The Heart-Mind relationship is more than a metaphor

When people say, “My heart says yes, but my mind says no,” they’re not being poetic. It might seem like they are using a metaphor, but the truth isn’t so clean. It’s messier and far more fascinating. There’s a reason we say heartbreak when love fails – not mating misfire, dopamine defeat, hippocampal hangover, or cortex crash.

Let’s say your heart wants to date someone, but your mind says you really should focus on work. Your heart wants what it wants, right? It’s more like the heart doesn’t want anything; it bullies the brain into wanting something, and it might be something neither expects.

The Heart vs. The Mind

All thoughts come from the brain, manifested in the mind, but influenced by the heart. However, here, the heart is a metaphor for emotions and intuition.

This metaphor is particularly interesting because humans have something called embodied cognition. It states that all of our cognition is essentially emerging from extremely basic building blocks that are tied to how the body moves and interacts with the world. Bit by bit, our physical experience of moving, falling, seeing forests and rocks, touching people, etc., creates mental components of those experiences, and the interaction of those components creates thoughts.

Thinking is a bodily experience, not just a mental experience

To understand the relationship between the heart and the mind, we have to first look at this larger context of “Cognition“. In most cases, cognition refers to thoughts and thinking mechanics. In technical cases, cognition refers to attention, memory, sensation, perception, and internal mental phenomena. Now, take this technical perspective and make it relevant by giving it human experience as a context. That brings us to this incredibly fascinating approach to the mind called the 4E theory^[1], which was published after cognitive psychologists, philosophers, and many other allied researchers reached a consensus on how we should look at the mind.

• Cognition is Embedded: Cognition is meaningful when the external environment is involved. E.g., thinking of cooking is cognitively easy when we have ingredients in front of us instead of imagining the ingredients. Involves culture, society, and the environment.
• Cognition is Embodied: Cognition is not limited to the brain, it exists across the body. And bodily changes alter cognition. E.g., Dancing well alters spatial reasoning. Involves the body.
• Cognition is Enacted: It’s a meaning-making process that interprets information from the senses and internally generated thoughts. E.g., our brain doesn’t receive an image of our food on the table. We interpret an interaction with food using our senses and movement.
• Cognition is Extended: It is directly associated with the tools we use. E.g., a calculator helps us think and reason. Involves tools we create, tools we naturally find, and other people.

The advantage of the 4E theory of Cognition is that it is no longer theoretical; it applies to all aspects of life – relationships, product development, conversations, education, daily interactions, computer use, etc.

We see evidence of this 4E cognition in many ways:

1. Playing a spatial rotation game like Tetris that involves changing the perspective of colored blocks can induce empathy because empathy is about changing perspectives^[2].
2. Drinking warm soup and having a warm bath^[3] can reduce loneliness because the physical experience of warmth is a building block for the more advanced cognition of “social warmth” which is often missing when lonely.
3. Dancing can improve spatial reasoning skills^[4] because spatial reasoning is built on top of basic physical movements in a physical space.
4. The concept of “moral” beauty – kindness and values shares neural mechanisms with physical beauty^[5] -appearances.

In all examples here, “the thought” aspect, aka cognition, is rooted in the physical manipulation of the body.

The point of this is that your physical experience will shape your cognition.

There is one more angle to consider.

During distress, our hearts could be pounding, and our chests could be tightening. If you meet your crush, your heart goes faster. This feeling is easily observable and can be described. It is strongly associated with the mental aspect of stress and arousal, which is largely a set of emotions. The association was known before we knew our anatomy and the brain well enough. Scientists suspect that this association of emotional & mental stress and the pain in the heart created the assumption that emotions emerge from the heart. I, too, think this started the idea that emotions come from the heart.

We observe thoughts coming from the mind, but we observe emotions as they are felt in the heart; that's why we split them up as enemies. Share on X

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The biological relationship between the heart and the brain

The heart pumps blood. It is needed for survival. The heart does not have components that manifest as thinking, but it does show strong changes to emotions, but it can’t itself feel. The brain/mind allows us to think, feel, and act using many systems of neurons that work together. The brain/mind creates emotions and thoughts. We also know that the brain guides the functioning of every other organ, including the heart. Organs respond to each other and work together. They are in a feedback loop.

The heart has about 40,000 neurites (projections from a neuron’s cell body) of its own – commonly called “the little brain^[6],” which is also recently 3D-mapped^[7]. They monitor and adjust the heart’s functions and send signals back to the brain^[8], which indirectly influences perception and decision-making. There are theories that these neurites also participate in habit-style learning and memory. In comparison to the neurites in the brain (100 billion neurons with 50-60 neurites each), 40,000 is almost zero, but not zero.

Emotions cause changes in heart rate^[9] and have a unique “cardiac profile” for common emotions. Sadness increases blood pressure and resistance in the circulatory system but reduces the amount of blood pumped. Fear and joy increase systolic blood pressure. Anger increases blood output and diastolic blood pressure. Generally, emotions change 4 very important properties of the cardiovascular system: Blood pressure, heart rate variability, vascular resistance, and heart output. This is why relaxation exercises work – we can consciously control how the heart works to a small extent using emotions.

Changes in heart rate due to non-psychological reasons^[10] like food, diet, organ regulation, disease, etc., affect our emotions, too. In fact, the James-Lange theory of emotion (re-interpreted with new findings) states that emotions are labeled in the brain after physiological changes. And those changes then affect our perception, which again changes the body’s response. For example, a sudden change in heart rate might cause a person to worry, and then anxious thoughts coming from detecting worrisome information can further increase heart rate after that.

But the relationship between the 2 is more complicated.^[11] The medulla oblongata, a part of the brainstem, is one of the most primitive regions of the brain, and it controls automatic processes like heartbeat and breathing. Damage to this area can slowly degrade breathing and heart function. In neurodegenerative disorders like ALS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s, neurons in that area can die or malfunction and eventually lead to death by cardiac arrest.

More physiological changes like physical ticking, facial expressions, pupil dilation, sweating, changes in voice, etc., indicate emotional states. That’s why the idea that emotions are physical also seems accurate in everyday scenarios. We have evolved to experience the mental aspect of emotions along with physical changes. Our sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system connect emotions and physical changes. This association is so strong that it continuously reinforces the connection between the heart and emotion. We don’t experience one without the other. Physical changes make emotions tangible and observable to others, too. That is why we can gain some insight into other people’s emotional states by observing their physical states – especially the heart – the speed of pumping, heaviness, and chest movement.

These observations show the heart is closely tied to emotions at a physical level, but the labeling of emotion occurs in the brain. So, using the word “heart” to represent emotions is quite natural and logical. However, the heart’s properties aren’t the emotion itself. This leads people to equate the heart with emotions.

What the heart vs. mind actually represents

The following contrasts (left = heart, right = mind) are common associations made through experience – embodied cognition. Heart vs. Brain is a distilled version of all of the following.

1. illogic vs. logic
2. animalistic vs. human
3. emotion vs. logic
4. feeling vs. thought
5. simple vs. complicated
6. childlike vs. adult-like
7. unconscious vs. conscious
8. dumb vs. wise
9. irrational vs. rational
10. instinct vs. purposeful
11. automatic vs. conscious
12. inner voice vs. outer voice

The heart carries associations like childlike, at the core, deep within, life, etc. The heart is usually equated with emotions – something fundamental to being human; fundamental is another association for the heart. We use such vague ideas based on associations. This is how humans have abstract thoughts and metaphors and associate multiple ideas.

Let’s try an example: There are 2 humans – a 2-year-old baby and a 60-year-old man; which one represents emotion, and which represents thought? Most people would tend to think of the baby as a representation of emotion.

Assuming Cats and Dogs are genderless, which one would be closest to a human male, and which one would be closest to a human female?

Some common answers: Cats have relatively smaller body sizes compared to dogs. Thus, they can be mapped to the size difference between men and women. Cats are independent, dogs are chasing – so maybe we can stereotype and map these connotations onto humans. These are called cross-modal correspondences, where meanings from 1 mode (sensory information, idea, language) are mapped onto meanings from another mode. The famous Kiki-Bouba experiment demonstrates this well.

Or for that matter – which one is smarter – a rock or a phone? Most would say a phone is smarter, not because it is called a “smartphone,” but because it can do things while a rock doesn’t.

Humans can abstract really well and think about concepts in many different ways. And that is how people uniquely conceptualize “the heart” in the context of different feelings and thoughts and varied associations.

If, at some point, you believe it is just an organ that pumps blood, you wouldn’t worry about what the heart is telling you. But, if you believe that the heart is the ultimate representation of emotions, your brain will put the heart in focus and pull out all the associations of emotions – childlike, innocent, animalistic, life, stress, anxiety, heartbreak, etc.

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Our breakup language shows this very well.

There’s a reason we say heartbreak when love fails – not mating misfire, dopamine defeat, hippocampal hangover, or cortex crash. The emotional connection (real or imagined) breaks, and we reach for the heart to describe it. It’s obvious – The heart is our oldest symbol of life because no heartbeat means death and heartbeat means alive, and a racing heart means really alive, like how you’d feel chasing baddies.

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