A group of neuroscientists from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPLF), in Switzerland, have located the brain “silencer” that allows us to forget about a rhythmic and incessant noise that occurs, on average, 100,000 times a day: the heartbeat . Their study has been published in The Journal of Neuroscience .
The researchers asked 150 volunteers to look at a blinking octagonal figure on a screen. And to their surprise, these people had a harder time processing that image when it appeared and disappeared at the same rate as their heartbeat .
That was the track they followed to locate the specific area of our gray mass that intercepts the sound produced by the pumping of the heart muscle. They did this by repeating the test by examining what was happening in the volunteers’ brains using magnetic resonance imaging . Thus they saw that the activity of an area called the insular cortex fell abruptly when the blinking of the image was synchronized with the heart rate. That is, then, its function as a buffer failed and prevented the subjects from properly concentrating on what they were seeing.
“It is not convenient for your inner sensations to interfere with the outer ones. Since the heart was already beating when your brain was forming, you are exposed to its sound from the very beginning of your existence . It is not surprising that there is a brain mechanism to mute it, ”explains Roy Salomon, a scientist at the EPLF’s Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory and one of the authors of the research.
In addition, awareness of one’s own heart rate only occurs when we experience moments of extreme tension . In normal life, we forget about it, unless we suffer from anxiety disorders. Our mental health is grateful, then, that we are not constantly listening to that “boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom…”.
