Take Time for Your Heart to Meet Your Mind

It's pretty hard to feel calm when your heart is racing. It's also true that when you are feeling calm your heart is typically not going a mile a minute. A key thing here is the passage and awareness of time. Each of us has lots of experience with this kind of body-and-brain relationship, but how much do we really know about the science of heart and mind?

Your body knows a thing or two about time

Research suggests that our estimation of the passage of time is rooted in our bodily rhythms and internal signaling. Things like heart rate and breathing for example. But how this all works has been elusive. That is until the recent work of Shiva Khoshnoud, David Leitritz, Meltem Çinar Bozdağ, Federico Alvarez Igarzábal, Valdas Noreika, and Marc Wittmann from research units in Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Their work published in the Journal of Neuroscience gives "the first direct electrophysiological evidence suggesting an association between the brain's processing of heartbeat and duration judgment."

Getting to the heart of it

In 30 women and men aged 18 to 36 years, they measured brain responses of "heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP) and contingent negative variation (CNV) during an auditory duration-reproduction task and a control reaction-time task." Internal body awareness was assessed by a questionnaire and a heartbeat counting task. Results showed that higher questionnaire scores were associated "with longer and more accurate duration reproductions."

The researchers point out that "timing mechanisms in the brain are of the essence for an organism to represent environmental temporal regularities and the temporal metrics of events." Taken in sum, they suggest that internal signaling of bodily "states create the experience of time." Their evidence that our brains process signaling of heart rate as part of time tracking" as a "neurophysiological mechanism that determines the estimation of duration."

Keep calm and carry on

Since the perception of time is a critical measure of our perception of place in the world, this research also suggests that "the ongoing creation of an embodied self over time by ascending neural signals from the body...could function as a measure of time." Things that come to mind (sorry for the pun) here are whether these relationships are what is being leveraged in mindful practices like stationary (sitting or standing) or moving (martial arts) meditation. That is, those practices focus on bodily states and awareness of mind. These practices lead to a general calming and sense of being in the moment and are rooted in focus on bodily states. That is, a feeling of the slowing of time perception. This is likely trainable and probably related to the "take home" benefits of mindful practices like meditation and martial arts.

These observations also relate to the idea of outside-in "brain hacking." While we can often be very challenged to directly alter our thinking, many things we do can lead to changes in the processes of the brain and body that encourage calmer thoughts and mindsets. When you are beginning or implementing your own mindful practices you really are enabling your body and brain to "keep calm and carry on."

(c) E. Paul Zehr (2024)