Neurocardiology

The new field of neurocardiology hypothesizes that the heart is not just a muscle which pumps blood throughout the body but is a sensory organ. The heart is now seen as an extensive nervous system with a sophisticated information encoding and processing center, sufficient to qualify it as a "heart-brain."

For example, recent studies in neurocardiology have found that:


 * 1) The anatomical organization and function of the cardiac nervous system is a complex hierarchy of nested feedback control loops;
 * 2) Interactions occurring among multiple populations of heart neurons maintain cardiovascular stability and maximize cardiac efficiency;
 * 3) The heart as a complex, self-organized system maintains a continuous two-way dialogue with the brain and the rest of the body.