How to make smart decisions

No matter where you are in your life right now, I bet that you are
constantly faced with more decisions than any of your ancestors.
The great thing about the modern world is the shear amount of
choices we face, but this can also be a curse. Having to choose
between a large range options doesn't make us happier. In fact,
research shows that with most things, just having a small range of
options is often enough to keep us happy, and after that we rapidly
become dissatisfied.

Why?

The answer is that we start to worry that we didn't choice the best
option. In other words: we regret.

As an example, think of how hard these days people find it to
remain in a long term marriage. People have more freedom and
options these days about who they date. In fact, the other day I
read an article about how long-distance dating is becoming more
popular. Apparently, with the rise of the Internet and cheap
flights, more people than ever end up having romantic relationships
with people in different countries. In the past this was quite
rare, today it's common.

At the back of many people's minds they think that there are,
potentially, many tens of millions of people out there who they
could date and have a successful relationship with. And, do you
know what? They are probably right! Its no wonder that many people
find it hard to commit to one person for the rest of their life
when there seem to be so many choices!

Anyway, there are all sorts of reasons why we find our range of
choices hard to deal with these days. Here are my top three tips
for coping with this:

1 Cut down on your own range of options
Let go of perfectionism, and learn to accept options which are good
enough. This doesn't mean accepting something which makes you
unhappy, but, rather, learn to stop thinking the grass is always
greener on the other side.

2 Get in the habit of being decisive
Learn to make decisions quickly for things which aren't
life-changing. For example, if I'm eating out, I always make a
point of choosing something from the menu within 60 seconds. 99% of
the time, procrastinating won't change the decision you would have
made anyway!

3 When it's simple, use your head, when its complex, use your gut
If there are a small number of factors you need to take into
account to make your decision, then think it through by listing the
pros and cons of each option. However, if there are many factors
you need to weigh up, trust your first gut instinct. The reason is
because your gut instinct is formed from your subconscious mind,
which is able to process far more bits of info at once than your
more logical conscious mind.

Interview with 'Cosmic Trends' author Philip Brown

‘Cosmic Trends’ is the new book by astrologer Philip Brown. It uses astrology to sketch out a map of the major themes and trends that are going to become prevalent in our societies in the next couple of decades. Most people only know astrology from the day-to-day horoscope predictions, but not all astrology is based on such short time periods, there are also much longer, slower cycles, and it’s these cycles that can show us big societal trends. ‘Cosmic Trends’ charts the movements of these slower cycles by looking at the movements of the outer planets: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, as well as Jupiter and Saturn (which are still pretty far out in our solar system). As these planets are much further from the sun than the Earth is, they take a longer time to move around it. Pluto, for example, is seen by astrologers as the planet of extreme power and destructive transformation. When it was making its voyage through Libra, the sign of marriage and relationships, in the 1970s, we had the rise in divorces, when it was moving through Scorpio, the sign of sex and death, in the 1980s, we had the beginning of the era of AIDS, and from the mid-90s onwards it’s been moving through Sagittarius, the sign of sports and religion, we’ve seen extreme sports and the growing power of religious extremists. Now, Pluto is poised to enter Capricorn, and a new era is about to dawn. What will this era bring?

For those who are interested in using the ancient art of astrology to catch some glimpses of our future , ‘Cosmic Trends’ is a must-read.

I spoke to Philip Brown about the issues raised by his book, and his predictions for our near future.

Darren: Thanks for giving me the opportunity to interview you. How did you become interested in using astrology to predict future trends?

Philip: Actually, my interest in trends pre-dated my interest in astrology. I’ve always wanted to understand what makes groups of people “tick.” What, for example, are the underlying causes of an upsurge of interest in spirituality, or why does particular entertainment—such as American Idol—become popular and begin to influence mass culture. I’ve always read quite widely and been intensely interested in the future. When I began to study astrology in earnest about 15 years ago, it enabled me to see connections between trends, to tie things together. I became fascinated with the symbolism of the outer planets because I discovered that their cosmic movements correlated very strongly with cultural and global trends. By understanding how past planetary cycles influenced the world, we can begin to see how the next similar cycle will influence us.

Darren: I think the first question that most people would have is: does this mean the future is pre-determined? Or, to put it another way: how much influence do we have in the way these trends play out?

Philip: We choose our own futures. I believe we have a great deal of free choice, both individually and collectively. The planets and astrology describe potentials, not pre-determined outcomes. We can look around and see the results—both positive and negative—of collective choices in the world. We are responsible for nurturing the seed of the future. The planets in astrology do not represent a fait accompli, but rather are indicative of symbolic energies which are filtered through human will. I believe that we can always make a huge difference in our own destinies. Planets are not good or bad. It all depends on how we use those energies.

Darren: If astrology can be used to predict future trends, why are big events so rarely predicted?

Philip: That is one of the big gripes against astrology—that it misses the big event predictions. I believe that events happen as a result of certain trends and so understanding the underlying connections between trends can help us to forecast directions. My book’s section on Pluto in Capricorn, a cycle which will unfold over 16 years beginning in 2008, does not forecast specific events, but rather points to certain directions and changes in national and global moods that presage events. I suggest some possibilities, but we can make collective choices which influence the future. Events are never written in stone until they are over.

The pre-eminent astrologer Robert Hand wrote an article that was published shortly before 9/11. His article was about the violent and wrenching effects we were about to experience as a result of the then-forming Saturn-Pluto opposition in 2001. Saturn symbolizes structure and one thing Pluto can symbolize is destruction. His article was prescient. Shortly after its publication, when the Saturn-Pluto opposition became exact, the World Trade Center was attacked. He never predicted that specific event, but Hand’s article accurately described the general impact that planetary alignment was about to have. Astrology, then, can be used to forecast collective conditions, but not necessarily specific events.

Darren: How do you think astrology ‘works’? Do you think its evidence of a divine power ordering the universe?

Philip: That is an excellent question to which there is no agreed-upon answer, although astrologers have been trying hard to come up with one. The latest “trend” in astrological discussion groups is to find a scientific basis for astrology or to prove its validity with empirical evidence. So far, it hasn’t happened—although that’s not to say it can’t.

I personally believe that astrology works, but why it works is another matter. For me personally, there is in astrology a strong sense of the divine, and I tend to see it as more spiritual than scientific.

There is order in the universe. The planets and stars (there’s a whole branch of astrology that looks at the fixed stars, not just the planets in our solar system) are predictable and serene. Just go out to the desert or a mountaintop at night, lay on your back and experience the cosmos. It’s beautiful. If we are connected—and this is where faith steps in—and not just isolated self-functioning sets of chemical elements, then we are connected not just to each other or to the land or to our nations, but to the cosmos. Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager has this beautiful line in Our Town where he finds poetic symmetry between the tracks of the stars and earthly train tracks. Our world is a microcosm of the larger cosmos. To quote Hermes Trimegistus: “As above, so below.” It is this numinous connection that I find most resonant when looking for an explanation of why or how astrology works.

Darren: Do you think any/many business or government leaders use astrology to predict trends or time their actions?

Philip: I don’t really know for sure, although I think they could certainly use some good astrology. I’ve heard that some movie studios use an astrologer to look at optimal film release dates.

Astrology is misunderstood because so many believe it to be just a horoscope column in the newspaper, and many business and government leaders would be loathe to admit they use astrology—even if they did. Astrology as a useful tool for government or business is much more widely accepted in India.

Darren: Do the recent discoveries of new planetary bodies, or the new category of ‘dwarf planets’ change the significance or path of future trends?

Philip: I think that Pluto’s new place in the solar system, as a dwarf planet and prototype for a new class of planets, is exciting. Discoveries in the Kuiper Belt—of which Pluto and the newly discovered Eris are a part—are symbolic of an expansion of human consciousness. I think that these new planetary bodies really give us more tools to use when we look at trends.

I included in my book a mini-chapter on Pluto’s re-classification as a dwarf planet and what that implies for astrology. One thing I mentioned is that Pluto’s new status as a dwarf planet “has not reduced its power in astrology, just as a champion tennis player’s switch to a lighter racket need not lessen the power of the player’s serve.” So far, I have not seen any change in astrologers’ use of Pluto, but I think as the general public begins to accept (and be taught in elementary school classrooms) that Pluto’s a dwarf planet, astrology may eventually reduce its strong emphasis on Pluto.

Astrologers are just beginning to come to grips with the potential applications of Eris, the planet of strife and discord. This promises to be a rich new area in astrology, given the current conditions in the world.

Also, astrologers got along very well before the discovery of the outer planets—Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and beyond. Until the late 18^th Century, Saturn was the outer limit of our solar system. A number of modern astrologers still use this more traditional form of astrology. The last chapter in my book is about the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, which was the old-fashioned predictive pattern used by astrologers before the modern telescope opened up the cosmos. The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction still works as a forecasting tool and is a very reliable way to predict trends. It indicates a shifting paradigm which happens every 20 years, presaging changes in government and social structures.

Darren: Because many countries were founded on New Year’s day, there are many countries with their sun in Capricorn, meaning that Pluto, the planet of (amongst other things) destructive regeneration, is going to be passing right over this most important part of their charts in around 5 years time. Without wishing to scare anyone, could this mean something dramatic like large scale terrorist attacks?

Philip: That’s a great question. In looking at The Book of World Horoscopes (Nicholas Campion; Aquarian Press; 1988), there are several major nations—including Indonesia, Spain, and Syria—with Capricorn founding dates. However, as with human birth horoscopes, we need to look at the total horoscope picture for a nation. The July 7, 2005, bomb attacks in London, for example, involved Mars and Neptune in the British horoscope. Most security experts predict with almost universal certainty that we will experience a large-scale terrorist attack. It’s just a matter of when.

It’s worth noting that the most commonly used U.S. birth chart (for July 4, 1776, although some use July 2) has the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter all in Cancer. Cancer is opposite Capricorn and opposites are powerfully linked in astrology. So, when Pluto goes into Capricorn, we will be feeling its transformative effects quite strongly in the U.S. up until about 2020.

Darren: Is there any evidence of any big scientific breakthroughs coming within our lifetimes? For example: human time travel, or discovering alien life?

Philip: Well, I think that scientific breakthroughs are really the result of trends. Uranus, for example, is a planet associated with technology and so, by looking at the placement of Uranus and its cycles with other outer planets, we can trace the development of modern technology right up to the cell phone, BlackBerry, and PDA. My book, Cosmic Trends, looks specifically at technology, genomics—studies involving the human genome—and robotics as three scientific trends which will result in huge changes in our personal lives.

Discovering alien life has been a distinct possibility while Pluto has been going through Sagittarius—the sign of the explorer, opening new frontiers—since 1996. Several astrologers predicted that between 1996 and 2008, we might find life on other planets. We have during this time received tantalizing hints of extra-terrestrial life on Mars and the discovery of new planets orbiting other stars. But we will probably have to wait until the 2020’s, at least—when Aquarius will come into the forefront of our lives in many ways—for any overt evidence of intelligent life in the universe. This contact with alien life would probably come to us in the form of intercepted wave transmissions and not a flying saucer landing near the Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower.

Human time travel is a different matter. When Pluto goes into Capricorn starting in 2008, we will be very influenced by the planet Saturn because Saturn rules Capricorn. Saturn has to do with time and aging. We are already seeing a more prosaic form of time travel—which will soon accelerate. Namely, aging Baby Boomers are trying to turn back the clock, travelling back in time through cosmetic surgery and attendance at Rolling Stones concerts. However, that’s not time travel in the sense that most people understand it. Again, we probably have to wait for Pluto’s entry into Aquarius in 2024 and the 2020 Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius—and possibly a strengthening of the Age of Aquarius in a century or so. Aquarius has two planetary rulers—Saturn and Uranus—and so Aquarian energy could give us the technology for time travel.

One breakthrough we are already beginning to see is related to what is called a “mutual reception” between two planets, Uranus and Neptune. Mutual reception means that they are in each other’s signs. Uranus is in Pisces and Neptune is in Aquarius, a configuration that began in 2003 and will last until 2011. Because of this mutual reception, thought control of objects is becoming a reality—thanks to technology, our understanding of the brain, and robotics. Through direct connection between the brain and a robotic device, an individual can manipulate objects. The next step will be a wireless brain hook-up.

Darren: Within the next few hundred years (and some say we’re already feeling the effects), we’ll enter the Age of Aquarius. Do you have any take on what this will mean?

Philip: Aquarius has to do with control of the airwaves, technology, the “brotherhood of Man,” equality, democracy (not as a political system but in the sense of demos, the common people), society and social relationships, independence, thought, and logic. The Aquarian Age will see an emphasis on all of these, many of which are already undergoing transformation—sometimes wrenchingly.

Aquarius is the water-bearer, bringing knowledge to a thirsty world. Esoteric teachings and age-old truths (since in a lot of ways there is nothing new under the sun) will be newly prized. We will want to use our minds to their fullest capacity.

Darren: Finally, what advice would you give people about the coming decade?

Philip: Maintain a positive attitude, but fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be an exciting ride, perhaps a little bumpy at times. Find good, constructive ways to deal with stress. Meditate, practice yoga, tai chi, or whatever calms you and helps to keep you centered. And do things that help to make a positive difference in the world.

‘Cosmic Trends’ By Philip Brown is available through all good booksellers. You can also visit Philip's website here.

Lost Mental Powers

Lost Mental Powers

The danger with writing an ebook and newsletter based on the mind powers of people in the past is that you start to look at the past with rose-coloured glasses, and maybe even start to worship the past and think that the modern world is all bad and everything has gone wrong! This is the approach that many people take who write on these subjects. However, I don’t think this way at all. I think that, overall, we have advanced a lot, and whilst it would be amazing to have a time machine and go back and visit the past, I’m sure I wouldn’t prefer to live there. Nevertheless, having said that, I do believe from my extensive research on this subject that we have genuinely lost certain powers of the mind as we have advanced our civilisation.

It’s often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. For every gain that is made in life, there is a cost. We have made many gains in the development of our civilisation and in our mental evolution, but there has almost certainly been a cost we have paid.

The central issue is that as we have created ways to automate our thinking, particularly by relying on books and computers, we have to some extent become mentally lazier, and in the process lost some of our earlier mental powers.

For example, I’ve written before about how people in the past had better memories than we do today. Over time, since the invention of writing, then the printing press, and then, more recently, the Internet, we have become more reliant on outside sources for our memories, and we spend less time and effort on cultivating our own memories. For thousands of years information was passed down the generations orally, through stories and song, so a highly trained memory was very important. The ancients could perform feats of memory that would truly astonish us today.

Equally, the ancient Indians developed techniques (described in my book) for performing complex maths in their minds so easily that even children can do it. Today we rely on our calculators and computers to perform calculations for us. However, does this hide the fact that we have hidden, extremely powerful mathematical abilities in our brains that we have forgotten how to use? There are a couple of pieces of evidence that suggest we do. Firstly, in recent years a number of researchers have discovered that the dimensions of ancient stone structures around the world show that ancient man was a sophisticated mathematician, and may have worked out not only complex astronomical maths, but measurements such as the circumference of the Earth, thousands of years before modern measuring and calculating devices. Secondly, in modern times there have been a number of cases of people – often with disorders such as autism – that can perform very complex maths in their heads, very quickly. I’m not talking about the kind of maths that a professor could do in his head either, but calculations that are so complex that for someone to do them in their heads in seconds seems almost impossible, and we have no idea how they can do it.

However, it’s not just through external aids – such as books, calculators and computers - that we’ve automated our thinking, we have also automated much of our own thinking within our own minds. Once something becomes familiar and routine to us, we can do it without giving it much conscious attention. The benefit of this is that it takes up less ‘energy’ for us to perform tasks – such as driving – and we can think about other things. However, some people see a major drawback to this as being that it makes us live our lives as though we were asleep and dreaming. The writer Colin Wilson describes it in terms of us having multiple ‘minds’ within our own head. One of them he calls ‘the robot’. This is the automatic slave we have in our mind that we teach to be able to do the tasks that are routine. While you were driving down the road and daydreaming, then suddenly remember you’re driving but have no memory of having driven the last few miles, who was doing the driving? The robot was. Over time, argues Wilson, we’ve become more and more reliant on the robot for performing tasks for us. And while this has been very useful, even essential for our mental evolution, it has a major drawback. The robot is like our personal assistant, but the trouble is that we’ve given it too much power, and its ended up running our lives for us. The main problem here is that it decides how much mental energy we need at any given moment, when it senses that theres no particular emergency, it only allows us to have a very tiny little bit of energy, because that’s all it thinks we need. That’s why when you are bored, you feel totally drained of energy. This is the root of why we are living way below our potential. We don’t, in Wilson’s words, have the ability to increase our mental pressure to lift us up to our higher potentials.

The good news is that although these skills have been lost, they can be recovered to some extent. Whilst we currently don’t know how to unleash the more astonishing powers of memory and maths that some people have demonstrated, we can re-learn these ancient arts. Equally, we can probably learn to wrestle a bit more control of our own energy levels back from the robot: by deliberately willing ourselves to pay more attention to what we are doing, or to the environment we are in, or by constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things.

Did the ancients see the same colours as us?

Did the ancients see the same colours as us?

One of the mysteries of consciousness is colour perception. For
example, science can never prove whether I experience exactly the
same thing as you when I see the colour red (for example). The
colours we can perceive are our brain's way of categorising
different frequencies of light that are within the range of our
eyes. However, if we could see a broader range of frequencies, no
doubt we could see new colours. Try to imagine that! It's very
difficult to imagine a totally new colour without just imagining a
different shade of a colour we already know. Probably the only way
we could do this is in a dream. Also, not all animals perceive as
many colours as us, some perceive more, and some only perceive
black and white, or none at all! Equally, some people are colour
blind, meaning that they are unable to distinguish between some
colours. Men are more likely than women to suffer from this, in
fact almost one in ten of the world's men (8%) are colour blind
(although men are more likely to be superior in other areas of
visual perception). It is thought that women probably evolved a
more exact ability to distinguish between different colour as
during the vast majority of our history, as hunter-gatherers, women
would have needed to be very careful about which fruits and berries
to pick, and a good ability to distinguish between different
colours is obviously of benefit in that.

However, to ask whether the ancients didn't see the same colours as
us may seem ridiculous. Yet things aren't quite as simple as they
seem when it comes to colour perception.

Whilst we may not be able to ever know whether another person
experiences the same thing as us when they look at the same colour,
to some extent we are able to investigate the subject with how
people describe colours. I'm sure you've had the experience of
calling something one colour, and someone else thinks it's another
colour. This is particularly common with colours that are similar,
such as blue and purple. Studies of the writings of the ancient
Greeks reveals that they didn't have words for pure blue or pure
yellow. Homer describes the 'blue hair of Agamemnon', when he means
black, and the 'wine red Aegean sea' when he means the blue sea.
Does this mean that the ancient Greeks saw colours differently? Or
perhaps it just means that they simply didn't have words for
particular colours, just as today some cultures have words for many
different variations of a colour that we lack in English. Yet, to
me, red is very different from blue, and black is very different
from blue. I can't see how anyone could confuse the two. And if
they simply lacked the words for blue and yellow, but could still
see them, why not invent words for them? If you can see a colour,
would you not want words to describe it?

Of course, our choice of particular words for colours defines how
we see them as separate, whereas in fact colours are not really
separate, discrete things, but points on a continuous spectrum of
light. Nevertheless, having words for a particular colour
undoubtedly draws our attention to it. An example of this is how in
the 19th Century people became aware of the colour Mauve - a form
of light purple. Surprisingly, before then this colour wasn't
recognised and we didn't have a word for it. That didn't come until
1856 when the Chemist William Henry Perkin coined the word, after
inventing an dye of this colour (called Mauveine). The colour
quickly spread as it was used in colouring clothes, and was highly
fashionable in the 1890s. It soon then became associated with
homosexuality, as a number of prominent homosexuals in the arts,
such as Oscar Wilde, took to wearing it. Interestingly, an example
of how our consciousness about colours shifts over time is that by
the 1950s Lavendar was then associated with homosexuality, and by
the 1970s, pink.

Ultimately we probably will never know for sure whether people in
the past saw colours differently, but with more research through
the historical archives we might be able to at least gain some more
insights and clues into this mysterious subject.

Video: How to improve your memory, part 1

Part two is in the post below

Video: How to improve your memory, part 2

Can your heart think and feel?

Can your heart think and store memories?

A number of years ago, Claire Silvia from Boston, USA, had a heart transplant. Pretty soon she started to experience strange things. “It was like a whole new rhythm, a whole new feeling,” she explains. And when a journalist asked her, soon after the transplant, what she now wanted most in the world, the words “I’d die for a beer right now!” suddenly popped out of her mouth, much to her embarrassment and surprise – she didn’t previously even like beer! “Little by little,” she says, “other things started happening until I was convinced I was living with the presence of another within me.” Claire not only noticed changes in her tastes, her preferences for foods and drinks, but even in her handwriting. All she knew of the person who had donated her heart was that he was a young man who died in a motorcycle accident, strict confidentiality rules mean that organ recipients aren’t allowed to know the details of their donor. Then one night she dreamed of her donor, and the name ‘Tim L’ popped into her mind. The next day she rang her transplant co-ordinator and told her about the changes she had experienced, and asked her if her donor’s name was in fact Tim L. There was silence on the other end of the phone, and then the co-ordinator said “Please don’t pursue this.”

It turned out that her donor’s name was in fact Tim Lamarand.

Throughout most of Human history people didn’t locate their thoughts and emotions within the brain. For example, the ancient Egyptians didn’t even see fit to preserve the brains of their kings and queen’s in the same way that they did with other organs when mummifying them. But while it wasn’t until recently that the brain was identified as the seat of our thoughts, emotions or soul, then where did the ancients believe was the centre of these things? The answer is the heart.

Today we laugh at the notion that our hearts could be intelligent, we see them as basic pumps. A pump doesn’t have thoughts, emotions and memories. But perhaps we don’t know as much as we think we do. For example, our modern association of thought and emotion with the brain may have gone a bit too far.

One association with the heart that we have still kept, to some extent, is that its something to do with our emotions, particularly with love – the heart remains a popular visual symbol of love. Also it’s often used as a symbol for our intuition and morals. We often use phrases like “listen to your heart.” Or “follow what your heart tells you is right.” Admittedly, most people when using these phrases are not always literally asking you to stop and try and sense how your heart feels, they are using the word ‘heart’ as a metaphor for your intuition. But could that metaphor for locating feelings and emotions in the heart actually have some reality to it?

Well, at the most basic level, we know that emotional stress can harm the heath of our hears, putting them under strain, and perhaps leading – in extreme cases – to people suffering heart attacks, as the end product of years of chronic stress. Also, the heart regulates the blood flow, and blood contains hormones and neuro-peptides which transmit emotional information. But could there be a stronger connection than this?

Amazingly, Dr Andrew Armour, a neurologist from Montreal, Canada, discovered a small but complex network of neurons in the heart, which he has dubbed ‘the little brain in the heart’. These neurons seem to be capable of both short and long term memory. Why should the heart even have neurons and the ability to remember? Well, for one thing, there is a lot of muscle co-ordination that goes on in the heart in order to allow it to function properly. The fact that hearts can even be transplanted shows that there is a long-term memory stored in the heart for its rhythms. When a heart is removed, it is cooled and can stay alive for up to four hours. Once the heart is connected into its new recipient, as blood enters it, it begins to beat again. It is almost certainly the ‘little brain in the heart’ that is enabling the heart to remember how to beat.

Furthermore, there is a lot of communication that occurs between the heart and the brain. There are 40,000 neurons in the heart which communicate with the brain. Hormones from the heart travel in our bloodstream. Every time the heart beats, it creates both pulse waves of pressure, and of electromagnetic energy which travel through the body and to the brain. Amazingly, the heart generates a magnetic field 5000 times more powerful than that of the brain. It can be measured six feet away from the body. It almost certainly extends further, but this is the limit of our current sensing equipment.

We all too often forget that the brain is just the most complex end of a whole nervous system which extends throughout our body. For example, the nerves in our hands are in almost constant communication with our brains, a fact that leads some to believe that the ancient art of palm-reading may have some validity: if the nerves on our hands are constantly communicating back and forth with our brains, then its not an unreasonable stretch of the imagination to wonder if our personalities could imprint themselves on the lines of the skin of our palms. Similarly, our hearts are also in constant communication with our brains. Could a similar effect be occurring with the heart? Could the 10-15% of heart donation recipients who – like Claire Silvia – experience changes in their tastes, personalities and memories be picking up on information on the heart’s original owner that was stored in the heart itself?

Gary Schwartz, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale university believes so. He has developed a theory that could explain how the heart learns and remembers. Schwartz points out that all that is required for a system to be able to learn is that it has dynamic feedback: the outputs feed back to the inputs. Any such system that has feedback can learn. As the brain and the heart have feedback – both through neurons and through the bloodstream – the heart can in theory learn. Schwartz, in collaboration with Professor Paul Pearsall, a cardioneurologist from the University of Honalulu (and author of ‘The heart’s code’), collected a number of case studies of heart donation recipients who have experienced these unusual changes. Among them is the case of a 47 year old white man who received the heart of a young black man. Whilst the 47 year old was not racist, he did have a number of underlying assumptions about what kinds of tastes a young black man would have. He joked that if his tastes had changed, perhaps he would now start to like rap music! But what actually happened was the man became obsessed with classical music, and would listen to it over and over. It turned out that the young black man had in fact been a classical violin player. Another heart recipient suddenly became obsessed with competitive cycling and swimming, and began training for, and eventually winning competitions at these sports. One year later he discovered his donor had been an athletic Hollywood stuntman.

Whilst there are a number of scientists and doctors who are now convinced that these types of stories could point to the reality of ‘heart memories’, there are many who also remain sceptical. They argue that there are alternative explanations.

One explanation that’s been put forward for these strange experiences is that the drugs that the person has to take so that their immune system doesn’t reject their new transplanted heart (immunosuppressants) are causing some kind of psychological effect that makes a person believe they are accessing memories from the organ, particularly as even having a deceased person’s heart in your body might play on your imagination. However, while this explanation would account for having some kind of psychological effect, it doesn’t account for the accuracy of the information that such heart recipients have come out with. This accuracy is all the more impressive considering that hospitals maintain a policy of not telling the recipient or their family any of the personal details of who their donor was.

Another theory is that the patient manages to pick up enough information from the medical staff around them to piece together – perhaps even subconsciously – some basic details of their donor. It may even be that conversations that doctors and nurses have while the patient is anesthetized are somehow being absorbed by their mind, below the level of conscious awareness. This is certainly plausible, yet in most of the documented cases it’s been confirmed that the surgical team had not discussed patient details whilst performing the operation, and indeed it would be highly unusual for such a discussion to take place.

There may be many orders of magnitude far fewer neurons in the heart than the brain, but many simple animals such as insects can display intelligent behaviour and memory with a relatively small number of neurons. So perhaps this is also true of our hearts? Ironically, the kind of feedback that Dr Swartz says is present between the heart and brain and is responsible for heart-memories is the very thing that’s currently lacking in the scientific world on this issue, and is holding back our understanding of it. We need feedback from all heart donor cases, we need much more study on this area in order to finally understand whether hearts can remember. Simply ignoring this possibility will block us from ever understanding it.

And if it turns out that our hearts can remember, I think many more people would find comfort in knowing that a part of their dead relative’s personality was living on in the recipient. Some may even chose to meet the recipient and place their hand on their chest to once again feel the heart-beat of the person they loved. It may also encourage more people to carry a heart donor card.

Scientific theory of astrology

An interesting theory from Terence Guardino:



And heres part two: