The Heart

Of course we all know the importance of the heart, but in a way this obscures how incredible the heart is. The heartbeat, a naturally produced, electrically induced contraction and expansion, pumps nutrient-rich blood through the body. And it does so in what seems to be a remarkably regular way. About 85,000 beats a day. About one heartbeat every second.

And yet, and yet… there is another dimension to the heart that is so fascinating: when you look really closely at the rhythms of the heart, it turns out that hearts don’t beat with the reliable precision of a clock, and that’s a good thing! This rhythmic complexity to heartbeats, it turns out, is an expression of the central role the heart plays in regulating the ways in which we feel based upon how we sense our changing, dynamic world with our hearts. In other words, our heart plays a central role in shaping our perceptions of the world.

Really, our hearts. Increases in our heart rate and a shrinking in the variability between our heartbeats regulates our bodies as we transition between sympathetic and parasympathetic states throughout our waking hours. These states are also known as the rest and digest instinct and the fight or flight instinct. The parasympathetic nervous system is characterized by resting, recuperating, creating, eating, and breeding, the sympathetic state characterized by stress, conflict, evasion, and confrontation.

Heart rate variability, or the variation in time between heartbeats, offers insight into our daily oscillations between sympathetic and parasympathetic states. Today, many people report struggling to “turn off.” Not being able to turn off sometimes means the heart gets stuck in a sympathetic state. This has all kinds of implications for health, digestion, sleep, brain functioning, and productivity, not to mention relationships, politics, social and psychic transformation, cognition, disagreeability, and emotional dysregulation.

These feelings both start in and are expressed by the heart. It turns out the heart’s rhythms reflect our feelings in a way that can be measured and tracked.  Turns out the biosignals from the heart provide remarkable insights into the interior of human experience and feeling. Turns out, in a way, that much of the interior of consciousness is expressed outwardly in the physiological rhythms of the heart.

I’m really excited about this possibility, but also hesitant.

I want to observe, measure, and map the emotional rhythms of the heart. I think understanding these rhythms, and human emotions, cognition, experience, and their relation to AI, will be central to solving all sorts of social, economic, and computing challenges. I think better understanding emotions can also greatly contribute to our understanding of mental illness and emotional health.

The problem is that because emotions are co-constitutive of cognition and experience, they are also a vulnerability. Emotions help us manage the complexity of life. They help us humans reduce the chaos of life and experience into a coherent reality, a field, within which intervention and action take place. The allure of manipulating feelings and emotions to modify behaviour has long tempted scientists, advertisers, politicians, and others.

The temptation will only increase because both the digital and material worlds around us are already embedded with sensors for interpreting faces, voices, gaits, eyes, texts, and all sorts of biorhythms. The way things are developing, in the near future we should expect our online and offline experiences will integrate and reflect our emotional states. In ten years the internet will be emotionally intelligent. In ten years, emotionally attuned artificial intelligence will be integrated into our homes, workplaces, schools, universities, and public spaces, not to mention all the smart devices that extend our bodies.

We’re only scratching the surface when it comes to computational approaches to measuring, tracking, and mapping human emotions and feelings. Somehow, though, we are also already way behind on the ethics and bias in the AI. The heart deserves better.