Introduction

There’s an organization called the HeartMath Institute whose programs to increase “heart coherence” have been quietly adopted by many otherwise reputable institutions. Though the foundation these programs is a dubious rebranding of parapsychology and energy medicine, HeartMath has managed to spread their ideas into academic journals, university curricula, hospitals, and several departments of the U.S. government using a variety of tactics to promote their programs while obfuscating the meanings of their ideas. These associations have granted HeartMath an aura of credibility and an international audience.

On the surface HeartMath is a research and education organization that develops therapies centered around heart-rate-variability (HRV) biofeedback. These programs are based on a mixture of sound science and pseudoscience, but exist substantially within the overton window of acceptable discourse in mediocre scientific journals. But as we will see, these programs are mostly a public-facing veneer over the core of this organization—a new-age cult centered around the heart’s alleged mystical powers and ability to connect you to the spiritual realm, ideas that they’ve rebranded into a palatable form that may appear scientific at first glance.

Online resources that clearly explain their beliefs are scarce, so understanding the jargon that rebrands their new-age ideology currently requires a careful reading of their research library. This obscurity may partially explain how they’ve evaded much high-profile criticism, and their continued success in collaborating with organizations who likely have little understanding of the programs they’re buying. So in the interest of bringing clarity to HeartMath’s programs, I’m going to carefully break down their belief system, which I hope can help readers make an informed judgment about the credibility of the ideas they’ve spread into the Stanford Medical School, Veterans Affairs, Army, Navy, Nature’s Scientific Reports, and more.

Heart Coherence

HeartMath’s research is ostensibly centered around a phenomena they’ve dubbed “heart coherence”, and the courses and devices they’re selling to hospitals and governments are meant to help customers achieve this state. They claim to have over 300 peer-reviewed publications attesting to their understanding of it. According to their website, heart coherence is defined as:

“a state of cooperative alignment between the heart, mind, emotions and physical systems”

This definition is comically vague for one that’s supposedly the product of 30 years of rigorous scientific research. Partially this vagueness is explained by their enormous ambitions for the application of this concept—as I’ll eventually explain, they believe it is the key to unifying energy medicine, parapsychology, quantum mysticism, and new-age spirituality under a single theory of how the human heart interacts with electromagnetic fields. But first we’ll start with how they believe their work relates to the credible scientific literature.

Existing science has found that measures of heart-rate variability (HRV) are correlates and predictors of various ailments like chronic fatigue, congestive heart failure, hypertension and atrial fibrillation. It’s not known whether directly intervening on HRV with biofeedback does anything useful and it’s still an open area of research. While existing science has mostly noted correlates of a high or low HRV, HeartMath’s research is fixated on an HRV pattern that oscillates up and down like a sine wave at 0.1 Hz, or one cycle every 10 seconds. They call this pattern a state of “coherence”, and their business model is centered around selling a device called the emWave that can detect this state.

According to HeartMath’s practitioners, achieving a state of coherence is simple. One need only focus their attention on the heart while breathing slowly and visualizing positive experiences. The recommended breathing pattern on their website is 5 seconds in and 5 seconds out. An astute reader might have noted that this tempo corresponds exactly to the 0.1 Hz oscillation rate associated with coherence and that small motions (like from, say, breathing) can show up as artifacts on an HRV reading, besides the fact that breathing directly affects your heart rate. So is more than 30 years of research actually about the artifacts of breathing on an HRV reading?

HeartMath devotees have invented a multitude of minor variations on this technique. For example, a writer on Psychology Today admonishes the reader to visualize the sending of feelings from your heart to your brain as “healing light energy” and to notice your cells “vibrating with the energy of joy”. Some of these variations have been given new names like “Heart Lock-In” and “Heart-Brain Synchronization”, but they’re based on the same deep breathing and focused attention (and in the Psychology Today author’s case, imaginative delusions).

Deep breathing and focused attention are known to elicit a relaxation response besides being the core elements of mindfulness meditation, so in order to demonstrate that coherence is a clinically useful concept they need to identify effects of coherence that haven’t been documented in existing research. The public-facing HeartMath will tell you that coherence has various psychological and physiological benefits like reduced anxiety, lower blood pressure, and decreased burnout, but these are effects that other research has attributed to similar relaxation techniques and therefore don’t account for what allegedly makes coherence distinct from relaxation, a distinction HeartMath has emphasized repeatedly even while acknowledging that coherence elicits a relaxation response.

While their website limits their explanation to vague statements like “increased harmony and synchronization in the nervous system”, in fact they mostly attribute the alleged benefits of their therapies to paranormal phenomena. The term “coherence” originates in 20th century parapsychology, with “researchers” like Dean Radin attributing his telepathic powers to increased “mental coherence”. The HeartMath project synthesizes this idea with their conviction that it’s the heart (rather than the mind) that’s the key to understanding human’s alleged ability to escape the bounds of the material world, and over the last two decades they expanded this hypothesis into an elaborate theory that I would find hilarious if it wasn’t the basis of treatments being deployed in actual hospitals. The mechanics of this theory are explained in their research library, so next we’re going to take a tour of it so we can see how HeartMath’s pseudoscience borders on a religion.

Research Library

HeartMath’s programs are founded on their research library, a collection of over 300 publications attempting to demonstrate the effects of coherence and the utility of their emWave device. Though practitioners of these programs have pointed to this library as evidence that coherence therapies are evidence based, anyone in academia will know that the mere existence of publications isn’t evidence of anything – there’s an entire sphere of low-reputation journals devoted to every fringe pseudoscience you can imagine, including astrology, acupuncture, and homeopathy. HeartMath’s research library is a mix of boring results published in real journals and wild claims published in this alternative sphere.

A quick perusal of the HeartMath website would have you believe these publications are peer reviewed and generally accepted by the scientific community. A closer inspection would reveal that some of them make extraordinarily bizarre claims like that the heart has psychic powers and the heart is coupled to a field of information not bound by the classical limits of space and time, claims mostly published in non-peer review or predatory open access journals. Even more of their research, however, is published in mediocre peer-review journals and establish narrow scientific facts with unclear implications. These studies make claims like that the heart emits a magnetic field or the electromagnetic field of the sun can be measured in the autonomic nervous system, but it’s not immediately obvious what their interest is in these topics.

Each of these studies address narrow aspects of a single worldview that borders on a religion in its ambition and scope—a worldview that attempts to unify energy medicine, parapsychology, quantum mysticism, and new-age spirituality under a single theory of how the human heart interacts with electromagnetic fields. Divining the exact content of their belief system is complicated by the narrowness of each paper and the jargon they’ve invented to obfuscate the meanings of their ideas, but simply as I can reconstruct it, their theory is encapsulated by the following four beliefs.

Belief 1: The energetic heart

In energy medicine, there’s a concept known as subtle energy, which is used to refer to a healing energy or force that can supposedly be channeled into patients. Though practitioners of energy medicine often believe this phenomena is principally outside the scope of empirical investigation, HeartMath research has claimed they can characterize it experimentally by observing the behavior of electromagnetic fields, which they believe carry “biologically relevant information” about any system with measurable electromagnetic activity, including water, trees, and the human brain. HeartMath often refers to phenomena they believe are supported by this energy as “energetic” processes, which is why their website is laden with language like “energetic communication”, “energetic fields’’, and the “energetic environment”.

Though these energetic processes allegedly apply to a wide-range of physical systems, HeartMath became particularly fixated on the heart due their supposed discovery that the electromagnetic field produced by the heart is many times stronger than the one produced by the brain, which they claim gives the heart an outsized ability to connect to and influence the energetic environment. For example, in the paper Modulation of DNA Conformation by Heart-Focused Intention they claim test subjects were able to cause DNA in a beaker to unwind by putting their heart into a state of “coherence”, staring at the beaker, and willing it to unwind – an ability they claimed was mediated by so-called energetic interactions amplified by the heart. Their interpretation of this experiment is embellished with a cacophony of physics-babble, but they essentially claimed to have demonstrated that the heart is capable of psychokinesis.

Belief 2: The global consciousness

According to HeartMath’s research, a crucial element of the energetic environment is the magnetic field of the earth, which they believe unifies the hearts of all humanity into a “global consciousness” capable of collective feeling and emotion. The idea of a “global consciousness” is an old idea from parapsychology – HeartMath’s innovation is the claim that the autonomic nervous system around the heart has a central role in connecting you to this global consciousness through its ability to conduct the earth’s magnetic field, extending the reach of the heart’s energetic powers around the globe and creating a unified system that encodes the collective emotions of all humanity. Their rationale is that since a coherent HRV oscillation of 0.1 Hz matches the geofield’s “resonant frequency” of 0.1 Hz, it must therefore amplify your connection to the earth. Needless to say, this is not how electromagnetic fields work, nevermind that the fundamental mode of the Schumann resonance is 7.83 Hz.

This claim is the basis of the Global Coherence Initiative, an international effort to “facilitate the shift in global consciousness from instability and discord to compassionate care”. They plan to accomplish this using a mobile app they’ve developed to coordinate masses of people to transmit positive vibrations from their hearts to people supposedly in need, using the magnetic fields of the earth as a transmission medium. They’ve claimed this experiment has over a quarter million participants and it’s an example of the enormous ambitions they have for their work.

Belief 3: Non-local intuition

The global consciousness is not the only idea from parapsychology that HeartMath has given a pseudoscientific neuro-cardiological rationale. In fact, in a haphazard collection of poorly constructed experiments they’ve referred to as “science”, they claim that heart coherence solves the mystery of “psi”, the supposed unknown factor that explains varying capacities for extrasensory perception, and the central concern of the entire practice of parapsychology. In particular, they’ve introduced a form of quantum mysticism they call “non-local intuition” in an attempt to provide a scientific rationale for how the heart’s powers include precognition and presentiment, the alleged abilities to intuit the content and emotional valence of an event before it actually happens. Of course, they believe accessing this ability requires a state of coherence.

This belief is the basis of the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), a parapsychology experiment based on the hypothesis that the emotions of the global consciousness affect the output of random number generators before the events actually happen. By detecting non-random output in random number generators, HeartMath expects to be able to anticipate future terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and political unrest due to how these events will supposedly affect the emotions of the global consciousness. The GCP was originally operated by the PEAR Lab at Princeton University until it was closed for being an “embarrassment to science”. In keeping with this pejorative, the project is now maintained by HeartMath and has expanded into an international effort that includes operational sites in California, Saudi Arabia, Lithuania, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Belief 4: Heart intelligence

While the previous three ideas have earned HeartMath the label pseudoscience it’s this last one that earns them the label cult. If you spend any time with HeartMath’s programs it won’t be long before you encounter the phrase “heart intelligence”. It’s the central and most important concept in their worldview and besides being littered throughout their own materials it can be found repeated in university seminars and government documents, though never with an accompanying definition that isn’t vague and unintelligible.

Heart intelligence refers to HeartMath’s belief that the heart is coupled to the Universal Spirit, a “higher intelligence” that allegedly inhabits a different dimension and thereby transcends the bounds of space and time. They believe quantum mechanics provides a bridge between this spirit and your heart, and that achieving a state of “coherence” can amplify your connection to it. In other words, they’re claiming your heart connects you to god, and that you can amplify this connection with a breathing exercise. Needless to say, this is not a common view among cardiologists. Additional papers HeartMath researchers have published in theology journals describe how to reveal the “hidden face and voice of god” and connect to the “immanent and transcendent Spirit”.

The “compelling evidence” for this extraordinary claim is a series of experiments published in obscure entrepreneurship journals, which purport to show test subjects in a coherent state intuiting events before they actually happen. Much like the hundreds of similar parapsychology experiments that have failed to replicate, they mostly consist of small sample sizes and questionable quality controls. But even if the experimental results were valid, their conclusion that the heart must therefore be “coupled to a field of information not bound by the classical limits of space and time”, is no less a non sequitur. The only bounds these studies transcend are those of rationality.

These four beliefs complete the picture of how HeartMath’s worldview purports to unify energy medicine, parapsychology, quantum mysticism, and new-age spirituality – energetic processes supposedly connect all living creatures and unify them into a global consciousness, one can become attuned to and influence this system by achieving a coherent state, and quantum mechanics enables these effects to transcend spatio-temporal boundaries and connect one to god. They also reveal the true purpose of coherence therapies, which is to amplify your connection to the energetic environment, enabling you to access the heart’s psychic powers, influence the emotions of the global consciousness, and intuit the guidance of the Universal Spirit.

Rebranding

The fact that these ideas are (frankly) ludicrous immediately raises the question of how programs based on this set of claims have achieved adoption in places like the Stanford School of Medicine, University of Colorado, the U.S. military, and more. One possible explanation for this is that the content of the programs being used by these institutions eschew HeartMath’s mystical beliefs. As we will see, this is not quite correct – the distinction isn’t so much about the content as it is the branding – that is, the programs being implemented by these institutions are laden with most of HeartMath’s craziest ideas, just in a repackaged form that’s difficult to decode.

Take, for example, HeartMath’s belief that quantum mechanics couples your heart to the Universal Spirit. To label this theory they’ve introduced the phrase “heart intelligence” but their widely distributed materials contain only vague platitudes explaining what it actually means, even while invoking it profusely. This has led to an absurd situation where secondary materials from otherwise reputable organizations are obliviously parroting HeartMath’s metaphysical ideas, like this seminar at the University of Colorado, which promises to teach attendees to “access your own heart intelligence for creative problem solving”. I don’t doubt that university students could benefit from new methods for problem solving, but I do doubt that attempting to access the intelligence of a spirit in another dimension is likely to achieve this effect.

This jargon is a facade that makes HeartMath’s ideas inscrutable to those who aren’t already in-the-know and they’ve applied this same formula to obfuscate many different aspects of their worldview. For example, when referring to the “subtle energy” allegedly manipulated by practitioners of energy medicine they’ll use the term “energetics” or just “energy”. When referring to the heart’s psychic powers they’ll use the phrase “non-local intuition” or just “intuition”. Many terms HeartMath uses frequently like synchronization, intuition, and energy have ordinary meanings in addition to the mystical meanings HeartMath uses them for. A reader unfamiliar with their work may interpret statements like “a coherent state ensures personal energy isn’t wasted, leaving more energy to manifest intentions” as a comparatively benign claim about metabolism, even though for HeartMath it has a metaphysical meaning based on energy medicine and the law of attraction.

Once you understand their jargon you’ll see that all of their materials, even the comparatively benign ones being advertised to serious institutions, are laden with these opaque references to some of the wildest ideas you can imagine. Unfortunately, this is likely an intentional strategy by HeartMath – their director of research has admitted to using alternative jargon to get their papers past peer review.

Besides the jargon that obfuscates their worldview, the other factor that completes their facetious rebrand as a science-based organization is their claim that their 300+ publications are peer-reviewed and therefore accepted by the mainstream. This claim is questionable at best. Some of their papers are published in obscure journals with little to no vetting process. Some of their papers are published in predatory open access journals. At least one of their papers is published in a special issue where the editor was a HeartMath employee. Some of their papers with more boring results have been published in real journals, which HeartMath has subsequently used as evidence to bolster radical claims not explicit in the papers themselves. Much of this research consists of small pilot studies with poor quality controls and questionable methodology, a deficiency that has explained hundreds of replication failures in parapsychology research.

Impact

For how fringe many of their ideas are, HeartMath’s programs have achieved an impressive amount of adoption, including many bastions of the health establishment. There are far more instances than I have space to address here, but here’s a few examples. Consider this section a wall-of-shame.

Universities: HeartMath’s most damaging university connection is almost certainly their association with the Stanford School of Medicine. The school’s logo is prominently displayed on the HeartMath website and I’ve witnessed the school’s reputation being used to justify the implementation of HeartMath’s programs in the U.S. government. As it stands, however, HeartMath appears to be completely warranted in advertising this connection, since they can be found in Stanford’s recommended wellness resources and summer course listings, which state that a previous HeartMath CEO has spent over a decade teaching for the school’s Health Improvement Programs and Executive Program. This is surely an embarrassment to the medical school. Another example is Florida Atlantic University, which in 2015 announced the institutionalization of HeartMath training for all of its faculty, students, and staff. The university’s press release stated that these programs would help people bring their “physical, mental, and emotional systems into balanced alignment with their heart’s intuitive guidance”. These are just two of many examples; a search for HeartMath in .edu domains returns hundreds of results.

Hospitals: Given that the HeartMath campus is located in California, it’s perhaps unsurprising that they’ve targeted the Stanford Hospital. I’ve been told that they’ve littered flyers advertising their services at all the hand washing stations, and it’s inevitable that some of these offers are being accepted. Though this may be a waste of resources, it is somewhat unsurprising given the common practice of offering known quackery like Rekki energy healing to hospital patients. Perhaps more surprising, is that coherence training is even being pushed on hospital staff. Psychiatrist Scott Alexander has previously complained about being forced to attend a lecture about their techniques at his hospital, and other documentation indicates thousands of medical professionals across many medical centers have received HeartMath training in an attempt to increase staff retention.

Governments: Given the U.S. government’s history of funding parapsychology research, it’s somewhat unsurprising that they’re a major purchaser of HeartMath’s programs. For example, the U.S. Navy has trained over five thousand enlisted in how to achieve heart coherence, and an interview with some Navy seals indicates some of them are perfectly amenable to the idea that coherence techniques can amplify psychic abilities. Other documentation indicates that HeartMath’s government clients have included the Army, Office of Personnel Management, Federal Aviation Administration, Internal Revenue Service, and Veterans Affairs. Local governments that have made use of HeartMath’s ideas include those in Nebraska, Tennessee, and Ontario. Clinical trials of their work have been funded by the National Institute of Justice, Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Journals: The presence of HeartMath’s work in academic journals pollutes the research record with nonsense and falsely implies their ideas are scientific. Even though much of their work is in non-peer reviewed or predatory open-access journals, people may fail to recognize this. I once witnessed a MD erroneously conclude HeartMath’s research was credible after conflating a non-peer reviewed publication accessible through the NIH portal with NIH funded research. Some of their papers, however, have gained acceptance into real journals. For example, one paper claiming to show the heart’s energetic connection to the sun was published in Scientific Reports, a journal by the Nature publishing group. The paper is laden with subtle references to energy medicine and parapsychology, and particularly because a fundamental methodological problem with this study has already been pointed out, this paper’s continued existence is an embarrassment to the journal. I suspect the reviewers failed to investigate the paper’s references to mystical programs like the Global Coherence Initiative.

Conclusion

So overall, what appears to be happening is that HeartMath is pitching heart-rate variability biofeedback as a method for stress relief, and packaging it together with an obfuscated metaphysics about why the technique works and what it accomplishes. The best analogy I can think of is if Scientology was training tens of thousands of medical professionals, government employees, and university students on how to get clear (coherent) using the e-meter (emwave pro), but were using cryptic language to describe the mystical forces (energetics) and entities like Thetans (Universal Spirit) they believe realize the effects of their techniques.

I think it’s unlikely that many of HeartMath’s most reputable customers fully understand what they’re buying. People often expect that quack medicine originates from rogue cranks with obvious tells, but sometimes it comes from PhDs with seemingly relevant credentials, patents, credible associations, and an aura of professionalism. We’ve seen that there are many reasons to question HeartMath’s claims that their ideas are evidence based, but beyond just their misuse of statistical methods, insignificant sample sizes, cherry picking, wild extrapolations and misrepresentations, there’s an even more fundamental problem with how HeartMath’s has appropriated the scientific method to bolster their new-age ideology. It’s that even when research superficially applies scientific methodology, and even when it conforms to the norms of academic publishing, there’s a crucial difference between two very different objectives one can bring to any attempt at an evidence-based inquiry.

One of these is the ethos of science – the attempt to construct falsifiable theories that can be tested against rigorous experiments. The success of this approach has granted science an earned authority that’s the envy of anyone with strong convictions they intend to proselytize, and has created a new class of gurus with the contrasting objective – to appropriate this authority in the service of their pre-existing agenda. In the case of HeartMath and others who espouse a similar new-age message, this is usually the feel-good egocentric message that you’re somehow specially important and have powers beyond your imagination. This posture is at odds with the purpose of science, which is to uncover empirical facts regardless of if they validate your self-image. HeartMath’s work falls short of this ideal because their facade of rigor and objectivity is really just an elaborate attempt to promote ideas they already believe.