LCFC#5: How my heart keeps time

Plus: The mind menders who help people with heart problems

My dad often says perception is reality. Now there’s evidence that the heart might play a role in generating those perceptions, at least at the millisecond level.

A fascinating new body-brain research paper, which the New York Times covered here, shows heartbeats can drive distortions in time. The longer the heartbeat interval, the longer a millisecond audio tone seemed to last to undergraduate students at Cornell University. Shorter heartbeat interval, shorter perceived tone, the researchers found.

This study is yet another example of an inextricable link between body and brain and dovetails nicely with the post I wrote last time about how raising mice’s heart rates made the animals seem anxious. (You can read the Science News version of the story, written by author Bethany Brookshire, here.)

As the New York Times story points out, understanding the physical system that underpins our perception of time could offer insights into trauma and how to treat it.

It’s not clear how exactly that would work, but scientists and psychologists acknowledge that we can’t fully comprehend how we think without taking into account something as seemingly simple as our heartbeat.

I can attest that distressingly fast heartbeats can be seared into the mind for a long time. When my heart would race with little warning, time seemed to fly, yet subconsciously I gave those moments my full attention. I still remember every detail after my heart rate hit 180 while lying on a beach in Miami a little more than a year ago. I curled into the fetal position, waiting for a shock. I floundered for more than an hour before we called 911; still that span of time seemed like minutes.

There was the whirring of an ambulance. Burly men hauling me onto a stretcher. Confinement in a noisy medical box on wheels. Calming words. Scissors on my swimsuit. Sticky pads on my chest and side. A cool IV infusion into my arm. 

Then … “I really don’t want to do this, sweetie. I’m so sorry.”

Zzzzzzzzzzzap.

Joules of electricity raced through my cells, along with an indescribable searing sensation. My body contorted, and I screamed in pain.

“AHHHHH. Please don’t f*cking do that again!”

“It’s ok,” the EMT said as soothingly as he could. “We got it. We don’t need to do it again. We got it.”

My heart was beating in a regular rhythm. Tense muscles relaxed. The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air. I closed my eyes, but couldn’t cry. I wouldn’t allow it.

That memory and all the others that flood my mind when I think of the word shock aren’t as psychologically crippling as they used to be. There was a time when I couldn’t go up a single flight of stairs because I had gotten shocked at the top of a staircase once and was certain it’d happen again. I wouldn’t put electric collars on my sister’s dogs because of the fear of a zap. And the whirring of ambulance sirens still trip me up, but I no longer rock heel to toe, repeating, “It’s not for me,” when one goes by.

I’ve worked through most of my health-related psychological hangups with the help of a psychologist trained specifically to work with people with heart problems. It’s as if she and her colleagues, who are rarities across the country, instinctually know about the complicated connection between heart and head and how to tamp down the circuits in the brain that fire at the slightest hint of danger.

What draws me to the work on the basic science of heartbeats and time distortions is how tapping those millisecond-level mechanisms could one day aid people who have experienced extremely distressing events. Individuals with abnormal heart rhythms might be a good group to study for further insight. And, there may already be answers to some of the questions I have about this area of research out there; I just haven’t stumbled across them, at least not yet. (I’m continuing to collect papers on this topic so if you see any, please send them my way).

I swear next time I’ll share a less intense anecdote, maybe one about learning to run again (because yes, I can run again!)

More soon. Thanks for reading.