This is interesting. Emotional trauma can result in cardiomyopathy, aka broken-heart syndrome, and is physiologically similar to a heart attack.
It’s especially interesting to me right now because I’m reading Emotional Intelligence and Goleman writes at length about the various physiological effects of peoples’ negative emotions. He cites study after study on such topics as the effects of anger on the heart, optimism and pessimism and how one’s tendency to be one or the other is a better prognosticator of recovey (for example from cancer or a major medical procedure) than a person’s physical condition, and hope and its affects on recovey as well. And it seems like this should be common knowledge, but you can’t base medical or scientific treatments on ‘common knowledge’.
I picked this book up after reading The Gift of Fear in which Gavin de Becker recommends we listen to our intuitions. Because our brains and our bodies are primed to survive — whether we are cognitive or not of what our impulses are or how our intuition makes us feel, there’s probably a good reason for it. He also cites example after example, sometimes chilling and sometimes simply creepy, of cases he’s worked on in which peoples’ intuitions accurately warned them of impending danger.
De Becker cites Emotional Intelligence several times and the first section of EI is the most interesting to me because it essentially explains the mechanics of the brain and how it generates an intuitive sense (or a ‘gut feeling’ if you prefer). The most interesting tidbit from that section is this: signals from our sensory organs get sent to the thalamus which then sends them on to the neocortex of our brains which processes those signals into something we understand. But, there is a shorter, single synaptic neuronal pathway between the thalamus and the amygdala, a primitive center of emotions, which allows the amygdala to receive a smaller subset of the signals sent to the neocortex and allows it to immediately process and generate an emotional response (when significant) *before* we fully understand what it is we’re experiencing or seeing, or why we feel the way we do. A telling example cited in the book is about a young man who sees a woman standing at the edge of the water looking down with a distressed look on her face, and before he knew what he was doing, he’d jumped into the water to save a child who’d fallen in.
Our brains are endlessly interesting little things. So are our hearts. Today’s Nature, along with the article about cardiomyopathy, also has an article about the regenerative ability of certain heart cells and how this could potentially help patients with heart attacks.
