Heart Story.

The speaker continued. “So we continued looking for these brain like cells around the heart and stomach of other animals. Gorillas have more than quadruple that of humans, dogs triple and even cows have double that of humans. It appears human development has not only increased our ‘head’ brain it has decreased these other areas of brain like activity. What might that suggest? From centuries human societies have referred to ‘heart felt’ and ‘gut feeling’: We say them without thinking. But people often experience visceral emotion in their chest, existential hunger in their belly. We don’t consider them evidence of brain activity yet we readily accept a headache is evidence of mental stress. Surely if you feel it in your chest it must be happening there, not in the heart itself but in its surrounding brain. I say ‘brain like’ because we don’t experience these responses as the usual cognitive activity connected to our outward senses; they appear just an indescribable sensation.” The audience took the speaker’s pause to re-comfort themselves. “The quite recent revelation that we do have outposts of brain activity in these regions has thus far been a novelty, an unexpected quirk of evolution, possibly located to help the organs function. But what if those colloquial sayings are accurate? What if they are the seats of our experiencing of love and primal hunger?” The speaker paused again before closing the circle of his argument. “If so our findings suggest animals have retained a greater capacity to experience and evaluate these essentials of life where human evolution has consistently bread out that capacity in favour of our conscious head brain.” He looked around his audience. Most were proving his point, evaluating it no lower than their necks, finding it interesting, novel, worthy or not of consideration. “Can you imagine that gorillas experience life four times as intensely as you, that as you play with your dog he loves you three times more than you love him? That you’re simply no longer equipped to love him that much? Of course you have no way of knowing. Our most recent research has returned to the study of humans. Our non-invasive scanning techniques have shown a strong correlation between heart-brain volume and how people are perceived by others, self-perception having proved too unreliable. People experienced as empathic, loving with a rich joyful life are in the higher percentile where egotistical, uncaring types with a self-serving lifestyle are in the lower. I leave you to ponder the consequences of following this particular evolutionary path.”