21
The
Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart:
“Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though
every inclination of the human heart
is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living
creatures, as I have done.”
Deuteronomy
4:29 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
29
But from there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find
Him if you search for Him with all your heart
and all your soul.
Deuteronomy
4:39 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
39
Know therefore today, and take it to your
heart, that the Lord, He is God
in heaven above and on the earth below; there is no other.
Deuteronomy
6:5 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
5
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your might.
These
scriptures are just a tiny fraction of Bible references to the
heart, its condition, and importance. I used to think that this usage
of the word “heart” was just another way of talking about our
brain; our thoughts and reasoning. I've always thought that the heart
was just an organ that pumps blood.
In
my research of this subject, I have found that there is scientific
evidence that the heart plays a much bigger part in our lives than we
once thought. There is a relatively new field of science called
Neurocardiology.
Neurocardiology refers
to the pathophysiological interplays of the nervous and
cardiovascular systems. It is an emerging field in medicine over the
last decade. The constant communication between the heart and the
brain have proved invaluable to interdisciplinary fields of
neurological and cardiac diseases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurocardiology
Wikipedia
Here
are just some of the things that I have discovered in my research:
The
heart is in a constant two-way communication with the brain and there
is more information traveling from the heart to the brain than vice
versa, brain to heart. The parts of the brain that the heart and the
cardiovascular system communicates with are the parts of the brain
that “play
a direct and important role in determining our perceptions, thought
processes, and emotional experiences.”
“Recent
work in the relatively new field of neurocardiology has firmly
established that the heart is a sensory organ and an information
encoding and processing center, with an extensive intrinsic nervous
system that’s sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a heart
brain.”
There
is evidence both scientific and logical that leads us to believe that
the heart can not be just a pump. There are over 40,000 km (more than
24,000 miles) of blood vessels in the human body. It would take a
hydraulic pump a whole, whole lot stronger than the heart to push
blood through all those paths. Think about it, many or most of these
pipes that the blood flows through are capillaries, about the
diameter of a single cell. Have you ever tried to pump a liquid,
let's just say water, through a very small tube? It takes great
pressure to do that.
Heart
Trivia
The
Heart beats 100,000 times a day, about 3,000,000,000 or more in an
80-year lifetime. Blood circulatory volume is about 5 quarts per
minute, or 2,000 gallons per day. The capillaries total about 40,000
km in total length. If all the capillaries were laid end to end, they
would cover the area of three football fields (Cowan, The Fourfold
Path to Healing, Ch. 3 p. 4). The healthy heart varies its rate up to
20 beats per minute throughout the day. Heart rate arises from a
delicate precise balance between information provided by the heart
itself, the brain, the vessels, the blood-rich organs and the
capillaries. 60%-65% of the cells in the heart are neural cells, and
about 70% of these are glial cells not neurons. The heart produces
2.5 watts with each heartbeat. Electromagnetic amplitude is 40-60x
that of brain waves, making the heart by far the strongest EM signal
produced in the body. The EM field radiates at least 12-15 feet
beyond the body; it is easily measurable at 3 feet. Arteries and
Veins are named for Yang (Ares) and Yin (Venus) mythological
archetypes. Heart, brain and planet earth all oscillate in the same
30 cps range. About half of those who suffer their first heart attack
have no risk factors (high cholesterol, obesity, smoking, high blood
pressure) (Pearsall, p. 36). Overwhelming evidence points to life
experience (love, stress, etc.) as the primary factor. The progenitor
of the heart (neutral principle) appears on day 17 of embryonic
development, one day earlier than the liver (yin principle) or
central nervous system (yang principle). The blood (extraembryonic
mesoderm in the trophoblast) is considered to be the very first
“organ,” appearing about day 12.
As
I was thinking about this information about the heart, I asked
myself, “What happens to a heart transplant patient who receives a
heart from a donor? Do they receive some of the personality traits
from that donor?”
There
are some pretty remarkable stories about heart transplant recipients
experiencing memories, habits, and desires they had never experienced
before; some have knowledge of people who only the heart donor could
have known.
Amazing
New Scientific Evidence Corroborates Biblical Teaching Yet Again!”
by
Robin A. Brace, 2006.
Here
is an article I found on the MBG mindbodygreen website written in
2013 by Dr.
Joel Kahn :
I
don't know about you, but for me knowing this new information about
the heart sheds more light on the scriptures in the Bible that talk
about the heart. It also helps me see God just a little clearer. He
created us in His image (Genesis
1:27). No words can describe my awe of God.
I'm
starting to view the heart much like I view God. I said in a previous
post that I see God like a conductor as in an orchestra or choir. The
heart is the conductor of the body.
I
used to look at creation just at the surface of things, just skin
deep. It is amazing and beautiful just to see creation at this level,
at the level of just what one can see. It was when I began looking
below the surface and seeing how something was made and how it
functioned that I really started seeing God, the Creator.
I used to read the Bible the same way I saw creation, only skin deep. So many
things that I read, when I really thought about it, were just words.
The words had meanings but only from what I had been taught over the
years. So often I would come across passages that just didn't seem to
fit. I used to put theme aside thinking that it was beyond my
understanding. I don't do that anymore; I keep asking Father God to
paint this picture of my understanding a little clearer each day. He
is doing that but each new thing I see makes me more aware of how
much more there is. God is awesome!
9/16/2016 I thought about this post and decided to find out if there have been any new findings about Neurocardiology and came across this article posted 2/15/2016 on "Waking Science" website called
