, we feel physical pain from the heart (as in during heart attacks), though where we feel it is often far from heart tissue.  And we also know that heart signals project into consciously-mapped brain regions.

"Sun Moon Stars" (1942) by Meret Oppenheim

But if all we sensed was the physical state of the heart, we wouldn’t also use phrases like “seeing with the heart” or “what does your heart tell you”.  Many of us also have perceptual experiences situated in our heart that relate to external and abstract perceptions -- other people, situations, life decisions, ritual and spiritual experiences.

I remember distinctly the specific swath of left pericardium that panged when in the lobby of a theater I suddenly ran into my ex, one year after our breakup.  Or the shrink-wrap shame behind my upper sternum when I approached a college professor about my dismal grades.  Oof, wow… what is that?  Why would my brain feel such a social-emotional wave as a localized sensation?

Maps of bodily sensation activated when perceiving others' emotional cues, both visual and vocal. Krager and LaBar 2016.

Part of the answer is one of evolution’s most nifty tricks, called ‘Exaptation’ – wherein a system that evolved for a specific function (sensing/regulating the physical heart) gets re-purposed for another (integrating emotional/symbolic experiences). 

It’s clear that something like this has happened with our interoceptive-emotional world:  We are animals whose supreme superpower is sociability, and we have learned to use our interoceptive brain for all kinds of social/emotional processing.

How the Insula takes basic interoceptive information and continuously encodes an embodied self. From my class Mapping the Soma.

But that only deepens the mystery:  Why do different emotions map differently in our sensory experience?  Is it a weird quirk or some obscure advantage to process different emotions as distinct interoceptive phenomena?  If my eyes view a climbing credit card balance and then I feel a clench in my solar plexus, why would this particular stressor manifest in such a specific way?

Self-Reported areas of Activation/Deactivation in different emotional states. Nummenmaa et al 2013

One thing we do know: learning to regulate this interoceptive component of social-emotional states can be incredibly helpful.  For one thing, we avoid compounding the stress with additional layers of overwhelm or threat response.  Secondly, the interoceptive experience can end up being a tool or reflective medium for our other forms of cognition.  Whatever the perceptual capacities of the heart tissue itself (personally I’m a skeptic here, but open to hypotheses) – the brain’s representation of the heart seems like a powerful engine of intuition and insight.

Predictive Interoceptive Processing, Khalsa et al 2018.

All of the above is fascinating to me, but it falls far short of the lore we observe in somatic and spiritual circles --> that the heart itself is a perceptual organ of the energetic/symbolic/spiritual world. The most grounded thing we can say is that over time we brained creatures have augmented our heart-maps to represent far more than just heart rhythm and tissue stress.

So we're back to trusting our direct experience, but perhaps with a different lens as to what it means. What feelings do you locate in your heart?  Have sensations there served you in navigating or understanding your life?

For me, my sensory-emotional heart is a signifier of attention. When I feel that space in my chest come alive, it means "This matters. Be this. Deepen this connection." Conversely, when my heart-sense feels numb or absent, it is the truest signifier of spiritual exile -- of non-adhesion to the present task or person or path. Learning that my brain bootstraps its own evolutionary heart-maps -- tuning into the subtle cues of my spirit -- makes me all the more curious and attuned to the heart's wisdom.

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If you're curious about applying any of this material, check out my Embodied Anatomy curriculum, especially the 4-hr courses Heart of Perception and Mapping the Soma. They're online/in-person, open to anyone, and recorded in perpetuity.