What We’re Missing With Human Connection

You might be reading this in isolation. A lifestyle that has suddenly become our new normal. Maybe you’re starting to miss the feeling of other people around you. I know I am. What is it exactly that we are missing? 

It’s something we’d already been looking for. There’d been a lot of talk about empathy leading up to this moment. Strategizing around it. Building brands on it. Teaching it. Developing it. Marketing books & businesses & masterclasses about it. All of it established on a hunger to understand something that felt more distant than maybe it should.

A quick look into Google Search Trends on ‘empathy’ shows the story clearly:

Search Interest Over Time on ‘Empathy’ Topic — Source: Google Trends (2004–2020)

Then, without warning, our chance to be physically present with each other was suddenly taken away. Talk of empathy surrendered itself to the rapid growth of a new idea: social distancing.

So here we are, staring into the spaces where other people once stood. Our brains searching for the words to describe the feeling of what’s gone missing from our hearts.

Words will not get us there. That’s because words are the Language of Logic. Logic can bridge the gaps between ideas, but it cannot bridge the gaps between people. It is not words that connect us, it is our feelings.

What words like empathy seek to describe exists behind a veil past which Logic cannot go; past which our reliance on the firm ground of objective facts must give way to a trust in the shifting sands of subjective experience. There is a doorway through the Heart into a laboratory of spirit — more than science — which we must enter alone to see for ourselves what is truly real.

Therein lies the great irony of human connection — and the great opportunity of our isolation. The journey toward understanding each other begins with understanding ourselves.

The Answer In The Asking

Words are like swords. They are ideas condensed into sound & symbol, engineered to cut through the dense foliage of nature’s uncertainties. 

There are myths of our primordial language. The Hebrews refer to Lingua Adamica as the words carried between Adam and Eve and God in the Garden of Eden — and in turn, the words by which Adam named all things. 

We can hear the echoes of such a language in the passage of the most basic phonetics like Ka, carrying with it one fundamental meaning across time and culture. 

Ka has a primal origin in the guttural sound of a death rattle. Ka is the Egyptian word for the principal aspect a human soul which survives through death. 

Ka, written as ??, is the first consonant of the Sanskrit alphabet, translating to ‘who’ at its most fundamental and providing the root for Kali, written as ????, meaning the “changing aspect of nature that bring things to life or death.”

Kaf, written as ?, is the eleventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet, represents the power latent within the spiritual realm of the potential to fully manifest itself in the physical realm of the actual.

In this way, words have been the weapon by which humanity has achieved its dominion over reality with ever-increasing complexity — acting collectively as Adam walking through our garden and naming all we find.

So then, as we turned this naming gaze of Adam within, we arrived at a simple, but vital question suggested by the mystery of Ka: where is the seat of the soul?

Like swords, the sharpness of words cuts both ways. Their power also tempts us to strike them against each other; to test their strengths. The more complex and divergent our language, the more forceful our battles.

In the march of history, this question has come to be understood as a battle between deliciously complex words, each forged with the linguistic alloy of latin & science and bejeweled with the ornaments of mankind’s most celebrated thinkers.

It is known as the Cardiocentric vs Cephalocentric Debate. 

Cardiocentrism believes in the Heart as the seat of our soul and with it, our innate intelligence; the central operation of our body. The Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians are counted amongst the Cardiocentrists enchanted by the mysteries contained within the rhythmic beating of our hearts, believing it brought the story of our souls into the afterlife. With them in their belief in the Heart were also the Greek Stoics and Epicureans as well as philosophers Aristotle, Democritus, Praxagoras, and Empedocles. 

These people, according to the measured analysis of the Cephalocentrists for whom seat of the soul clearly resides in the Head, are imbeciles. Among their ranks are some of the greatest thinkers in human history: Pythagoras, Plato, Galen, Alcmaeon, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Rufus of Ephesus, and the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus, which laid the foundations of modern healthcare.

The weighing of the heart ceremony, the judgment day of the ancient Egyptian religion. The heart of the deceased is weighed against the Feather of Ma’at, the goddess of truth and justice. In the Papyrus of Ani circa 1200 BCE.

Today we sit on the other side of centuries of achievements in medical study probing the depths of the human body and the debate would seem to be settled: The Cephalocentrists were right. 

We live in our Heads.

For instance, we know that the brain holds the executive power in the operation our body’s many functions. In fact, we have minted a whole new vast roster of words to explain precisely how and why this is. 

We know…that through afferent nerves, signal from all over the body is sent to the brain for processing while through efferent nerves, signal is sent back to the body for regulation & movement.

We know…that what keeps us awake lives in the thalamus of our brain. That is, according to a 2020 study that zapped monkey brains to keep them up at night.

We know…that we can probe the brain for consciousness. We call what we’re looking for Neural Correlates of Consciousness. In 2016, researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre at Harvard Medical School proudly announced, “For the first time, we have found a connection between the brainstem region involved in arousal and regions involved in awareness, two prerequisites for consciousness.”

Digging deeper, the explanation as to what this means and why it matters comes as a flurry of words, dancing with schooled, sophisticated flourishes: 

First, they identified the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum and the relationship of its damage to the dark sleep of “coma”. They then found that this region links up to two other regions of the brain that prior research had shown plays a role in regulating consciousness; one in the left, ventral, anterior insular cortex and the other in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex — both of which have been linked in to arousal and awareness specifically. 

It’s a stunning amount of knowledge we’ve been able to amass about ourselves.

There is something else we know now too though. Something that adds a layer of puzzlement to all of these discoveries.

We know…that words, themselves, live in the brain.

Words, it turns out, live specifically in the cerebral cortex, where the Wernicke’s Area, located in the left cerebral hemisphere, houses language comprehension and connects to the Broca’s Area, located in the inferior frontal gyrus, for the motor functions of speech.

So again — Where is the seat of the soul?

This knowledge about our knowledge adds an interesting wrinkle, doesn’t it.

In using these words made by and for the brain, we didn’t so much settle the debate between Head & Heart as seat of the soul, we’ve only narrowed our gaze. 

The modern world we’ve built on the foundation of this conclusion is a monument to the language of logic. Yet here we are, struggling through a maze of technology and data of our own construction to confront the very pains of our existence. We call it malaise, we call it anxiety, we call it depression, we try word after word to describe what’s wrong — to ask once again who we are and how we can connect with each other.

Perhaps, our answers are pre-determined in the manner of our asking. Perhaps we’ve gotten lost in our heads. The portrait we’ve painted of ourselves is but a reflection of the brain’s own image — and nothing more. Can we find our way back out of its brilliant labyrinth?

Yes.

Pulling back on the thread that brought us here, let us return our gaze to the original mystery stirred by Egyptian mummifications, Greek pondering, and Renaissance vivifications of unfortunate corpses. 

What did they find when searching for the origins of Ka, the essential force of life and death within our human bodies? 

Contemporary artist Alex Grey depicts internal bodily systems such as the nervous & cardiovascular with arresting physiological accuracy // More info at alexgrey.com

Sit with the images above for a moment and feel the balance between the two primary networks of our bodies, both of them featuring central operating organs within vast systems of apparently equal complexity. The Head, served by its peripheral network of nerves running & returning all across the body — and the Heart, served also by its own peripheral network of veins running & returning all across the body.

Could it be that the signals carried within these systems convey information more primary than words can describe? Could it be that intelligence is not the exclusive provenance of the brain? 

We’ve listened to the Head. We’ve built our world in its image.

How might we also listen to what the Heart has to say?

The Whispers Of The Heart

The heart is an instrument of rhythm.

The tempos of its beat tune us between our different modes of being. There are memories in those rhythms. I feel it. I can journey into my past and feel through my heart who I was when I reached for my first kiss. The nervousness. The new. Who I was when when I found myself truly on my own for the first time. The spartan craving for discipline that kicked in. The excitement. The fear. How time slowed down when I proposed to my wife. The bliss. The eternity. 

These chapters and moments in my life story, they each carry their own signature. Each of their heartbeats carry their own character — and each character embodies a feeling. 

There’s something archetypal about the information encoded within our Hearts. There’s a heartbeat for The Hero. A heartbeat for The Lover, The Victim, The Sage. It’s as though the essence of what is held in myth & memory is software for our bodies.

I learned to listen to my Heart from my father. The lifetime we shared together filled me with memories that each carry their own feelings, rich with the subjective knowledge of direct experience; none of them sharper than at the end of his life, when I stepped into his hospital room shortly after his heart stopped beating — when I felt for myself the ineffable awe of what language has tried to capture through Ka. 

The essence of life becomes apparent once it has gone missing.

There are no words that can explain the release in my Heart when it happened while I was miles away on a train racing to that room. I felt it when he died. Nobody told me, but I knew. Before any words carried any facts my way, I was with him in my Heart when it happened. 

I like to think he trained me for that moment. A decade earlier, he taught me how to listen to my Heart. He showed me you can reach the Heart through Music.

When I was thirteen, my dad agreed to drive — on a whim — for five hours through back country roads so I could see my favorite band live at the New York State Fair. On that drive, he shared with me his entire college mixtape collection — each and every cassette painstakingly recorded from vinyl into a curated musical experience of his passions. 

The ebb & flow between those songs taught me how intimate —and how potent — the connection between Music and the Heart truly is. 

That experience in that car for those five hours is what made me a musician. The rest was just practice. As it would many times again in my life, my Heart led and my Head followed.

Ripples In Time

And follow it did. A year after that road trip, I bought a bass guitar and began studying. 

I was fortunate to go to a school for music with teachers that encouraged to not just learn how to play, but to chase virtuosity. Speed, dexterity, knowledge, and a deep understanding of the Masters. All of those pursuits absorbed me completely. A constant call to the practice room where my stool and my bass guitar awaited — where one day, I discovered that my Heart can slow down time.

I was alone when it happened, as tends to be the case with the biggest breakthroughs in the laboratory of subjectivity. At 16 years old, in an empty recital hall— just me and my bass guitar — I was chasing one of the esteemed masters named Jaco Pastorius, working my hands through one of the heroic performances he’d left behind for generations of players to try and keep up with. I was practicing “Donna Lee”.

I worked through the song with a metronome next my stool on the floor beside me. Jaco tops out at 230 beats per minute in his take. I was working on breaking the 200 barrier. I’d run through it over and over again at one bpm until I’d felt I’d grabbed the tempo. Stop. Crank up the metronome up 5bpms and start again.

When I hit 210 bpm, I noticed something strange. Time would seem to slow down when I started playing. The space between the metronome’s clicks would stretch longer as I leaned-in to race my hands up and down the fretboard. My heart was pounding. I became aware that I was pushing into the liminal space above which the heroic energy of this Master waited. I was beginning to tune into how Jaco experienced time.

So I stopped. And I listened. 

I listened to the clicks of the metronome and to the beat of my heart like I would any two beats. When you’re training to be a musician, you learn how to hold something called a polyrhythm —when two beats or two different tempos are happening at the same time. I’d learned to hold polyrhythms it by shifting my focus to just one of the beats until my mind could catch the placements of the other. It’s like jumping from one moving platform to another.

Some records by other masters hold astounding performances of this skill. Like on ‘Stratus’, the dance between Billy Cobham’s time-bending drum fills dance around Leland Sklar’s stubborn-as-hell unflinching bass line.

That day in the empty recital hall, I put my instrument down and I tuned in to these ripples in time. 

I locked in on the polyrhythm between the metronome and my heartbeat. I focused first on the thumping in my chest. I found that it was steady. The space between thumps consistent and predictable. I held my ground there to leap my focus toward catching the metronome’s click. 

The clicks, though, they kept shifting. The space between each would wax and wane, but my heartbeat remained steadily the same. 

In sitting with the steady rhythm of my own heart, I experienced the fluidity of time.

I was in awe. I wondered, how can it be that something as internal as my heartbeat can so drastically alter something as external as time? Is the rhythm of our heart, much like the speed of light is for objective space-time, some sort of universal constant for subjective experience?

Months passed. The school had a unique curriculum, to say the least. I’d enrolled in a class called ‘Dimensions Of Time’. It was one of many subject-spanning courses, designed to pushed us to explore the meeting points between history, science, and literature to answer big questions like…what is time? 

In the class, we learned about pre-Industrial methods of timekeeping like ancient Chinese water clocks and sundials. One week, we were given an assignment: invent your own time machine. 

In order to pass, we needed to create some sort of machine to accurately track the passage of time for a full 60 seconds. Some students constructed intricate contraptions out of paper, some emulated the cleverness of the Chinese water clocks, some tried variations of sun dials. 

I used my Heart.

In the days leading up to the test, I played with the polyrhythmic experience of heartbeat and clock I’d uncovered in the practice room months earlier. This time though, I would work to bring the beats together; to line them up rather than play with the spaces between them. My heart rate was usually at about a resting 70 bpm, but I worked at this exercise until I could routinely set my heart to a steady 60 bpm — and here’s the important part: to comfortably know what 60 bpm felt like.

When the teacher called my name, I stepped up in front of the class and gently raised my hand to my throat. The teacher, looking quizzically at me, started her stopwatch. I closed my eyes and counted sixty heartbeats.

Calling out ‘Time!’, I opened my eyes to my teacher’s smile.

My time machine — my Heart — counted a perfect 60 seconds.

The Head Seeks, But The Heart Knows

How do we make sense of that? 

Let’s allow the seeking of the Head to follow the mystery of the Heart. We can start by stepping back into the Language of Logic and return to a couple of the words from earlier: Afferent and Efferent.

To review — we know…that through afferent nerves, signal from all over the body is sent to the brain for processing while through efferent nerves, signal is sent back to the body for regulation & movement.

Through these signals, a constant conversation is taking place between the Head and the Heart, among other organs. 

For some time, it’s been believed that the brain’s medulla oblongata regulates the beating of the heart through a vitally important network of nerves known as the autonomic nervous system. 

In a process called heart innervation, the two polarities of the autonomic system send efferent signal to the Heart to regulate the tempo of its beating. 

The polarity that says “go faster” is known as the sympathetic nervous system — communicating via the sympathetic cardiac nerves.

The polarity that says “go slower” is known as the parasympathetic nervous system — communicating via the vagus nerve.

It helps to think of this like a gas pedal and brake pedal for the engine of the Heart. It would seem that this paints a portrait of a relationship where the brain is master & commander of a subservient heart. 

There is more to the story, though — the details of which we’ve only discovered recently.

Beginning in the 1990’s and expanding as we entered the 2000s, mounting evidence emerged across a number of studies of a startling conclusion:

There exists a “little brain” in our Hearts.

This little brain came to be known medically as the intrinsic cardiac neural plexus, a network of somewhere between 10K-40K interconnected ganglia neurons situated within the heart. The significance of these particular neurons is that they are the very same that network with each other to create thoughts & memories within our brains.

Source: Cardiac neuroanatomy — Imaging nerves to define functional control

The heart, it seems, has a mind of its own. But why?

Evidence has shown that this “little brain” is what holds the rhythms of our heart. Surprisingly, that master & commandeer portrait of the Head’s lordship over the Heart doesn’t hold. The heart beats for itself — and in literal terms, tissue from heart is capable of beating entirely by itself.

A study conducted by Dr. David Paterson of Oxford University demonstrates this beautifully. 

Paterson ran an experiment, in which he suspends in an oxygenated solution the specific area of a rabbit’s heart where these specialized ganglia neurons have been found. He finds that the heart beats on its own, despite having no blood flow or consistent energy being sent through it. When Paterson shocks the heart, he observes the tempo of its simply beating changes in response.

The “little brain” in the heart makes a decision in direct response to the signals it receives. The efferent signals sent from the brain through the autonomic nervous system is not constant regulation, but quick pulses; suggesting that the heart is more than just a mindless mechanical pump, but an independent center all together. 

The closer we investigate the systems within our bodies, the more it appears that the Head does not command the Heart so much as converse with it.

What might this tell us about the nature of how we connect with our own inner worlds — and how we connect with each other?

Voices In Our Head

In 2009, a pair of endeavoring French psychologists, Professor Droit-Volent and Sandrine Gil, embarked on a fascinating study titled The Time-Emotion Paradox. 

In this study, they used sounds and pictures with varying emotional weight as determined by the International Affective Pictures System (IAPS) to measure the apparent differences in participant’s subjective reporting on the duration of their experiences. 

The data showed them a profound truth: 

There is “no unique, homogeneous time but instead multiple experiences of time.” 

The method of their study leveraged our growing realization of a principle known as mirror neurons, in which observing the actions of others causes those very same neurons to fire in our own brains as though we were performing them ourselves.

The study was conducted as follows:

In this task, participants are initially presented with two anchor durations, namely a short one (400 ms) and a long one (1600 ms), presented in the form of a pink oval. 

Next, in a testing phase, they are presented with a series of seven comparison durations, i.e. one for each anchor duration, and five for the intermediate durations which differ from each other by 200 ms (600, 800, 1000, 1200 and 1400 ms). 

In the testing phase, the stimuli consist of faces expressing a basic emotion (anger, fear, happiness, sadness or disgust) or a neutral emotion. The participants’ task is to judge whether the presentation duration of the face corresponds to the short or the long anchor duration (short versus long response).

The results?

Anger and fear slows down time dramatically, leading to overestimations of time spent.

Happiness and sadness does too, but not as much.

Disgust has no affect on time.

Shame speeds up time — but not for children, only for adults.

The second half of the study adds even further to the wonder. It shows that whose faces were being shown had its own influence on the viewer’s sense of time, building to another startling conclusion, that

 “Individuals adopt other people’s rhythms and incorporate other people’s time.”

Examples of (a) elderly and (b) young women’s faces with a neutral expression from the The Time-Emotion Paradox study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2685815/

The researchers explain their method for this portion in detail:

In this study, men and women were presented with pictures of faces of elderly and younger males and females as part of a temporal bisection task similar to the one described above. 

When the participants viewed the elderly faces, their bisection functions shifted significantly towards the right compared with the young faces, thus indicating that the presentation duration of elderly faces was underestimated…suggesting that this underestimation is owing to a slowing down of the internal clock.

I would argue that our experience of time is among the key aspects of what it means to feel like ourselves — and that to connect with what it feels like to be someone else is to connect with their subjective experiences of the passage of time. When I chased those breakneck tempo performances of my musician idols, I wasn’t just tuning into the music. I was stepping into their identities.

Could it be that even the very image of someone else’s face carries with it the fingerprints of how they perceive time? Could it be that through sharing that perception of time, we step into what it feels like to live in their story?

The Human Escapement Plan 

Clocks were invented with the remarkable innovation of something called an escapement.

It’s a mechanical system that holds the energy of a coiled spring and releases it in such a controlled fashion to maintain the steadiness kept time.

In one of the most mystifying turns in history, the first mechanical escapement appeared to humanity in the 13th century with no known inventor — though many are credited with its improvements.

The escapement was, in many respects, the invention of Time as we collectively know it today.

This objective version of Time unlocked the Age of Exploration and the Industrial Revolution. A version of Time that created the mechanical future we live in today.

So — where is the escapement of the human body?

The answer is complicated. 

To start with, we learned from the 2020 study that zapped our unfortunate monkey friend’s brains, that what keeps us ‘awake’ sits in our thalamus.

Multiple studies through the years have developed a modeling of an internal pulsing that affects our sense of time in the prefrontal region of the cerebral cortex and basal ganglia.

What we also know from the previously mentioned study, is that emotions influence our sense of time. Anger and fear specifically seem to have the most affect on this and they appear to live in the amygdala — along with possibly happiness.

What most of these regions share in common is that they make up the Limbic System, which through stimulation studies has been shown to have an intimate relationship with the vagus nerve.

Rendering of the Vagus Nerve by Nicole Fuller of Sayo Studio // https://sayostudio.com/vegas-nerve-scratchboard-art

An important fact about the vagus nerve, is that while it does send that “slow down” pulse signal to the Heart as we explored before, the vast majority of its workload goes the other way, being 8–90% afferent in its signal. So in fact, much of the vagus nerve’s purpose is in sending information from the Heart to the Limbic System along with signal from other organs.

What might the Heart be adding to the conversation?

In 2014, five years after Droit-Volent and Gil’s study, the Brighton and Sussex Medical School published one of their own in the Journal Of Neuroscience , showing beautifully how the character of our cognitive experiences are altered by the rhythm of our hearts.

They focused on two key phases of the heartbeat: systole when blood is pumping out of the heart (when it is mid-beat) and diastole when the heart is relaxed (when it is not). When hooking test subjects up to heart monitors, they would quickly flash images of people’s faces in front of their eyes — similar to Droit-Volent and Gil’s method. 

Some faces expressed neutral emotion and some were expressing fear or anxiety. The test subjects were asked to rate the intensity of the emotions being expressed by each image.

Through the use of heart monitoring, the researchers at Brighton and Sussex were able to A/B test between responses to images flashed during a heart beat (systole) and to images flashed in between heart beats (diastole).

Their results show “that fearful faces were detected more easily and were rated as more intense at systole [during a heart beat] than at diastole [between heart beats].” 

Further, the subjective reports of the study’s participants was backed by measurable responses in their brain’s limbic systems. The researchers found specifically that “amygdala responses were greater to fearful faces presented at systole relative to diastole.”

Results showing activity in the amygdala for subjects viewing images of “Fear” faces and “Neutral” faces during the Diastole and Systole phase of their heart beat | Source: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/19/6573

When we put the conclusions from these studies together, we begin to see a provocative blueprint in our human design. We know…

• The experience of time is different for each of us.
• The speed of time stretches & contracts with the emotions we feel.
• The depth of our emotional feeling stretches & contracts with our heart beats.

Correlation does not mean causation. It’s tempting to take the leap and say that our hearts are time machines, but that’s not quite true.

Once again, the answer is complicated.

“Heart rate itself has no relevant impact on time perception” is the conclusion of one study that used physical exercise to ask that very question. That would be too crude or too blunt of an instrument.

Instead, the answer lies in the details of the signal being passed through vagus nerve of the autonomic nervous system, with a recent group of studies suggesting “that while the beats of the heart themselves are not analogous to a pacemaker, changes in the autonomic nervous system are either a corollary of a timing mechanism, or the autonomic nervous system directly plays role in how humans perceive time.”

Time for humans is more sophisticated than for machines — the secrets of its ebb & flow live in the rhythm, not the rate, of how our hearts beat.

Much like the signal that passes through cable wires winding across city streets and into our television screens, the encoded information of our Hearts moves in a vastly complex sequential language before being translated into the stories that play in our Heads — to tell us how we feel.

As the research shows…Feel is primary to our experience of reality.

Emotional Signature

Humanity has a rich history across numerous cultures of studying the varied language of our pulse. Modernized western medicine has recently renewed our vigor on this with a concept called Heart Rate Variability, which is a measure of the variations in time between heart beats. 

The medical significance of Heart Rate Variability is that it provides a clear indicator of whether our heart is receiving more signal from our sympathetic nervous system for a more consistent, and in some cases, faster beat — or from our parasympathetic nervous system for a more varied, and in some cases, slower beat. 

It is believed that a higher Heart Rate Variability is an indicator of better heart fitness — that the relaxed, loose rhythm of the parasympathetic signal is more of a “ready” state for the heart than the rigid, stressed state of the sympathetic.

This is something that has been intently studied by the HeartMath Institute, beginning in the early 1990’s, whose founder Lew “Doc” Childre & researchers like Dr. Rollin McCraty have very much championed the role of the heart in not just our physical, but mental states.

The difference in variations of heart rate between positive & negative emotions as found in research studies by the HeartMath Institute

What the HeartMath Institute found was that variations (HRV) in our heart rate (bpm) tend to smoothly wade in a wide berth from slower to faster for emotions on the “positive” end of the spectrum; whereas for emotions on the “negative” end of the spectrum, variations in our heart rate would be more chaotic and tightly bouncing between slower and faster tempos.

They took this line of research a step further and used a chart of six psychophysiological modes to construct a typology, mapping out a more complex range of emotional states of being with associated heart rhythms — inclusive of states of being like apathy, anger, love, resentment, and others.

What we find through this research is a more complete picture of heart health and its connection to our emotional states. 

I see something more. 

This is where we have, once again, stepped to the edge of the veil — past which, the language of logic that brought us here cannot go any further. These data points measuring our emotional states and considering our unique perceptions of the passing of time, are the echoing signals from the intimate, subjective experiences that cannot be measured; that can only be experienced or understood by ourselves alone.

These rhythms in our heart are not just an index of emotional states, they’re a library of identities.

Groove Is In The Heart

The idea at the core of Heart Rate Variability is familiar to me. In keeping time, its inconsistency — not consistency — that makes music.

It’s called Feel. Bassists earn a living from perfecting it.

Playing with Feel was the most important lesson I learned as a young bass player. Though many preached it to me, I didn’t begin to understand it until it was shown to me through the deeply spiritual and incredibly dexterous bass virtuoso, Victor Wooten.

So what is Feel? Feel comes from groove. Groove comes from the pocket.

It’s confusing, I know. Let’s start at the bottom. What is the pocket?

The pocket is what gives rhythm sophistication, if you keep it simple. The pocket is how you dance with the space between the clicks of the metronome. The pocket is your ability to wiggle with or stretch out into the fluidity of time — without breaking it.

If time is a river, you can float or you can swim.

A musician’s character is determined, above all else, by where & how they play with their own unique pocket in time — how they swim through its currents. This is what rappers call flow, what bassists call groove, and it all ladders up to what we know as feel.

It’s the splash of Elton’s mischievous, staccato stabs of the piano keys in Bennie And The Jets that make him sound like Elton John.

Let’s play, says his feel.

It’s the laid back waves of how Questlove hammers the kit on D’Angelo’s Chicken Grease that make him sound like Questlove.

Be cool, says his feel.

It’s the white caps ripping on the surface of Angus Young’s tempo-pushing opening riff of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck that make AC/DC sound like AC/DC.

Faster, says his feel.

It’s the hoppy slides of Tina Weymouth bouncing bass playing on the beat of Talking Heads’ Making Flippy Floppy that make Talking Heads sound like Talking Heads.

Perk up, says her feel.

What might your feel be? If you don’t know the answer, you might know where to go looking.

Your Feel lives in your Heart.

I believe that the Heart holds a library of the personality archetypes we embody. I believe the rhythms kept in the beats of our hearts hold the memories of the ways we were and in turn, who we might become at any moment. I believe this remembering is among the purposes of the cluster of neurons that live inside on the heart.

At times, we may play the Hero. At others, the Villain, the Lover, the Victim, the Sage. All of these ways of being carry their own feel, their own signature heart beat. Once activated, the pulsing electric, rhythmic, and hormonal signals emerge from the Heart to affect the conditions of the rest of the body, including the brain, which then constructs a story in its Language of Logic to make sense of the way the Heart makes us feel.

Consider the hangover. Ugh.

Waking up feeling a deep well of anxiety prompting my brain to scan through memories of the night before in search of a mistake to explain this untethered sense of shame. Without fail, my brain will find something to hook onto. That moment I called someone by the wrong name or shared something too vulnerable or risked a joke made in poor taste or failed to reciprocate buying a round at the bar. 

Whatever memory I can dig up, it anchors the anxiety and becomes my mental fixation for the rest of the day — or at least, until the feeling of anxiety subsides. More often than not, the simple dissipation of the feeling or the confused responses to my apologetic texts would signal to me that the story binding me these fears was one of delusion.

The anxiety is more real than the facts we attach to it.

With hangovers, our bodies work to metabolize the alcohol in our system, making our blood more acidic, which in turn affects the heart muscle’s ability to contract. That sense of anxiety comes from the heart struggling to beat, disrupting its rhythms and forcing the sympathetic nerve to push it, bringing us into negative emotional states. That signal is then sent up to the brain, which does what it does…constructs a story that explains why we feel what we feel.

Where Empathy Comes In

Something bothered me about the The Time-Emotion Paradox study by Professor Droit-Volent and Sandrine Gil. A small, but nagging detail in the findings didn’t seem to fit with the rest of their results — seemed to undercut the whole principle even.

They found that when participants were asked to hold a pen between their lips, they lost their empathetic connection with the faces they were being shown. 

In the research team’s own words:

The fact that emotion perceived in others produces the same emotion in the perceiver arises from a brain circuit that is specialized for mimicry. There is evidence that people involuntarily mimic perceived facial expressions…However, in one condition, imitation remained spontaneous, while, in the other, imitation was inhibited by asking the participants to hold a pen between their lips.

The results show that, in the spontaneous imitation condition [no pen in mouth], the presentation duration of angry and happy faces was significantly overestimated and that this overestimation was greater for anger than for happiness…By contrast, in the inhibited imitation condition [pen in mouth], the difference between the emotional and the neutral faces was close to zero, thus indicating that there was no temporal distortion [change in perception of time] when imitation was inhibited.

Further, they also reference a separate study by the University of Clermont-Ferrand, which found that “individuals are more likely to imitate the gestures and emotions of people they identify with or wish to associate with.” This was reflected in the apparent racial biases of participants, whose perceptions of time were more affected by faces that shared their same race than by faces that were of a different racial identity. 

The research team’s conclusion on this matter: “Our results suggest that we are not motivated to empathize with everybody.” The implication of this being that the empathy arises from the firing of mirror neurons in our brain only when we care enough to let them.

How discouraging.

So, is it that our natural inclinations toward looking for ourselves in others the key to empathy? That we are only really capable of connecting with other people if we can see ourselves in their image? 

Is empathy just selfishness with extra steps?

No.

What these results show is not a limitation in the human faculty to understand each other, but the limitations of the objective, reductionist approach to understanding ourselves that is so vital to the scientific inquiry of a laboratory.

There is something missing from the data: the physical presence of other human beings. All the participants had to connect with were photographs of other people. 

It’s a fair limitation of the study considering how impossible it would be to make people physically appear and disappear within 400 milliseconds. It’s also good science to reduce the variables down to the core of what’s being measured. 

Good science, after all, creates more questions than it does answers. Holding space for results we may not expect or like is what births new insights — like the grain of sand that frustrates the oyster enough to make a pearl.

The pen in the mouth. Inhibiting the experience of empathy. This is the grain of sand. How does it become the pearl? When add to it the question of what else was missing. 

What was missing, was the opportunity for participants to experience Empathy by connecting through the Heart.

The limitations of bias aren’t a fact of humans, they’re a fact of the brain. 

Hearts To Hearts

What happens when we are physically present with each other? 

A collection of studies reveals some stunning indicators. 

In 2017, an article published in Nature explored the various manners in which our mere presence or physical contact with others creates synchronizations in the beating of our hearts among other biorhythms:

Recently, an increasing number of studies have explored the physiological mechanisms that underlie social synchrony. 

These studies have shown that group synchrony is accompanied by cardiac rhythms that are synchronized between active participants and bystanders during collective rituals and people collectively watching emotional movies. 

In addition, cardiac and respiratory synchronization was found to underlie interpersonal action coordination during choir singing.

Similarly, dual synchrony between romantic dyads was associated with cardiac and respiratory coupling during gazing and imitation tasks and even simply when the two members of the couple are together, suggesting that the mere presence of one’s partner may trigger heart rate synchrony.

I would also add to this list the beautiful insights from studies of mothers and infants sharing a synchronized heartbeat together, often cited as the primary reason behind the importance of skin-to-skin contact immediately following childbirth.

Other research has found that the connective property of the heart is fundamental to the nature of its cellular tissue — finding that heart cells from entirely separate bodies will synchronize to the same beat when placed together in a petri dish.

The beats in our hearts that tell us who we are, bleed out to become the shared rhythms that tell us who we are together.

We can see that our hearts synchronize in each other’s presence. What a beautiful fact. Does it follow, then, that the we might — with practice — learn to listen to each other through the Heart? How can we bypass the Head’s need to explain and connect with each other in how presence feels?

Playing Beyond The Veil

That day in the recital hall when time warped around me became just one of many links in a long chain of sessions of self-quarantined training. I spent hours upon hours to explore the subjective space of being alone with myself.

I’d been prepping to apply to Berklee College of Music to take the first steps toward a career as a professional musician. I studied furiously and looked for all the help I could find. At some point in my studies, I learned of a secret bootleg book that held a near mythic status with jazz musicians. It was called The Real Book.

The Real Book is sort of the jazz version of a karaoke machine. It has all the sheet music and chord charts for the most popular songs needed in every professional musician’s repertoire since the sixties. Any player worth their salt would have these tunes memorized or ready to read at a moment’s notice on the gig. If you didn’t know them, you didn’t know the language of the pros.

I got my hands on one and started grinding through the tunes. These were not modern songs. They were dated, but beloved. Duke Ellington’s big band epic in harmonic minor, “Caravan”. Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael’s heart tickling ballad “Skylark”. They all got played.

Bear in mind, this was in the early 2000s before the launch of of music streaming and P2P file sharing like Napster made all recorded music available at the click of a mouse or slide of a thumb. So, for many of these songs, I didn’t have a clue what they really sounded like outside of the notes on the page. The work of remembering every note and chord was taxing on the brain, but over time, I developed the skill.

The day finally came and I arrived for my start at Berklee. I stepped eagerly into my first one-on-one lesson with this notoriously difficult teacher I’d heard had taught a couple of my bass idols. I was ready.

“Do you have a Real Book?” he asked me as I settled into the stool in the corner of his office. I nodded my head. 

“Good” he replied, “can I see it?” 

I pulled my worn copy out of my bag and handed it to him. He tossed it right in the trash. Didn’t even look at it when he threw it in.

“If you want to really learn how to play, you’re going to have to learn to listen” was the last thing that came out of his mouth that lesson. The rest came from his hands on his instrument. The rest was music.

The Language of Logic can only take us so far. Whether its communicated through markings on a page or words from our mouths, it binds us to our brains — keeps us in our Heads.

To connect with each other through the Head is to connect with abstracted versions of ourselves. The distances between us are never truly bridged.

Music fills the gap.

It’s why we experience such catharsis and shared connection dancing together in fields at concerts. It’s why we share songs with each other as we fall in love — and why we trust others when they share the songs we love.

Music speaks the Language of the Heart — and my life in Music forced me to learn to listen for it and to speak with it.

First, by chasing my idols. Listening to their playing to experience how they felt the passing of time. How they sit in their pocket to create their Feel.

Then, by playing in the presence of others in total improvisation. Feeling their anticipations and responding to their musical suggestions. How we, together, sit in a shared pocket of time to create a unified Feel.

Later, by standing in the energy of an audience. Holding their desire for comfort and surprise at the hands of the music they came to see. How beginning with an audible breath in their silence slows time with anticipation invites the audience into the pocket in which we’ll play. How the delight, for them, is in the unexpected, the novelty of the performer’s Feel.

How much of this is in the sound — and how much of this is in the presence?

When we come together to feel the same, regardless of the differences in what we think, we pass through the opening in our Hearts to find each other in one shared adventure — and return with our own stories to tell to our Brains.

What We’re Missing

And so now we return to where we started: alone together in the experience of COVID quarantine isolation. Our interactions reduced to two-dimensional avatars presented to each other through digital devices, all made in the image of our cerebral selves, operating according to the scripture of their own language of logic. Ones and zeroes. 

This is the tech that has made our world today.

Is the Heart coded into our tech? I don’t believe it is. I do believe that absence is what brought us here.

The incompleteness of its ability to connect us when we are apart reveals this truth — and as we could expect, it’s a truth felt in our Hearts even if we are at a loss of words to describe it in our Heads.

My experiences in quarantine have brought me smiles, to be sure. I’ve never been as in-touch with family and friends from bygone eras as I am now. Bouncing from video conference to video conference has become my routine stretching from morning to evening. 

Through the restraints of their being just out-of-touch, I’ve felt an opening in me. I want to hug them like I never did before. I want to hold their hands like I never did before. I want to bask in their presence of just being there. 

I find myself reaching into the spaces where other people once stood, seeking that feeling of human connection I didn’t know I had until it was gone. The reaching comes from my Heart. 

When these sentiments are expressed back to me over the screen, the reaching only extends further.

In seeking what we’re missing with human connection, the strength of our Hearts has grown. Imagine the world we will make now that we can speak its language.