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When a man was fitted with a new heart, his mind changed in unusual ways. Why? The answer reveals a surprising truth about all our bodies, says David Robson.

Every second or so, Carlos would feel a
small "bump" hitting his tummy. It was the
beating of his "second heart".
The small mechanical pump was meant to
relieve the burden of his failing cardiac
muscles, but Carlos (not his real name)
disliked the sensation. The beat of the
machine seemed to replace his pulse, a
sensation that warped his body image: as
the device throbbed above his navel,
Carlos had the eerie feeling that his chest
had dropped into the abdomen.
It was a strange, unsettling feeling. But
when neuroscientist Agustin Ibanez met
Carlos, he suspected even odder effects
were to come. By changing the man's
heart, Ibanez thought, the doctors might
have also changed their patient's mind:
Carlos would now think, feel and act
differently as a result of the implant.
How come? We often talk about
"following the heart", but it is only
recently that scientists have begun to
show that there is literal truth in the
cliche; the heaving lump of muscle
contributes to our emotions and the
mysterious feelings of "intuition" in a very
real way. Everything from your empathy
for another person's pain to the hunch
that your spouse is having an affair may
originate from subtle signals in your
heart and the rest of your body.
And the man who feels two hearts
offered Ibanez, who is based at Favaloro
University in Buenos Aires, a unique
opportunity to test those ideas.
"Cranial stuffing"
Ibanez's work chimes with millennia of
speculation about the heart's role in
cognition – which was sometimes thought
to supersede the brain's. Touching the
cool, moist grey matter of the cortex,
for instance, Aristotle assumed that
the brain's main function was to
chill the passions erupting from
the heart – which he considered the
seat of the soul. For similar reasons,
embalmers in ancient Egyptians made
sure to leave the heart in the chest, but
happily removed the mere "cranial
stuffing" from the head.
We now take a more cerebral view of
thought, even if the view of the heart as
the font of our emotions has lingered;
just consider the many metaphors we
use to describe feelings today. William
James, the founder of modern
psychology, helped formalise these ideas
in the 19th Century by suggesting that
emotions are really a back-and-forth
feedback cycle between the body and the
brain. According to his theory, the brain
might be able to register a threat
intellectually – but it is our awareness of
the racing heartbeat and sweaty palms
that transforms an abstract concept into
a visceral emotion.
James' ideas also raised an important
question: if everybody has different
bodily awareness, would that shape the
emotions they experience? The idea was
difficult to test, however, but a hundred
years later scientists are now on the
case.
The studies first asked subjects to count
their heartbeats based solely on the
feelings within their chest; they weren't
allowed to put their hand on their heart
or actively take their pulse. Try it for
yourself, and you'll see that this kind of
"interoception" can be surprisingly
difficult; around one in four people miss
the mark by about 50%, suggesting they
have little to no perception of the
movements inside them; only a quarter
get 80% accuracy. After testing their
cardiac awareness, the researchers then
gave the volunteers various cognitive
tests.
James, it turned out, was spot on. People
with more bodily awareness tend have
more intense reactions to emotive
pictures and report being more greatly
moved by them; they are also better at
describing their feelings. Importantly, this
sensitivity seems to extend to others'
feelings – they are better at
recognising emotions in others'
faces – and they are also quicker to
learn to avoid a threat, such as a small
electric shock in the lab, perhaps because
those more intense bodily feelings
saturate their memories, making the
aversion more visceral. "It may quickly
clue us in to the relative goodness or
badness of the objects, choices, or
avenues of action that we are facing,"
says Daniella Furman at the University of
California, Berkeley. In other words,
people who are in tune with their bodies
have a richer, more vivid emotional life –
including both the ups and downs of life.
"We may not be able to describe the
particular physiological signature of a
pleasurable experience, but we would
probably recognise the sensations when
they occur," she says.
Emotional barometer
These secret bodily signals may
also lie behind our intuition – the
indefinable hunches that you have the
winning hand in poker, say, according to
an elegant study by Barney Dunn at the
University of Exeter. The task was simple:
the volunteers were asked to choose
cards from four decks, and they would
win money if it matched the colour of
another, upturned card.
The game was rigged so that you were
slightly more likely to win from two of
the decks, and lose if you picked from
the other two. Dunn found that the
people who could track their heartbeat
with the most accuracy would tend to
pick from certain decks, whereas those
with poor interoception were more likely
to choose at random.
The bodily-aware people weren't always
correct – they were the worst losers as
well as the best winners – but the point
was that they were more likely to follow
their hunches.
So the folklore may be right: people who
are in touch with their heart are more
likely to be swayed by their instincts –
for good or bad. All of which prompted
Ibanez to wonder what would happen
when you are fitted with an artificial
heart? If Carlos experienced substantial
changes, it would offer important new
evidence that our mind extends well
beyond the brain.
And that is exactly what he found. When
Carlos tapped out his pulse, for instance,
he followed the machine's rhythms rather
than his own heartbeat. The fact that this
also changed other perceptions of his
body – seeming to expand the size of his
chest, for instance – is perhaps to be
expected; in some ways, changing the
position of the heart was creating a
sensation not unlike the famous " rubber
hand illusion". But crucially, it also
seemed to have markedly altered certain
social and emotional skills. Carlos seemed
to lack empathy when he viewed pictures
of people having a painful accident, for
instance. He also had more general
problems with his ability to read other's
motives, and, crucially, intuitive decision
making – all of which is in line with the
idea that the body rules emotional
cognition. "It is a very interesting, very
intriguing study," says Dunn of the
findings.
"A lifeless shell"
Sadly, Carlos died from complications
during later treatments – but Ibanez now
hopes to continue his studies with other
patients. He is currently performing tests
on people undergoing a full heart
transplant to see how it could influence
interoception. Damage to the vagal nerve
should cut off some of the internal
signals sent from the heart to the brain,
which might then impact their cognition.
Away from the cardiac clinic, he has is
also looking at whether a fault in the link
between body and brain could lead to
strange depersonalisation disorders, in
which patients have the eerie feeling that
they don't inhabit their own body. "I feel
as though I'm not alive, as though my
body is an empty, lifeless shell," one
patient told researchers. "I seem to
be walking in a world I recognise but
don't feel." Ibanez has found that they
tend to show worse interoception, and
brain scans suggest that this results
from a breakdown in communication
across the anterior insula – a deep fold
of the cortex that is, tellingly, implicated
in body awareness, emotion
perception, empathy, decision
making – and the sense of self.
Dunn, who is a clinical psychologist, is
more concerned about its relevance to
depression. "At the moment therapy is
very much in the head – we change what
the client thinks and trust that their
emotions will follow up," he says. "But I
often hit a wall: they say that they know
these things intellectually, but emotionally
they can't feel it."
Even after therapy has trained more
positive thinking, the patient may still
struggle to feel joy, for example – a
problem that Dunn suspects may come
from poor interoception. He gives the
example that when you are walking
around the park, your body might give
you all sorts of pleasant feedback that
shows you are relaxed and peaceful. "But
depressed clients seem to walk around
the park without being engaged with the
sensory experience," he says, "and then
they come back and say it was flat and
empty".
Along these lines, Furman has found that
people with major depressive disorder
(but without other complications like
anxiety) struggle to feel their own heart
beat; and the poorer their awareness, the
less likely they were to report positive
experiences in their daily life. And as
Dunn's work on decision making would
have suggested, poor body perception
also seemed to be linked to measures of
indecision – a problem that blights many
people with depression. Furman stresses,
however, that there may be many
different kinds of depression, and poor
bodily awareness may only influence
some of them.
It's not clear why some people may have
reduced bodily awareness, but Dunn
thinks it can be trained, with practice. He
is currently looking into the use of
mindfulness-based therapy, which
encourages people to focus on the
sensations in their body. He says the
challenge is to try to recognise the
feelings, even if they are unpleasant,
without reacting to them in a knee-jerk
way. You should then be better equipped
to use the body as the "emotional
barometer" to inform you about your
state of mind and decide how to act.
Another group has designed a
rudimentary computer game that
asks you to tap a key with every four
heartbeats, and flashes red when you are
wrong, offering feedback that should
boost body awareness.
So what are you waiting for? You can
enjoy a richer, more emotional life; tune
into the sensory pleasures of the world,
and make better decisions. And all you
have to do is listen to your heart.


On 12/7/14, ogunlowo joseph <ogunlowojoseph@gmail.com> wrote:
> Gangnam Style hit music video by
> South Korean singer, PSY, has exceeded
> YouTube's view limit, prompting
> YouTube to upgrade its counter.
> The video which was released in 2012,
> was announced to be its most watched
> ever and has been viewed more than
> 2,147,483,647 times. YouTube has now
> changed the maximum view limit to
> 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or more
> than nine quintillion.
> On December 1, YouTube posted a
> statement saying: "We never thought a
> video would be watched in numbers
> greater than a 32-bit integer… but
> that was before we met Psy."
> Meanwhile, how do you say
> 9,223,372,036,854,775,808? That's
> over a quadrillion, over a trillion, and
> over a billion.
>
>
> On 12/4/14, Joseph Ogunlowo <ogunlowojoseph@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Kim K has been named the "Most Searched
>> Person of 2014″, beating last year's winner,
>> Beyonce. 2014 was definitely the year of the 34
>> year old reality star with buzz-worthy events like
>> her wedding to Kanye, her Vogue cover and
>> most recently her 'break the internet' naked pics
>> for Paper magazine.
>> Beyonce comes second, while Miley Cyrus and
>> Katy Perry come 3rd and 4th respectively. See
>> the top ten most searched personalities of 2014
>> after the cut...
>> 1. Kim Kardashian
>> 2. Beyonce Knowles
>> 3. Miley Cyrus
>> 4. Katy Perry
>> 5. Justin Bieber
>> 6. Joan Rivers
>> 7. Jennifer Lopez
>> 8. Kendall Jenner
>> 9. Kaley Cuoco
>> 10. Robin Williams
>
>
>> On 12/3/14, Joseph Ogunlowo <ogunlowojoseph@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> At the Pioneers Festival in Vienna, a
>>> Slovakian startup called AeroMobil unveiled
>>> the thing that we have all been dreaming
>>> about since we saw that first episode of the
>>> Jetsons while still wearing diapers: The first
>>> flying car. It's here. It's real. And it's
>>> spectacular.
>>> According to Venturebeat, the company
>>> took the wraps off AeroMobil 3.0, the latest
>>> iteration of its flying car that has been in
>>> development for almost 25 years.
>>> "We believe personal transportation is about
>>> to change forever," said AeroMobil chief
>>> executive Juraj Vaculik at a press
>>> conference. "We think it's time to make
>>> transportation more emotional and more
>>> personal."
>>> The car was designed by Stefan Klein,
>>> founder and head of the Department of
>>> Transport Design at the Academy of Fine
>>> Arts in Slovakia. Klein had been tinkering
>>> with the concept as far back as 1989.
>>> Image
>>> The car needs very little runway to take off,
>>> and it can be refueled at any standard gas
>>> station when the wings are retracted.
>>> AeroMobil believes it will be attractive for
>>> countries that don't have billions of dollars
>>> to spend building a modern transportation
>>> infrastructure.
>>> The body is built from advanced composite
>>> materials that keep it lightweight but also
>>> durable. Under the hood, it has autopilot
>>> and an advanced parachute deployment
>>> system. The cockpit can carry two people,
>>> and in the air the flying car can reach top
>>> speeds of 200 km/h. It has a 27-foot
>>> wingspan and is 19.7 feet long.
>>> No word on the price tag.
>
>>> On 12/3/14, ogunlowo joseph <ogunlowojoseph@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> According to reports Angelina Jolie's black
>>>> SUV car slipped on a wet road, slid into the
>>>> curb with extreme force, popping two tires,
>>>> almost causing the driver to lose control of
>>>> the vehicle.
>>>> The actress was heading home in a
>>>> chauffeured black SUV from Writers' Guild
>>>> Theater, when the car hit the curb.
>>>> According to an eyewitness (who spoke ti
>>>> X17 Online): "The car slammed into the
>>>> curb at a significant speed. Angelina must
>>>> have wondered if they hit another car. It
>>>> was pretty bad -- the tire exploded and it's
>>>> amazing nothing worse happened to the
>>>> car. I wouldn't be surprised if she has
>>>> whiplash."
>>>> Angelina reportedly stayed in the car after
>>>> the incident and was later picked up, not
>>>> by Brad pitt, but by another driver from the
>>>> same car service.
>
>>>> --
>>>> Posted By ogunlowo joseph to entertainment,investing,education on
>>>> 12/03/2014 10:47:00 am
>
>
>
>
> --
> Posted By ogunlowo joseph to entertainment,investing,education on
> 12/07/2014 01:50:00 am
>

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