HeartMath Considered Incoherent · Read Scott Alexander

[Note: all opinions expressed here are my own. Nothing to be taken as medical advice.]

A group called the Institute of HeartMath has been remarkably persistent at making their way into my hospital. A couple of months ago I had to go to a lecture where they trained us all in their “scientifically” “validated” “heart” “coherence” “technique”. And yesterday I had to attend a class where one of my attendings (who is otherwise an amazing psychiatrist and teacher whom I have a huge amount of respect for) pushed the same technique and their biofeedback device.

And it looks like I’m not the only one. It looks like the US Navy is also “getting the coherence advantage” and that there’s an entire site dedicated to HeartMath for veterans and the military urging them to “apply for scholarships”. There are HeartMath training programs for teachers and managers ($3500 for a four-day workshop), for police, firemen, and first responders ($3699 for a four day workshop) and for doctors and clinicians ($1495 for an “interactive webinar”). There are HeartMath programs aimed at classrooms, including Early Heart Smarts Pre-K training ($179) and HeartMath Test Prep, $49 and apparently funded by a grant from the Department of Education. In case your classroom can’t afford these products, the Institute of HeartMath offers help filling out grant applications.

If any of these offers are actually being taken, this HeartMath stuff is big business. So in the process of writing up a letter to my boss explaining why I don’t want them back in my hospital a third time, I figured I’d make what I found public on the Internet for the benefit of anyone else looking into them.

Because their field of interest is heart electrophysiology, something I know almost nothing about, I’m not going to be able to do a good job debunking specific claims or responding to the science. Instead I want to make a few very general points about the science and then move into a discussion of the GIANT RED FLAGS the Institute throws up.

II.

According to a pamphlet I was given, HeartMath claims:

Create a coherent state in about a minute with the simple, but powerful steps of the Quick Coherence Technique. Using the power of your heart to balance thoughts and emotions, you can achieve energy, mental clarity, and feel better fast anywhere…Find a feeling of ease and inner harmony that’s reflected in more balanced heart rhythms, facilitating brain function and more access to higher intelligence.

The Quick Coherence Technique is a relaxation/focusing exercise where you concentrate on your heart area, breathe deeply while imagining the breath coming through your heart, and imagine a happy situation. According to HeartMath, this causes your heart rhythm to enter a state called “coherence”, which looks like a sine wave on graphs of heart rate variability and which can be detected by cheap and simple monitoring devices.

They say that the heart has so many interconnected neurons that it is like a “second brain”, and probably involved in various forms of advanced emotional processing. Further, “the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart”, so getting the heart into a coherent rhythm can sync brain waves into a coherent rhythm and improve emotional states. They present lots of research showing their Coherence Technique does in fact change heart rate variability, brain waves, and performance on various tasks that require calm concentration.

Further, they say that “the heart has a magnetic field a thousand times stronger than that of the brain, the strongest of any organ in the body”. It can be detected up to several meters away, and its character changes with emotional state and with whether your heart is in “coherence” or not. They present links to a lot of research showing that subtle changes in the magnetic field of the heart can be measured even outside the body. Then they say that people can communicate emotional states with other people nearby through the effect of their hearts’ magnetic fields.

Therefore, if you get your heart in coherence with their meditative technique, you not only put your brain waves more in sync and eliminate your own stress, but you have a knock-on effect helping everyone around you.

This is a mixture of good science, mediocre science taken out of context, and total bunk.

Heart rate does have variability, and heart rate variability is an interesting proxy for your body’s general level of health and stress. You can find a good summary from an electrophysiological perspective here, and from more of a neurobiological perspective here. Most likely what happens is that when you’re calm, your heart gets more parasympathetic innervation which causes more variability, and when you’re stressed it gets more sympathetic innervation and less variability.

The heart does feed information to the brain. Then again, so does everything else. Your feet feed information to the brain – that’s why if someone hits your feet, you can feel it. I don’t know whether “the feet send more information to the brain than the brain sends to the feet” but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did – they have to communicate temperature, pain, position, touch, itchiness, et cetera, and all the brain does is occasionally tell them to move somewhere. This does not mean the feet are metaphysically prior to the brain in some important way, or that they control the brain. It just means that the brain is at some level aware of what is going on with the feet. So too with the heart. We know the brain has some level of monitoring of heart function – this is why people who have heart attacks have various unpleasant feelings, including chest pain and a so-called “sense of impending doom”. This doesn’t imply very much about the heart controlling brain function.

The heart does have a complex interconnected nervous system of its own. But HeartMath’s descriptions of it – which go from claims that “The heart’s extensive intrinsic neurvous system is sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a ‘heart brain’ in its own right” to the insane question The Heart Has A Little Brain – Which Is Really In Control? – are overblown. HeartMath says the heart has 40,000 neurons (other sources say more like 14,000). Okay. The brain has 86 billion. Which is really in control – the organ with 14,000 neurons or the one with 86,000,000,000? Yeah, it’s the second one. Also of note: the gut has 100 million neurons. For those of you counting, that’s seven thousand times more than the heart. Maybe “The Institute of BowelMath” didn’t sound sexy enough? Neurons are useful structures that manage electrical conductivity and ability to react to external conditions; they don’t always mean an organ has some kind of complicated emotional intelligence.

The heart does produce a magnetic field over a thousand times stronger than that of the brain. Here are other totally meaningless heart-brain comparisons: the heart is over a zillion times redder than the brain is! The heart is involved in 600000% more angsty teenage love poetry! Anything with electrical activity is going to produce a magnetic field, but that doesn’t mean the magnetic field is of any deeper significance, or that “size of magnetic field produced” is a good proxy for “cognitive significance”. In fact, we find that the magnetic field of the heart as measured at the surface of the body is ten million times weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field at the surface of the Earth. HeartMath says that subtle changes in the heart’s magnetic field can be measured outside the body, and this is true, but what they fail to mention is that this measurement was done at a super-high-tech laboratory in Berlin called the “most magnetically quiet room on earth” where building-sized magnetic shields sheltered the experimental apparatus from the Earth’s magnetism, which otherwise would have totally overwhelmed the effect the same way as hunting for a firefly on the surface of the Sun. Outside of a special magnetically shielded room in Berlin, your heart’s magnetic field isn’t going around influencing everything around you, let alone interacting with somebody else’s heart.

HeartMath does studies and finds that if I am holding your hand, your brain waves sync up to my heartbeat, and vice versa – and that indeed, this can happen even if we are nearby but not touching. Evidence for magnetic transfer effects? Before we say yes, I want to make three points about this study.

Number one, it is not in a peer reviewed journal. It’s published in a book called “Brain And Values: Is A Biological Science Of Values Possible?”, the editor of which is one of HeartMath’s “scientific advisors”.

Number two, it does not use p-values, Bayesian posteriors, or any other kind of statistic that involves numbers. It shows us pictures of wave patterns and points out that they look alike. I admit that they do look alike, but I know nothing about waves and for all I know it’s really easy to make different waves look alike.

Number three, EEG artifacts are a thing. That is, if any movement is going on near an EEG, it moves the electrodes and they record a noisy signal. Thus, you usually take an EEG with an EKG so you can see the patient’s heart rhythm and adjust it out, since otherwise the brain waves will appear to fluctuate with the heartbeat simply because the heartbeat shakes the electrodes. Manuals for EEG use have warnings about, for example, not letting anyone else sit on the patient’s bed during recording, or watching the patient’s intravenous lines because even the drip-drip-drip of the IVs can show up as perturbations. If I am holding your hand while you’re getting an EEG, perhaps my EEG reflects your heart rhythm not because your heart is affecting my brain waves, but because your heartbeat is indeed shaking me a tiny bit which shakes the electrodes which produces EEG artifact. This possibility seems to fit with HeartMath’s observation that when the heart-beat subject was wearing a thin glove on the hand with which she touched the brain-wave subject, the effect was decreased by a factor of ten. I admit this doesn’t explain the supposed sync between heartbeat and brain wave when the two subjects were standing a foot and a half apart without touching. But as we will soon see, HeartMath is so good at finding non-local effects that we have some reason to doubt their data-gathering process here.

Here’s what I think is going on as a fully general explanation of almost all of HeartMath’s research. Their Quick Coherence technique – and various others like it – are basically mishmashes of useful relaxation exercises stolen from various yogas and forms of meditation. Many of these ask you to focus on the heart – although many others ask you to focus on the tailbone, or genitalia, or third eye, or crown chakra – and all of them probably work in some vague way by redirecting your attention onto the body. I have no doubt that these yoga techniques effectively relax you. That changes your balance of parasympathetic versus sympathetic tone, which in turn affects your heart rate variability – which as we saw before, tracks parasympathetic and sympathetic tone. Since you’re more relaxed, you do better at various cognitive tasks, which HeartMath then records and claims is evidence of an effect from heart “coherence”. This explains about 80% of the Institute’s findings. There are definitely some findings that can’t be explained by this, but then, as we will very shortly see, there are some findings that can’t be explained by anything except Alien Space Bats.

III.

I would now like to move from a sober critique of HeartMath’s theories to an unfair character assassination of their staff.

Although HeartMath employs a bunch of people, the obvious two head honchos are founder Doc Childre (the CEO and President is listed as Sara Childre, who I assume is his wife), and Dr. Rollin McCraty, the executive vice-president and director of research, who is responsible for the lion’s share of the Institute’s research output and scientific claims.

Doc Childre has no medical training or relevant educational credentials. In fact, he is not a doctor at all. “Doc” is just his first name. This completes my character assassination of him.

Rollin McCraty is a doctor, but not a medical doctor. He has a Ph. D in “Health Sciences”, but all of his training and expertise is in electrical engineering and he has had no formal instruction in biology. His biography makes him sound very impressive:

McCraty is a Fellow of the American Institute of Stress, holds memberships with the International Neurocardiology Network, American Autonomic Society, Pavlovian Society and Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback

The Institute of Stress has a list of all its fellows online, McCraty is not mentioned.

The International Neurocardiology Network has no webpage or online evidence of its existence. When I Google “International Neurocardiology Network”, I get 47 results, every one of which is a claim by McCraty to be a member of it.

The American Autonomic Society does have a webpage, here. The webpage includes a helpful membership application where you can pay them $300 for membership, earning you a subscription to their journal and greatly decreased fees for attending their annual meeting. Their list of members is lorem ipsum text, but I’m totally willing to give Dr. McCraty the benefit of the doubt on this one.

The Pavlovian Society seems less prestigious than the American Autonomic Society, given that their membership application only involves a $30 fee and has to be sent by “mail, fax, or email”. What is this, 1995?

The Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback not only sells membership for $189, but in several parts of its site equivocates between the terms “member” and “customer”.

So of the five impressive-sounding organizations McCraty starts his bio with, one doesn’t list him as a member, one doesn’t seem to exist, and three give membership freely for a fee.

But aside from these organizational memberships, Dr. McCraty is widely published with many fascinating and well-accepted studies. Unfortunately, the fascinating ones aren’t well-accepted, and the well-accepted ones aren’t fascinating.

For example, on one hand we had the study showing my heart rate can affect your brain waves even when we’re not touching, which would certainly be ground-breaking if true. But it was not peer-reviewed and was published in a random compendium associated with a HeartMath advisor.

And on the other hand, we have The Heart Re-Innervates Itself After Transplantation. This is in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, an excellent peer-reviewed publication. But McCraty is one of twelve authors, and the study just shows that nerve growth goes on after heart transplant. Interesting if you’re a thoracic surgeon, but not exactly the spooky-action-at-a-distance they were talking about before.

This seems to be a common problem with HeartMath. Looking at their list of publications, it seems to be about 50% studies they have published themselves without peer review, 25% studies published in journals of alternative medicine with no standards, and 25% studies in real journals that show relatively boring results. For example, A Controlled Pilot Study Of Stress Management Training of Elderly Patients With Congestive Heart Failure in the perfectly reputable journal Preventative Cardiology tests one of HeartMath’s coherence-building relaxation techniques on the title population. They find that it in fact decreases stress, but “the twenty four hour heart rate variability showed no significant changes in autonomic tone”. In other words, their claims are that they’ve discovered some master switch to the body that can even cross air gaps into other people’s brains, but their reputable studies get results like “relaxation makes people less stressed”.

IV.

Everything I’ve talked about so far – the “coherence” “techniques”, the “second brain”, the heart’s magnetic field, the transfers of heart rhythms across air gaps – has been part of HeartMath’s public-facing persona. This is the stuff they use to sound reasonable to doctors so they can get their techniques into hospitals and other sober institutions. Hold on tight, because we are going to start investigating the deranged world of HeartMath’s non-public-facing core.

First let’s expand on this idea of “coherence”. Coherence just means your heart rhythm is in a nice sine wave pattern, right? Let’s ask Coherence: Bridging Personal, Social, and Global Health, by Childre & McCraty, published in the journal Alternative Therapies‘ July 2010 edition. All emphasis mine:

The heart plays a unique role in synchronizing the activity across multiple systems and levels of organization. The heart is uniquely well-positioned to act as the ‘global coordinator’ in the body’s symphony of functions to bind and synchronize the system as a whole…

There is compelling evidence to suggest that the heart’s energy field is coupled to a field of information that is not bound by the classic limits of time and space. This evidence comes from a rigorous experimental study that investigated the proposition that the body receives and processes information about a future event before the event actually happens. Even more tantalizing are indications that the heart receives intuitive information before the brain does and that the heart sends a different pattern of afferent signals to the brain, which modulates the frontal cortex. This suggests that the heart is directly coupled to a subtle energetic field of information that is entangled in and interacts with the multiplicity of energetic fields in which the body is embedded – including that of the quantum vacuum…

Just as individual incoherence leads to pathologies within the individual, group incoherence leads to social pathologies – violence, abuse, terrorism, etc. There is a feedback loop between the individuals in a group and the group’s level of coherence. When individuals are not well self-regulated or are acting only in their own best interests without regard to others, it generates social incoherence…Unfortunately, social incoherence is characterized by a lack of unity, common purpose, peace, and harmony in or among families, neighbors, or employees in workplace environments.

The Global Coherence Initiative is a science-based organization focused on examining the interactions between humans and the Earth’s energetic fields. One of the project’s hypotheses is that the Earth’s magnetic and geomagnetic fields created in the ionosphere in turn create bidirectional feed-forward and feedback loops within the collective emotional energy of humanity. More and more people are realizing that solar and universal energetic influxes are a part of a natural cycle with potential benefits to humanity. Yet people have a responsibility for their own energy and how it can be used to create deeper connections and more caring interactions with others and with the Earth itself, including all living entities.

If, as some content, all living systems are indeed interconnected and communicate with each other via biological and electromagnetic fields, it stands to reason that humans can work together in a concreative relationship to consciously increase global coherence. This can only occur when enough individuals and social groups increase their coherence baseline and utilize that increased coherence in innovative problem solving and intuitive discernment for addressing social, environmental, and economic problems. In time, global coherence will be indicated by countries adopting a more coherent planetary view. At this level of scale, social and economic oppression, warfare, cultural intolerance, crime, and disregard for the environment can be addressed meaningfully and successfully.

Strong claims. Any research to back that up?

Well, yes. But it’s called The Psychophysiology of Entrepreneural Intuition: A Quantum-Holographic Theory, and says that:

A new study shows that both the brain and the heart are involved in processing a pre-stimulus emotional response to the future event. Drawing on this research and on the principles of quantum holography, we develop a theory of intuitive perception. The theory explains how focused emotional attention directed to the object of interest (such as a potential future business opportunity) attunes the psychophysiological systems to a domain of quantum-holographical information, which contains implicit information on the object’s future potential. The body’s perception of such implicit information about the object’s future is experienced as an intuition.

In other words, entrepreneurs tap into the nonlocal holographic nature of reality in order to get hot startup tips. At this point I probably don’t need to add that the Institute of HeartMath is based in the Bay Area.

Can we get weirder? I think we can. A HeartMath press release: You Can Change Your DNA:

Many people have mistakenly believed that the DNA with which we are born is the sole determinant for who we are and will become, but scientists have understood for decades that this genetic determinism is a flawed theory.

Then they go on to bring up epigenetics, which is quickly replacing quantum mechanics as the Thing I Most Expect To Be Brought Up In Situations Like This. To reputable scientists, epigenetics means that the methylation of genes affects functions. But to HeartMath it means:

After two decades of studies, HeartMath researchers say other factors such as the appreciation and love we have for someone or the anger and anxiety we feel also influence and can alter the outcomes of each individual’s DNA blueprint…The influence or control individuals can have on their DNA – who and what they are and will become – is further illuminated in HeartMath founder Doc Childre’s theory of heart intelligence. Childre postulates that “an energetic connection or coupling of information” occurs between the DNA in cells and higher dimensional structures – the higher self or spirit.

Go on…

When we activate the power of our hearts’ commitment and intentionally have sincere feelings such as appreciation, care and love, we allow our hearts’ electrical energy to work for us. Consciously choosing a core heart feeling over a negative one means instead of the drain and damage stress causes to our bodies’ systems, we are renewed mentally, physically and emotionally. The more we do this the better we’re able to ward off stress and energy drains in the future. Heartfelt positive feelings fortify our energy systems and nourish the body at the cellular level. At HeartMath we call these emotions quantum nutrients.

There’s our quantum mechanics!

But is there proof?

Oh, yes. There is the best proof.

Modulation Of DNA Conformation By Heart-Focused Intention is a paper by McCraty (again), Atkinson, and Tomasino. The methodology is simple: the subject (in one case, Doc Childre himself) brings their heart rhythm into “coherence”, then stares at a beaker of DNA and wills it to unwind. The DNA complies. According to the paper, 10.27% of DNA willed at in this way unwound, compared to only 1.09% of control DNA (p < 0.01). Since this result is obviously too boring to even be worth mentioning, the experimenters up the ante by testing the "nonlocal" version of the effect. Instead of holding the beaker in her hands, the subject wills DNA in a laboratory half a mile away to unwind. Once again, a highly significant result (2.76% change, p < 0.01). I don't see any obvious screwups in this paper, aside from the conclusion. The skeptical Internet doesn't seem to be of much help either. I can think of a lot of potential problems - waiting different amounts of time to measure the DNA in the two samples, exposing them to different amounts of light, et cetera - but the methods section of the paper doesn't give me any particular reason to think these happened. And they go into great detail to describe their blinding procedures, all of which seem appropriate. But still. You got DNA to unwind by asking politely. From half a mile away. If this were in a peer-reviewed journal, I’d still be doubtful. If it were in a peer-reviewed journal and had been replicated five times by five different teams, I’d still be doubtful. If it were in a peer-reviewed journal and had been replicated ten times by ten different teams including several skeptics and had a strong theory behind it that was well-supported in other ways, I might grudgingly accept it. But we are not at that level. We’re at one experiment, once, not peer-reviewed. At this point, you do not get to conclude that:

The heart serves as a key access point through which information originating in the higher dimensional structures is coupled into the physical human system (including DNA), and that states of heart coherence generated through experiencing heartfelt positive emotions increase this coupling.”

Anyway, the question is: can we get even weirder than this?

Well, I dunno. What do the geomagnetic field, the inauguration of Barack Obama, and a random number generator have in common? If you answered “Nothing, as far as I know,” then yes, we can get weirder.

The Global Coherence Initiative is a project measuring how large-scale events affect some kind of feedback loop between people’s emotional rhythms and the geomagnetic field. The goal is to get so many people into heart-rhythm-coherence that it creates some kind of “global coherence” and, reading between the lines, immanentizes the eschaton.

But all that’s in the future. Right now they only have 10,000 people in 56 countries, who respond to “emergencies” by bringing their heart rhythms into coherence and sending out coherence waves in the appropriate direction. According to the site:

Even as the GCI was still gearing up in startup mode, these members, plus countless others they engaged within their families and communities, responded to several GCI alerts to send coherent energy and care to critical areas of need and crisis around the planet. These efforts of coherent heart are crucial and appreciated. Alerts went for the victims of Hurricane Gustav, conflicts in the Middle East and Democratic Republic of Congo, the financial meltdown and more.

Imagine how screwed up the Middle East would be right now if people weren’t sending coherent energy towards it!

Clearly the Global Coherence Initiative needs to up its game. That’s why they’re asking for your donations to buy $60,000 worth of giant magnetic coils. They say it’s for world peace, but honestly, when your first name is “Doc”, and you run a shadowy organization that is studying telepathic alteration of DNA, and you want $60,000 worth of magnetic coils, I start to get really suspicious.

Anyway, even without their giant coils they are doing good work. And by good work, I mean analyzing how random number generators reacted to Barack Obama’s inauguration. You or I might expect that the generators reacted randomly, but that is why we are random shmucks instead of people named “Doc” running institutes that are in the process of procuring $60,000 worth of magnetic coils. The Institute of HeartMath says the the outpouring of joy following the inauguration caused both a decrease in the variance of the random numbers produced by generators all around the world and subtle but observable fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field. They note that their partner organization, the Global Consciousness Project, says that “occasions that are meditative and celebratory are often associated with persistent low network variance,” where “networks” here tend to be things like random number generators and the geomagnetic field.

With apologies to Obama himself, that is not exactly the kind of change I can believe in.

We tend to think of alternative medicine practitioners as obvious loons with websites out of 1995 where all the words are IN CAPITAL LETTERS. But sometimes, they’re people with Ph. Ds and a bunch of papers published in prestigious journals who are able to focus on the less controversial aspects of their ideas well enough to infiltrate clinics and hospital systems.

HeartMath’s website is impeccable. Their representatives gave a presentation to a hospital full of doctors – including cardiologists and neurologists – without any missteps that made them look anything less than reputable. Their Board of Scientific Advisors contains some really serious intellectual clout like Abdullah Abdulrahman Al Abdulgader, who is both literally and figuratively a big-name cardiologist as well as leading the entire medical field in number of times the word “Abdul” appears in his name. These are top-notch people.

And then you look a little deeper and you find out that their cute little relaxation exercises are actually a plot to connect to higher dimensions beyond time and space and immanentize the eschaton by messing with Earth’s magnetic field, possibly with the help of $60,000 worth of giant coils and/or Yog-Sothoth.

Remember, these people are working with hospitals, with the military, with the police, and willing to helpfully explain how to apply for grants to bring their technology into the classroom. And they are total loons.

I think heart rate variability is an important concept. And I agree that relaxation exercises derived from yoga are a good way of helping people suffering from stress and even psychiatrically diagnosable anxiety disorders. I actually tried their Quick Coherence technique and it made me feel really good.

But I don’t think giving $3699 to HeartMath to teach you about it is a good investment, and I don’t think they are the best people to be furthering the study of these ideas.