Cutting-Edge Science

Last week's posting created a small but humourous thread on Facebook. I found myself in a conversation with strangers who felt what I was writing about was either religious nonsense or primitive science, as well as some sympathetic friends who were far more open to the ideas I was framing.

Faced with the assertion that the heart 'has NO cognitive functioning of any kind. It doesn't "feel," it doesn't control our emotions, and nor does it have anything at all to do with intuition. Such thinking has its roots 3,000 years ago with the early Greeks - who were WRONG.' , I wrote:

Science is a method of investigation. It is a constantly evolving body of knowledge. Most scientific findings are simply refutations of previous scientific findings. When I was a kid the atom was the smallest known particle. That's not the case anymore.

The scientific discovery that the heart is NOT just muscle tissue has opened up a whole new understanding of it. Similar findings have also caused scientists to re-think the stomach...ever hear of a gut reaction? There is now a scientific explanation for it.

Science is not a monolithic body of knowledge. Scientists disagree all the time on 'the truth' which is what makes the phrase "scientifically proven" so laughable.

When I wrote that these things have been observed and verified, someone wrote: 'By WHOM? WHEN? WHERE? By what means? Show me ONE peer reviewed source that says so.'

So I posted links to images of the ganglia of the heart and a synopsis of a monograph from the emerging field of neurocardiology:

Groundbreaking research in the field of neurocardiology has established that the heart is a sensory organ and a sophisticated information encoding and processing center, with an extensive intrinsic nervous system sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a "heart brain."

I followed up with:

This is cutting-edge stuff so I am not surprised when people dispute these findings. In twenty years' time it will probably be widely accepted...or rendered obsolete by other cutting-edge science. The resistance to possible evidence that things just might not be what they seem is completely understandable.

What I am asking you to consider is paradigm-shattering. It calls into question the very foundations of our belief and knowledge. It suggests we are infintely more complex beings than the present paradigm supports. We are greater than the sum of our parts.

It also asks us to embrace that there is still so much mystery in the universe.