We received through Ask the Counselor the following interesting and valuable question:

I am always confused whenever I read about 'thinking' and 'feeling' with reference to mind and heart. Will you please differentiate between the two?

The answer to that question is available in the Ask the Counselor Q&A in the Intelligent Guidance service. After posting that answer, we received an intriguing followup question:

In Western psychology, it is said that emotions are triggered from emotional brain (and not from the heart!). I was wondering whether our emotions are triggered from the brain centres rather than from the heart. Also, when the Quran mentions, "Lahum quloobun laa yafqahoona biha..." (…hearts with which they understand not) – what does this imply? Do we think with our heart or it is just "metaphorical"?

We decided to answer these two additional questions as an article in order to explore the issues more in-depth. Those who are members of the Intelligent Guidance service and would like to read the answer to the original question, please see http://salaamhearts.com/member/guidance/ask_answer.php?ask=40

Now let’s explore the issue of whether emotions are triggered from the brain or heart and whether "understanding with the heart" is solely metaphorical.

Conventionally it’s been thought that emotions are generated by the brain and as such were, axiomatically, mental expressions that had their physiological effects within the body, felt as happiness, sadness, confidence, anger, and so on. Research over the last decade has shown that emotional experience proceeds from the function of brain and heart in coordination with the body’s complex physiology. Moreover, the heart is now more and more understood as significant not only in terms of the experience of emotion, but also as an independent processor with an elaborate circuitry involving neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins, and support cells analogous to those in the brain. Such a network fits the heart to work independently of the cranial brain, functionally involved in the processes of learning, remembering, sensing, and feeling.

Even consciousness is now being shown to involve more than the cranial brain, with research in neurocardiology providing some fascinating perspectives on the interaction of brain and heart. According to Dr. Mohamed Omar Salem, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at United Arab Emirates University, "It has long been thought that conscious awareness originates in the brain alone. Recent scientific studies suggest that consciousness emerges from the brain and body acting together…a growing body of evidence now suggests that the heart plays a particularly significant role in this process. The above findings indicate that, the heart is far more than a simple pump. In fact, it is seen now as a highly complex, self-organizing information processing centre with its own functional 'brain' that communicates with, and influences, the cranial brain via the nervous system, hormonal system and other pathways."

When we speak about the heart as the center of emotions and as the seat of intelligence, traditionally it’s been understood that that we were speaking metaphorically, as in the Quranic verse "…hearts with which they understand not" (Quran 7:179). In fact, as mentioned above, it turns out that the heart is literally a "heart brain" and that the heart and the cranial brain are constantly exchanging information. According to recent studies, the heart sends more information to the brain than vice versa.


Purifying the heart allows for an understanding of moral and spiritual imperatives, as per the verse above, but it also makes sense in terms of health and physical well being. Negative emotions such as frustration or anger create erratic heart rhythms, increase stress hormone levels, constrict blood vessels, raise blood pressure, and weaken the immune system; while positive emotions such as love, gratitude, and compassion create a heart rhythm pattern that has been likened to "gently rolling hills." Purifying the heart sounds like a pretty smart thing to do!

In the interaction of brain and heart, we begin to conceive of the heart’s function as not just metaphorical but literal, as it plays its central role as a generator and processor, in its own right, of emotion and cognition. Two of the most popular and effective types of counseling/therapy used to help a client address issues such as anxiety, depression, phobias, and so on, are cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). These therapy approaches propose that it is the belief we hold about an event rather than the event itself that causes us to become depressed, anxious, angry, and so on. For example, a child misbehaves because of some normal factor such as fatigue or childish selfishness, but the parent thinks "How dare he behave that way in front of me, his father!" — and the father’s upsetness impels him to scream at the child and spank him. However, it was not the child’s behavior that caused the upsetness but the father’s belief about the behavior and what he thinks should be considered proper respect for a father.

What is interesting and relevant to our discussion is that studies have been done using CBT and REBT to examine the most effective techniques or mechanisms of change. Studies have shown that keeping thought records to observe and challenge automatic negative, irrational or fallacious thoughts/beliefs is very effective in providing an individual with greater clarity, to better put things in perspective, to logically examine such a thought and assess the evidence for or against its validity. Yet much greater success was attained when those individuals also engaged in "behavior experiments" — an experiment designed to provide an individual with an experience in real life to test out whether a particular thought or belief is valid or true.

For example, a person who believes and has persistent fearful thoughts that if she speaks up in class, everyone will judge her as being stupid. The "experiment" is designed, undertaken, and then the individual evaluates the result. In the case of a female college student who hesitates to participate in class, she and the counselor might design the experiment to be one instance during her next class session when she will volunteer to answer a question — even if it be a very brief answer like a "yes" or a "no" — asked by the teacher. Upon evaluation of the experience, she might determine that "none of the students even looked at me; it was like the flow of the class just continued without break…I didn’t get the expected ‘some kind of disaster.’ It felt great!" In these studies, the behavior experiments extended the change-producing experience from being primarily intellectual, in the head to a deeper level, sense-felt, more globally convincing. The behavior experiment involved not just the intellect but also feelings and gut-level experience of greater confidence or that "something just felt right." This is a moving beyond the solely rational, such as the student saying to herself "don’t be silly, of course you’re not stupid" and knowing intellectually that the other students will not perceive her as stupid. But that rationality doesn’t shift her physical and emotional experience of doubt and lack of confidence.

Similarly, when an individual practices feeling gratitude or appreciation for the good things in his/her life in order to self-generate a regular and healthy heart rhythm (referred to as heart rhythm coherence), they are instructed to recall a past positive memory that elicits warm, pleasant feelings. Over time and with practice, most are able to self-generate feelings of gratitude or appreciation without reference to the originative memory. Note that we said above that the memory must elicit a feeling that is warm and pleasant — that is the mainspring. Dr. Rollin McCraty, director of research for the Institute of HeartMath, says, "It’s important to emphasize that it is not a mental image of a memory that creates a shift in our heart rhythm, but rather the emotions associated with the memory. Mental images alone usually do not produce the same significant results that we’ve observed when someone focuses on a positive feeling."



What we are getting at here is that the common sense approach to understanding ourselves as thinking, feeling beings obligates us to see both brain and heart as essential. In reality, thought and feeling are both involved in everything we say and do.

Neither, alone, can comprehend the fullest reality or use all the human faculties for sensing, learning, remembering, reasoning, and caring — to understand, to wisely discern, to take the best possible action in any situation.

Part two of this article is available in the Intelligent Guidance service.