One day my wife and I were watching our twoyear-old having fun in the playground. Suddenly she expressed concern that the little one was beginning to develop a fever. The physician in me immediately dismissed it – the symptoms simply did not add up. A few hours later, to my astonishment, he was burning with fever! Instead of snubbing me with an “I told you so,” my wife silenced me with her intuition and premonition regarding our son’s health.
What is intuition? And where does it come from? From my own experience as a mainstream doctor and therapist, as well as a layperson, I am convinced that it is the heart that is the seat of intuition, the sixth sense.
The HeartMath Institute has been researching the physiological mechanism of the heart and how it communicates with the brain and processes information, what are emotions, and how they are perceived or sensed. Among these, their landmark research is about pre-stimulus response, which is nothing but the science of intuition. In one such very interesting study, conducted by the institute, different images capable of stimulating emotions like fear, joy, grief and so on, were displayed one after the other in front of a sample group of the population, and the heart-rhythm activity, or the heart-rate variability (ECG), and the brain responses (EEG) were recorded in each case. It was observed that people were able to sense the emotion before the image was displayed. While both the heart and the brain received the pre-stimulus information about 4 to 5 seconds before being exposed to a future emotional image randomly selected by the computer, the heart actually received the information 1.5 seconds before the brain.1
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