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Heart vs. Brain: Who Really Runs the Show?
14 Plays1 month ago
Episode 4 of Neuroblast debunks the myth that emotions come from the heart, highlighting the brain’s role in generating both thoughts and feelings. Athena and Tracey explain how brain chemicals, sensory perception, and memory shape emotions, offering insights into emotional intelligence, decision-making, and the brain’s remarkable power.
Original music by: Julian Starr
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Transcript
Introduction to Nerve As Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Neuroblast! ... ... ... ... The podcast where we debunk brain myths and get to the heart of the matter. Well, more like the brain of the matter.
Hosts Introduction and Background
00:00:27
Speaker
I am Athena Stevens, and apparently I know the brain because I have one. And I'm Tracey de Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa Pinosa, an international educational consultant, and I teach a course at Harvard University called The Neuroscience of Learning.
Who Controls: Heart or Brain?
00:00:41
Speaker
today we are looking at heart versus brain who really runs the show and golly gee Tracy do i feel like i have this debate going on inside of me. i feel like We're told there are two types of people, those who think and those who feel. What's going on? Well, we all think and we all feel. But what's so fascinating is that your brain is controlling all of that. But it hasn't always been like that, you know, historically, you get all of these, ah even working into our culture, you know, do things with a cool head, make decisions with a cool head or don't be, you know,
00:01:25
Speaker
dragged around by your heart or or or or the opposite, follow your heart to do things.
Emotion and Cognition: An Inseparable Duo
00:01:30
Speaker
Whereas what's really happening is that there is no cognition without emotion. And so emotion is driving a lot of this, but it's all processed in the brain. And that's something that most people don't really understand and it is important because it can in the end if you understand how it works you're able to control or take maybe not let yourself be carried away by emotions when it comes down to making those hard decisions and so it's it's um something that's been around for you know thousands of years this is not something that you know you and I are just making up right now but people throughout history have wondered
00:02:07
Speaker
where, you know, the essence of people was. Was it in your heart? Was it in your lungs? Was it in your blood? Was it in your brain? And there's been this debate, continual debate about this. um But now with modern technology, we're quite clear that really your brain is running the show. Okay, so hang on. That is an awful lot to fit in a love
00:02:29
Speaker
song Let's start there. I don't think, you know, Bob Dylan can make that work. But are we talking about, first of all, where is the essence of but who we are versus the mechanics of running the show? Let's get into that before we get in into the actual myth of of myth busting
00:02:58
Speaker
Well, if you go back, way back in history, if you look ah to the Egyptians and then to the Greeks, there was always this big discussion or or wondering of, you know, where where is the soul?
Historical and Modern Perspectives on Brain and Soul
00:03:09
Speaker
where And there's a beautiful rendition back when you start to hit into the 1500s and the Renaissance man and trying to figure out um there's a beautiful book called Soul Made Flesh which was this aha moment in Europe when all of a sudden they realized that the brain was actually, if we had a soul, you know, then we should be focusing and in that area. And so it's it's taken thousands of years to sort of understand what's going
Understanding Emotions and Feelings
00:03:40
Speaker
on. Of course, you don't live if you don't have your heart because you're not pumping blood, but that's going to your brain so that your brain can actually process your outside world, perceive the world, process that and understand what
00:03:53
Speaker
It means for you know past and prior experiences and how your emotions are triggered by contact with your world. um That's really you know a very recent thing. And understanding that emotions are different from feelings. Emotions are purely chemical. That's the brain deciding what chemicals to release, right? Whereas feelings are your psychological interpretation of that. And so all of that is very, very recent. I mean, recent in humanities terms. So maybe 50, 60 years where we begin to really understand the processes of emotional structures within the brain and body. So what do we know? Because we talk about our heart going thump thump thump We talk about butterflies in our stomach. When we see someone, I don't know about that because I feel like you get butterflies in your stomach when you see a serial killer as well.
Embodied Cognition and Physical Sensations
00:04:48
Speaker
Talk about
00:04:50
Speaker
what's being released by whom, what's being received, and how, is it how the brain interprets this versus the mind or what's going on here? Yeah, it's a real combination of all of those things and this big mind-body connection. Perhaps the, probably the best researcher in this field right now is Mary HelenImmordino Yang and she's um she's at USC and she ah Her mentor was Antonio Damasio. And Antonio Damasio wrote the first books related to this understanding of the Descartes and understanding how feelings and emotions are different and the feeling of what happens. um He wrote a lot of on this topic because as a neuroscientist, he was seeing how different events happen. So basically, you're in the world, your body's in the world, and you perceive through all of your senses, you take in information.
00:05:47
Speaker
And based on how you're perceiving that information, your brain reacts to the outside stimulus. right and so And it releases, because of that, different types of of hormones. So you have chemicals in your brains. You either have neurotransmitters or hormones. Those are both chemical structures in the brain. ah Things like you know dopamine and and feeling elated. Or you have cortisol, which is a stress ah very well-known stress hormone. Or oxytocin when you are feeling connected to other people. so different neurochemical combinations are what we then
Emotional Intelligence in Early Development
00:06:22
Speaker
interpret as the feelings of things. So those emotional triggers, um we sort of rehearsed this and this is why emotional intelligence is pretty much, um we hope it's well developed in humans typically early on in your life, maybe before you're eight years old, you're able to to do things
00:06:40
Speaker
um like label emotions that's one of the first things in emotional intelligence you can talk to a three-year-old and you can say okay i understand you're feeling angry so we label what that feeling must be right and then you give cause and effect because you know tommy took your ball or something like that right so what triggered this thing that's going on inside of you this will be labeled. We're going to call this now anger or whatever. And so what Mary Helen has been doing is absolutely fascinating is she's looking at how your brain, you said you get butterflies in your stomach, right? Or you get the lump in your throat or your knees feel wobbly or things, you know, happen in your body. What she's finding out in the brain is
00:07:23
Speaker
really, when you saw it when you've got like, a you broke up with your boyfriend and you have this sick feeling going on, she says this area of your brain for vomiting is actually really involved. So the physical sensation that's triggering this emotional response and your interpretation of the feeling is embodied cognition it is your body and your brain working together to give you that sensation and so um It's a combination of things right number one you perceive your world number two there's chemical reactions and then three is this interpretation that we give it and we label it as that you know feeling that's ignored or experiencing
00:08:04
Speaker
So basically, by
The Chemistry of Love and Cultural Views
00:08:05
Speaker
time this is released. Valentine's Day will be coming up quick. Boys, if you want to catch in my heart, write me a recipe card. of the different neurotransmitters and different proportions that you can activate.
00:08:26
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that that's it and it's it's also kind of unique, you know, there's some things that make people feel attached to other people that um have no effect on other others as well, right? And even we say very generically, love is, is as a sense you know, we what is this emotion? What is this feeling? You can say love.
00:08:45
Speaker
but In other cultures, you know, the language is is really different. You can, you know, oh, I love that chocolate cake and I love my cat and I love my boyfriend. You would use different verbs, actually. And so there's there's different combinations of neurotransmitters also involved in you know, between lust versus love or affection or yeah there's different combinations there. So it's not all the same thing. And it's also based on an individual's experience with those contexts and what they decide to label, for example, love or hate or whatever.
Brain-Body Communication: A Two-Way Street
00:09:20
Speaker
So it sounds to me like what I'm hearing is the brain and some of the chemicals that speed up the heart when you're excited.
00:09:31
Speaker
So we're not feeling with our heart. We're not even loving with our heart. Our brain is modulating our heart. Exactly. What about other organs?
00:09:45
Speaker
the brain modulates everything else as well and based on these neurochemical exchanges this is when you'll get the signals from the brain will tell no as you were saying your heart is going to beat faster pump more because you need to get more oxygen or whatever or you'll release different types of bile and related to different other organs in your body you know to get your adrenaline up to be able to to run or you know things like that. So your brain is sending chemical messengers to all of the parts of your body and to all of the other organs as well as your brain. I mean, your brain is in control of the other organs, but it's it's a two-way street, right? What's perceived. This is why there's a lot of talk these days about um you know mean your microbiome and what you eat and how that affects how you can think and all the rest of it. So it's a two-way street. What you're putting into your stomach
00:10:36
Speaker
changes the chemical balance in your stomach, which sends messages back to your your brain, which your brain says, okay, now what am I going to do with this? And it sends additional messages. So there's always this communication between the different organs. So I can feel it in my gut.
00:10:50
Speaker
might actually have more of a reality than he made my heart go boom. Exactly. Well, both of them are true. Both of them can be true. So what about memory and perception? There's no cognition without attention. It's something that I've heard you say a lot over the past few months.
00:11:15
Speaker
But what about the subject in memory in this heart with his brain? Yeah, when you perceive your world um ah At a lot of levels when we say your brain is paying attention. It's not necessarily at a conscious level, right? You're you're perceiving the world and taking in information sometimes you're not even conscious of all the things that you're taking in, right? And so your brain is always paying attention. But what's so interesting is when you have the sensory perception and the signals go, come in through your senses and they go through the base of your brain, really the first place that signal is stopping is in memory hubs in your brain.
00:11:53
Speaker
So basically, and this is pretty efficient, it's to try to see, do I already know something about the things, the new things that I'm perceiving so that I can use less energy? So the brain is always trying to conserve energy. be So it basically thinks to itself, if I already know something about this, I'll just use what I already know. So it stops in these memory hubs. And literally, one of the fastest, quickest stops is through the amygdala, not where memories ah emotional memories are, but where they are initially processed, right? And within less than a split second, it goes frontal lobe returns to the hippocampus, and it confirms those things. So you're looking at both, both types of different types of memory, emotional triggers of memory, but also, you know, conscious memories that you might have.
00:12:37
Speaker
but your brain is trying to figure out, do I know anything about what's going on already? So I can save energy and just use what I already know. This is why you can't have any cognition without emotion because literally the first stop in your brain that these signals, these sensory signals are are doing is checking in with memory, with emotional memory and with conscious memory to understand, um do I already have some understanding of the situation?
Fear vs. Complex Emotions: A Neural Comparison
00:13:00
Speaker
I think that's really important because it feels like so often in this world and we're told to cut emotion out or ignore emotion and particularly your definition right there of the amygdala we are apt to call it the fear center of the brain but it processing so much more than fear. Exactly and the in the perception which is so interesting it's just a it's a very
00:13:33
Speaker
Maybe initially you'd look at it as kind of a survival mechanism because the very first thing you want to do is know, do I need to be fearful of what's coming? Because you can take your time about falling in love, but you can't take your time about reacting to something dangerous, which is why people make quick decisions based on fear faster than on on um more complex emotions, right? I don't know. I know a lot of 18-year-olds that fell in love really fast.
00:14:00
Speaker
That's it just But you're also you know the thing is that the emotional states of things can range as you say it's not just fear but that is definitely what's so interesting in the brain fear is a really short neural network it's a really quick and direct you know neural network whereas other more complex emotions like empathy are much more elaborate in the brain and they're harder to track and harder to stimulate because they depend a lot on on an individual's prior memories and and context of things, whereas fear is you know kind of the survival mode kind of a thing. It's a very short neural circuit and and so it's very easy to trigger fear as opposed to more complex emotions as well. So
00:14:48
Speaker
When we feel torn between the head and the heart, we're really just working through what is a difficult brain decision.
The Brain in Decision-Making and Emotional Control
00:15:00
Speaker
That's exactly right. And you might feel the initial pull these you know These neurotransmitters or or these hormones might be, as you're saying, somebody falls in love and they they'll do silly things. People do crazy things for love, right? They react and maybe without thinking because they're driven um towards towards that chemical is telling them do one thing. But that entire processing, what's so fascinating about it, it it is all really cognition. There is cognition in all of that as well. and so
00:15:32
Speaker
Thinking through how you act, um that's part of the the problem is rehearsing hard situations so that when you come up against something difficult, you have enough tools in your toolbox to actually say, okay, I know how to cope with this emotional state or whatever, in order to you know get to a place or a better place where you're able to make better decisions about things. So you can initially feel that you should immediately react to the emotional states you find yourself in. um But if you understand what's going on, that shot of whatever balance of you know neurotransmitters is giving you that impetus. If you understand how that works, you can also do things to counteract that. I don't know if before you went on stage, if you ever did a lot of maybe deep breathing. But what's so interesting is that's giving oxygen. That's putting more oxygen to your bloodstream, which is also reducing this balance. So you're not feeling like running
00:16:26
Speaker
away from from a fearful situation, but you're you're more in control of things. If you understand how those neurochemicals work, there's a little bit more control involved there.
00:16:37
Speaker
Step one, though, is definitely recognizing that emotions are part of cognition.
Managing Emotions through Mindfulness
00:16:45
Speaker
Exactly. And then understanding that you can't evade them because they are part of the human condition. And then step two is understanding how that works in a physiological sense.
00:17:01
Speaker
that emotions are inevitable. It's triggered by your brain's reaction to its environment. And that's going to be a chemical release of something. But the big super power tool here is that feelings are your psychological reaction, your habituated way of reacting to that emotional state. So you can learn, you may you will not change your emotions, but you can change your feelings.
00:17:29
Speaker
And you can manage the the feelings, your reaction to things in the world. And that's a really powerful thing. And especially when you tell, um you know, younger kids, you know, I i understand, you know, oof that emotion is making you feel like you want to, you know, fight that kid or do something, you know, just lash out. That's, that's natural. And that's okay. Now let's use your psychology. Let's use your mind to decide how you're going to do things. So,
00:17:59
Speaker
Basically say, you know, I understand you're feeling angry because Tommy took your ball away. Now, what do you want to do about that? And that means you're not slave to the emotional state. You can actually have a different feeling or reaction to that.
00:18:14
Speaker
And then with that analysis, you can start to really understand the situation. You can. And I've seen actually little kids do this, which is really funny, literally. You know, I understand you're angry because, you know, she took the scissors away from you when you were in the middle of cutting something. What do you want to do about that? And the kid will say, he'll think a little bit and he'll say,
00:18:42
Speaker
Well, I just feel sorry for her that she doesn't and have good manners and hasn't learned how to ask me nicely, because I would be her friend if she did. But now I'm not her friend. So basically, you you have kids that take if they take a little bit of time to decide to understand They don't have to react the way their emotional state is making them feel, that their body wants to clench in a fist and you know do something else, that they can do something else if they just ah take a second there to to understand what has happened.
Practicing Emotional Intelligence
00:19:14
Speaker
It's fascinating. yeah And it is something that most people learn to do. something you know Most humans learn to have good emotional control around the age of eight or nine.
00:19:23
Speaker
Some adults never get it. I mean, it's it's not that it's a natural state of evolution. You have to always rehearse these things, right? It's not an easy thing to do to control your emotions and to actually have good emotional intelligence. That is something that's really, really difficult and hard to practice.
Conclusion: Biological Emotions vs. Controllable Feelings
00:19:41
Speaker
OK, you all. I think a big thing that I'm going to take away from this is emotions.
00:19:48
Speaker
are a biological reaction that I can't change and fight against. Feelings on the other hand and what I do with those emotions, I do have contorl over. of it. Exactly. And that's powerful. That's really powerful to understand because it gives you permission, you know, to have that emotional state, to have that, you know, rumbly stomach or not in your throat and all that other stuff. But then when you understand what's going on there, then you can choose what to do with it. And that is the feeling of what happens. And that's pretty amazing.
00:20:26
Speaker
Awesome. All right, y'all. Thank you for joining us on Neuroblast Keep following your brain, because when you follow your brain, you're also following your heart. We'll see you next time. Thanks a lot.