Context

At one of the monthly meetings for my cohort at work, an inspirational speaker was invited to present on how to thrive in the workplace. Unfortunately, the presentation was laden with various forms of new-age pseudoscience. When several of us complained to the administrators who had organized the speech, we were told that the speaker had “evidence” to back up his claims, and that he was certified by an accredited university. Given the absurdity of the presentation and the intention of a certain administrator to invite this speaker back, I decided to write an email explaining why the speaker’s claims were not, in fact, backed up by evidence. The rest of this article is that email.

Introduction

As you all are likely aware, we had a guest speaker at the last monthly meeting who gave a presentation entitled “Thriving vs. Surviving”. While I appreciate staff’s intention to provide us with more than just technical instruction, I have taken the time to investigate the speaker’s claims and I have some concerns I think you all should be made aware of. I apologize for the length of this email but I feel that this issue needs to be dealt with decisively, especially given the plans to integrate this speaker into further training.

None of what I’m about to say contradicts the fact that the speaker was lively, engaging, and some participants felt inspired by his presentation. I don’t dispute the fact that some participants appreciated the speech, but I’m concerned that this was accomplished by the promotion of pseudoscience. Unfortunately pseudoscience can be quite subtle, which perhaps explains the polarized response to his presentation amongst program participants.

I’m primarily concerned about his repeated promotion of HeartMath research in the second half of his presentation, so I’m going to focus on that, before addressing his promotion of neuro-linguistic programming, the new thought movement, and various other hallmarks of new-age alternative medicine. First though, I’d like to address one claim that I think is at the source of the speaker’s confusion.

Claim 0: If a paper is peer reviewed that means it is generally accepted by the medical community

Before delving into HeartMath research, the presenter asked us what it meant for something to be peer reviewed. He then provided the answer that something peer reviewed is “generally accepted by the medical community”. Nevermind that this isn’t actually an answer to the original question, anyone who has been near the scientific process will tell you this is false. Articles can be published in non-reputable journals. Articles can be peer reviewed by non-experts. Articles can be peer reviewed by people whose expertise is orthogonal to the contents of the article. Legitimate publications can be misrepresented to support pseudoscience. Even esteemed medical journals like The Lancet sometimes publish articles that need to be retracted.

As I will explain, HeartMath engages in all of these practices to cloak their new-age agenda with an air of credibility. If there’s any doubt about this, they even acknowledge in some of their own journal articles that their recommendations are considered pseudoscientific by the medical establishment.

What HeartMath believes

This is a partial list of HeartMath’s core beliefs, as documented in their book “Science of the Heart”.

  • The heart is a second brain that influences our perceptions, emotions, and intuition (chapter 1)
  • The heart can independently learn, remember, make decisions, feel, and sense (chapter 1)
  • There is a state called “coherence” which is vaguely defined as a state of correlation, connectedness, and synchronization between the heart and brain (chapter 4)
  • The heart emits a magnetic field that allows it to transmit/receive information (chapter 6)
  • This effect is amplified by a state of “coherence” (chapter 6)
  • This field allows the heart to communicate telepathically with the hearts of humans (chapter 6)
  • This field allows the heart to communicate telepathically with the hearts of animals (chapter 6)
  • The heart is capable of clairvoyant perception (chapter 6)
  • The heart is capable of precognition (chapter 6)
  • The heart can transmit and receive messages via the magnetic field of the earth (chapter 7)
  • Some messages the heart receives may be from the future (chapter 7)
  • These messages from the future may be received by the brain as intuitions (chapter 7)
  • This effect is amplified by a state of “coherence” (chapter 7)
  • The hearts of all living creatures are interconnected by planetary magnetic fields (chapter 11)
  • By measuring disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field, HeartMath can measure the heart messages of the collective consciousness in order to anticipate future social unrest, terrorist attacks, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes. (chapter 11)
  • The emotionality of the global consciousness affects random number generators (chapter 11)
  • By detecting non-random patterns in random number generators, HeartMath can demonstrate the impacts of non-physical consciousness on the geofield (chapter 11)
  • This is all dressed up with scientific language and diagrams to give it the appearance of credibility.

How the HeartMath pseudoscience machine works

As the presenter emphasized to us, HeartMath has a substantial research library of over 300 publications, a fact they repeatedly promote on their website in order to bolster the idea that their ideas are based on evidence. They employ a predictable strategy to feign credibility.

Step 1: Use their private funding to perform basic research

Using funding they’ve collected from donations and the sale of their heart coherence devices and courses, they can fund basic research into heart function without a need for grants. This research is usually rather boring and can get published in reputable peer reviewed journals. A good example is their paper measuring the strength of the magnetic field induced by the electrical signals in the nerves around the heart. Using sensitive instrumentation in a special lab they showed its exact strength. Another example is their study correlating heart rate variability and PTSD. These are mildly interesting experiments that can be published in a reputable medical journal, and account for about a quarter of their publications.

Step 2: Re-interpret basic research in some tradition of alternative medicine

The next step is to re-interpret the basic research in light of some tradition of alternative medicine like energetics or integrative medicine. One example is how they extrapolated from basic research showing the presence of electrical conductivity between people’s fingers to the idea that there is energetic communication between people whose fingers touch. These studies are usually published in low-reputation alternative medicine journals like Energetics Research, Journal of Integrative Medicine, Biofield science, and others. It’s in these publications that you’ll find their claims about the heart’s intuitive intelligence, how people’s heart’s communicate across space using their magnetic fields, the heart’s outsized role when compared to the brain in determining our emotional states, and social coherence.

Step 3: Present research as evidence for new-age spiritual phenomenon

The last step is to present their results as evidence for various new-age spiritual phenomenon, most often in support of the so-called “Global Consciousness Project” and “Global Coherence Initiative”, which are attempts to cause a shift in the global consciousness using alleged connections between people’s hearts, the earth’s magnetic field, and random number generators. By measuring deviations in the output of their random number generators they expect to detect shifts in the collective consciousness in response to world events.

Another example would be their paper “HeartMath as Scientific Meditation Method in Dialogue with Theological Phenomena”, where they discuss how HeartMath practices can reveal the “hidden face and voice of God” and connect one to the “immanent and transcendent Spirit”. They also explain how the rest of their work fits into an effort to “structure and send coherent global conscience messages”.

These claims are usually published in gutter reputation journals or just directly to their website.

Step 4: Profit

This respectable veneer allows them to sell their devices, trainings, books, and more.

HeartMath and Quantum Mysticism

First, some history that will be relevant shortly. When quantum mechanics was first developed in the 1920s, the ontology of the theory was initially unclear, so the field was rife with speculation about what could explain the “collapse of the wave function”, with vague concepts like macroscopicness, thermodynamic reversibility, and consciousness being among the proposals. Eventually several clear, mechanistic, realist theories were developed, such as Bohmian mechanics, the Everett interpretation, and GRW theory, and the field discarded the speculative proposals I mentioned in short order. These proposals have not been a part of serious physics in the decades since then. Unfortunately, however, this period of speculation has inspired the misappropriation of quantum mechanics to bolster various pseudoscientific agendas, most notably deconstructionist, poststructuralist, and new-age agendas. HeartMath represents the last of these, and they follow a long line of new-age spiritual gurus like Arthur Koestler, Lawrence LeShan, and Depak Chopra, who have all promoted some form of extraordinarily confused quantum mysticism.

Take, for example, the paper “The Psychophysiology of the Entrepreneurial Intuition: A Quantum Holographic Theory” from the HeartMath website, which was reviewed for and presented at an entrepreneurship exchange. The paper claims that:

It is likely that most, if not all, subtle, ephemeral and unexplained phenomena associated with subjective experience are connected, directly or indirectly, with the phenomenon of non-locality. … Non-locality and the non-local quantum hologram provide the only estable mechanism discovered to date which offer a possible solution to the host of enigmatic observations and data associated with consciousness and such consciousness phenomenon.

If it wasn’t clear without the full context, the author’s thesis is that entrepreneurs can increase their success in business ventures by perceiving future events using the electromagnetic properties of their heart. The alleged scientific mechanism for this is non-local phenomena in quantum mechanics, facilitated by the quantum hologram.

Any physicist will tell you this is nonsense, which was why this was published in an obscure entrepreneurship journal. Holography is a constraint for any theory that unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity, that any description of a volume of space can be encoded on the lower dimensional boundary of the region. There is no “quantum hologram”, it’s unrelated to non-locality, and it has nothing to do with consciousness or information transmission.

In the paper they discuss various “pioneering” studies on telepathic information transmission, from person-to-person, place-to-person, and future-to-person, including HeartMath’s own study which has “shown” how the heart can receive information from the future and transmit it to the brain, a phenomenon that’s bolstered by “heart-brain coherence”. If you want to measure this effect you can buy their emWave Pro for $299.

HeartMath is owned by Quantum LLC and has various strategic partnerships to promote their ideas. One of these is the Quantum University for Integrative Medicine, a non-accredited university that offers Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate programs in various kinds of alternative medicine. They most recently made the news in an article about how these kinds of universities were handing out bogus credentials, giving unlicensed medical “professionals” an air of legitimacy. The article gives the example of Dr. Brian O’Connell, a doctor who was arrested after performing an energy medicine ritual involving injecting hydrogen peroxide into a bone cancer patient while they begged “please, God, no more”, eventually killing them. Any time you see a mention of integrative medicine, quantum medicine, or energy medicine, it should raise red flags—these ideas are dangerous. HeartMath regularly publishes papers in journals devoted to all these topics, and you can watch lectures on these topics from the HeartMath director of research on the Quantum University website.

The speaker did not repeat every one of HeartMath’s most outrageous claims, though he did endorse many of them, implicitly and explicitly, as we will see. He did give an unreserved endorsement of the organization, calling them “important”, the “best”, and “science based” while promoting their research and directing us to their website, which should be disqualifying on its own in my view. Almost all of the claims from them he did endorse, are either founded on their shoddy research or implicitly assume the truth of their wilder claims.

Claim 1: The heart is a brain

As the speaker explained, the heart has a complex nervous system consisting of almost 40,000 neurons, which allegedly allows it to make decisions, have feelings, and sense independently from the brain. Nevermind that the brain has 86,000,000,000 neurons, or that the paper they cite to support this claim, despite using the phrase “little-brain” in the title, only claims that these circuits are used to regulate blood flow, or that machine learning researchers have a very clear understanding of what computations can be accomplished with 40,000 parameters (not very much), or that the gut has 100,000,000 neurons (they should change their name to GutMath), or that “sensing” here refer to the heart’s alleged connection to the earth’s magnetic field and the collective consciousness, I could go on—it’s a baseless claim.

Claim 2: Meditation “synchronizes” the heart and the brain by increasing coherence

When asked in the Q/A, the speaker seemed unsure what exactly he meant by “synchronize”, when he endorsed the claim earlier in the presentation, so he referred us to the HeartMath website for more information. A search in their research library reveals the following publications.

  • Empirical and Heuristic Phenomenological Case Study of the HeartMath Global Coherence Initiative
  • Global Study of Human Heart Rhythm Synchronization with the Earth’s Time Varying Magnetic Field
  • The Influence of Heart Coherence on Synchronization Between Human Heart Rate Variability and Geomagnetic Activity
  • Identification of a Group’s Physiological Synchronization with Earth’s Magnetic Field
  • Synchronization of Human Autonomic Nervous System Rhythms with Geomagnetic Activity in Human Subjects
  • Achieving Collective Coherence: Group Effects on Heart Rate Variability Coherence and Heart Rhythm Synchronization
  • So it seems that by “synchronization” HeartMath is actually talking about the rhythms of your heart and the geomagnetic activity of the earth, and the speaker confused the concept with heart-brain coherence.

Some of these papers have the appearance of being published in respectable journals, and it takes some effort to see past the layers of obfuscation. Take the first publication, as an example. It seems to be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and it seems to have some citations. If you look closer, however, you’ll notice that every single citation is from a paper by someone who works at HeartMath, and that this paper was published in a special issue called “Health and Energetic Environment”. This edition has only two papers, and the sole editor was Dr. Rollin McCraty, the HeartMath director of research. No wonder it got past peer review. You’ll find the paper has a wealth of scientific insights like

Holistic consciousness enabled Jesus Christ to affirm “before Abraham was I am”. More recently, coherent consciousness facilitated Einstein’s recognition of space-time, Bohm’s notion of an implicate order and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields. Such evidence has provided support for the postulation of an interconnecting global information network facilitated through the Earth’s magnetic field.

and

Listening to the synchronized sounds of singing silence and shushing sea, like spirit and soul, and all great values such as love, truth, justice and freedom.

I’ll leave dissecting the other “publications” as an exercise for the reader.

Claim 3: 90% heart 10% brain

The presenter claimed that it’s “90% heart, 10% brain”. While he never explained what was supposedly being quantified by these percentages, he was likely referring to HeartMath’s research indicating that 90% of the information sent between the heart and brain are from heart-to-brain rather than brain-to-heart. This may or may not be true, but what exactly does HeartMath think the heart to brain transmission bandwidth is being used for?

You can find the answer in chapter 7 of the “science of the heart” book, where they lay out various kinds of heart “intuition”, most notably nonlocal intuition and energetic sensitivity. As they state in their book, nonlocal intuition is “in the same category as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition”, dressed up with a nonsense interpretation of quantum mechanics to make it seem scientific. Energetic sensitivity is a concept derived from energy medicine, and provides their proposed mechanism for how hearts communicate with other people, animals, and the planets. Later in that chapter you can find a discussion of their energetic research demonstrating how a full moon can amplify their subjects’ precognitions. This is an example of the speaker repeating a claim that implicitly assumes the truth of the broader new-age theory.

Claim 4: Heart transplants can cause memory transference

To bolster his claim of the heart’s ability to “learn, feel, and remember”, the speaker gave an example of heart transplant recipients allegedly inheriting memories from their donors. While he didn’t provide a citation in the presentation, this claim can be sourced to a 2011 article from volume 19 issue 1 of NAMAH (Journal of New Approaches to Medicine and Health). Sound reputable? You’ll find that the author is an electrical engineer who primarily blogs about Integral Yoga, the editor claims the case studies exemplify the workings of the “occult”, the journal has little to no vetting process and it mostly publishes articles on parapsychology.

You can find more articles endorsing the adjacent claim that heart transplants result in personality transference, a claim which was widely promulgated by medicaldaily.com. The most reputable looking source for this claim is a 2020 article in Med Hypotheses. This journal is published by Elsevier, which can be accessed through the National Institute of Health website. This, once again, gives it all an air of credibility. Until you look closer.

Medical Hypotheses is a not-conventionally-peer-reviewed medical journal published by Elsevier. It was originally intended as a forum for unconventional ideas without the traditional filter of scientific peer review.

Med Hypotheses is best known for publishing a series of papers denying that HIV causes AIDS. An investigation by Elsevier concluded that the lack of peer review allowed it to repeatedly publish “baseless, speculative, non-testable and potentially harmful ideas”.

Other Pseudoscientific Claims

While I’m primarily concerned about the speaker’s promotion of HeartMath, it’s worth pointing out that the other half of the presentation was also almost entirely pseudoscience.

Claim 5: Live life in high vibrations

One of the earlier slides of his presentation was devoted to the thesis that there are “high” and “low” vibration emotions. He gave the example of gratitude, compassion, self-care, appreciation, and love as high vibration emotions, and anger, frustration, hate, jealousy, and envy as low vibration emotions. He claimed that there was scientific backing for this theory on the basis of research into brain waves.

This concept of “high” and “low” vibration emotions comes from a set of ideas usually called the “Law of Attraction”, which emerged as part of the New Thought movement in the 19th century. The core beliefs of New Thought are:

  • Infinite Intelligence or God is omnipotent and omnipresent.
  • Spirit is the ultimate reality.
  • True human self-hood is divine.
  • Divinely attuned thought is a positive force for good.
  • All disease is mental in origin.
  • Right thinking has a healing effect.

The Law of Attraction claims that, since people and their thoughts are made from “pure energy”, and that like energy can attract like energy, people can improve their health and relationships using the power of “adaptive” and “positive” thoughts to attract positive circumstances. Though the speaker attempted to relate this claim to brain wave research, there has been little to no scientific investigation into it. This is because it’s widely considered to be to vague and untestable to be worthy of scientific investigation, in addition to postulating an elaborate energy metaphysics that’s principally outside the scope of empirical investigation.

Claim 6: Reprogramming your unconscious mind

Several slides in the presentation focused on some cartoon diagrams of the conscious and unconscious minds, and how one can reprogram the unconscious mind using some recommended techniques. While the speaker didn’t refer to it by name, the slides appeared to be an overview of the cognitive architecture of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), or at least derived from it, whether intentionally or not. This isn’t surprising given that various HeartMath associated websites like thelawofheartcoherence.com contain NLP resources. This association is further implied by language in the abstract for the presentation.

Most of the time we are operating from automated programs stored in our subconscious mind that we have memorized which may not be useful. The good news is that we can change the programming which will lead to better results in our lives.

I don’t feel the need to explain the problems with NLP because in the 30 years since it was proposed there has emerged a consensus that it is false, and it has widely been considered pseudoscientific since its inception. Scientific reviews have demonstrated that NLP is based on outdated metaphors of the brain’s inner workings, and that much of the research that claimed to support it contained significant methodological flaws. I encourage anyone who doubts this to look at any review in a respectable journal.

Modern neuroimaging has led scientists to think about cognitive architecture as a large collection of modular systems connected by a sparse set of neural pathways for the global broadcasting of important non-conceptual mental representations. Conscious thoughts are generally identified with those being globally broadcast, although there is some controversy over whether a representation needs to be higher-order in order to be conscious. You’ll notice bears little resemblance to the diagrams in the presentation. If he wants to claim that his metaphors provide a useful way of thinking about our minds in everyday life despite being pseudoscientific, that’s fine, but it was presented as a scientific result which it decidedly is not.

Claim 7: Neuroplasticity neurobabble

He then proceeded to mix the neuro-linguistic programming theory of cognitive architecture with a misunderstanding of the neuroplasticity literature. As you may be aware, much press attention has been given to some recent scientific results demonstrating the brain’s ability to restructure and rewire itself after traumatic brain injuries, strokes, and other damage. Unfortunately, this has spawned a cottage industry of pop science articles and self-help books with titles like “6 ways to rewire your brain”, “9 neuroplasticity exercises to boost productivity”, and “how to boost your gray matter today”.

This pop science literature conflates the recent scientific results regarding the brain’s ability to recover from injury with the age-old fact that the brain is capable of learning new skills and adapting to new situations. It is not a new scientific result that the brain can form new memories, learn new habits, and master new skills.

The presenter spent a while explaining that the neuroplasticity literature demonstrates that we should do something like watch motivational YouTube videos for 10 minutes a day to “rewire our brains”. This is a paradigm example of a strategy that’s discussed in the MIT Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience article “Superfluous Neuroscience Information Makes Explanations of Psychological Phenomena More Appealing”. I’m not doubting that some people might find watching inspirational YouTube videos beneficial, but the presenter was misrepresenting scientific results in order to convince us.

I could address more claims, but this document is already far too long

Why pseudoscience is compelling

There is a common formula used by organizations like HeartMath to slowly immerse potential adherents in their ideology. You’ll find that scientology provides a surprisingly apt parallel.

(1) Present a reputable exterior

As pointed out by the presenter, HeartMath has “math” in the name. Scientology has “science” in the name. Both organizations publish research in prima facie reputable journals, both organizations claim to be based on science.

(2) Rebrand a simple, practical, wellness technique

In the case of HeartMath, they’ve rebranded the practices of meditation and positive thinking as ways of achieving heart “coherence”. The first technique they teach is the so-called “quick-coherence”, which is essentially a combination of slow breathing and positive visualizations, which helps people relax and release stress. In the case of scientology it is “auditing”, which at the introductory levels has some similarities to cognitive behavioral therapy.

Note that while I don’t remember the presenter actually walking us through the “quick-coherence” technique during the session, it seems to be referenced in the presentation abstract, so I assume that he has taught it to other groups: “…he will share a simple technique that you can do anywhere, anytime, and anyplace to feel better and go from surviving to thriving”.

(3) Introduce the ideology an explanation for the subjects increased wellness

At this point the subject has probably experienced some psychological benefits from the rebranded wellness technique. The organization can then begin introducing aspects of the ideology that would otherwise have warded off the subject because the increased wellness is taken as evidence that the ideas are true. If you get past the introductory HeartMath videos, they’ll eventually explain their belief that your psychological problems are caused by a state of heart-brain incoherence, that their techniques can help you achieve a state of coherence, and that this state will enable your heart to receive messages from the magnetic field of the earth. In the case of scientology, they’ll eventually explain their belief that your psychological problems are caused by your body being infested by disembodied thetans, the solution for which is more auditing.

Most people would be skeptical of claims like these after first hearing them, which is the purpose of step (2). The benefits of the wellness technique can be used as evidence the ideas are true. If you look in the comments under various HeartMath videos you can find the occasional skeptical comment. These often have replies of the form “well, their techniques worked for me, so they must be right about something”. Of course, the technique works because of the well understood benefits of meditation, not because of anything about your heart’s connection to the collective consciousness, but people don’t always recognize this. Analogously, in interviews with ex-scientologists they’ll often express how the effectiveness of the techniques kept them delving deeper into the organization.

(4) Escalate, repeating steps (2) and (3)

At this point a subject believes at least some of the ideology, and can be progressively introduced to more of it. With respect to HeartMath, an invested user can purchase their emWave2, which measures their heart coherence using electrodermal sensors. Subjects can use it to achieve higher and higher states of coherence. Scientology has the e-meter, which also uses electrodermal sensors, and is used by auditors to help subjects achieve higher and higher levels of spiritual awareness.

Both organizations have beliefs about new abilities that can be unlocked by these higher states of consciousness. HeartMath research promotes the idea that progressively higher states of coherence can allow one’s heart to communicate with the hearts of other people, plants and animals, the earth and sun’s magnetic field, and the collective consciousness of the present and future. Scientologists believe that higher levels of spiritual awareness can enable one to become immune to physical ailments, unlock psychic abilities and super intelligence, super senses and more.

(5) Continue forever

There’s no end to this process. One can always achieve a higher state of coherence, the auditors will always find more thetans. The organization will always take more of your money.

Conclusion

I hope the preceeding paragraphs have made the extent of my concerns clear. The speaker managed to synthesize an extraordinarily broad range of pseudoscientific ideas in to a single presentation, and I hope you can see why, in my view, we may as well have just been given a gentle introduction to scientology. I am told that the presenter may be integrated into further training, an action I feel the need to recommend against. Even if steps are taken to ensure the presenter doesn’t continue to talking about HeartMath specifically, it doesn’t change the fact that (1) his unreserved endorsement of the organization and many of its claims displays a serious lack of judgment (2) the parts of the presentation that weren’t about HeartMath specifically still managed to be entirely pseudoscientific and (3) it therefore seems unlikely to me that his advice about mentorship or any other topic would be credible.