For millennia, human culture has associated the heart with an intuitive sense of truth and knowing the right life path. I have come to suspect the heart helps determine what’s relevant.  And yet, it is a stunningly consistent feature of Western ‘scientism’ — the belief that truth is only found through science — that all challenges to head-centric cognition are ruthlessly suppressed, shamed and denigrated. Capitalism comes from the Latin word ‘capitalis’, meaning ‘of the head’. I suspect that nine out of ten people when asked what the human heart does will reply something to the effect of 'it pumps blood'.

Western culture seemingly understands that the heart’s job is essential, but more as a plumber than a knowledge worker.

Despite this ignorance, we live saturated in metaphorical references to the heart. Most of them directly relate to the foundations of a meaningful life: truth, guidance, and love. Follow your heart, heart’s desire, open-hearted; the list is endless. Why do these kinds of idioms relate to our hearts and not the liver or kidneys? Western culture seemingly understands that the heart’s job is essential, but more as a plumber than a knowledge worker.

In The Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man longs for a human heart in his mechanical body. The Iron Giant starts the story as a weapon. His newfound heart metaphorically leads it to make the ultimate sacrifice, embracing love and peace over destruction. Perhaps the best example is The Wild Robot, a 2024 animated movie based on the children’s book by Peter Brown. After being stranded in nature, a service robot learns to nurture life and communicate with the natural world. At one point, the robot even points to her chest and remarks how her cognition has moved from head-centric programming to her intuitive heart. Our culture is increasingly reflecting our unconscious longing for a reunion with our hearts.

Our culture is increasingly reflecting our unconscious longing for a reunion with our hearts.

Science may be finally catching up with indigenous wisdom traditions that have long considered the heart a center of perception and cognition. Our hearts are reciprocal electromagnetic sensors. It’s why an electrocardiogram beeps with every heartbeat. What are those pulses picking up and what are they transmitting back into the world around us? Moreover, can the heart think? Multiple studies across neurocardiology and neuroscience have identified an intrinsic nervous system within the heart itself, which can  interpret information in a way that modulates brain activity, emotional processing and cognition through its neural and electromagnetic influences.

Our brain’s right hemisphere is deeply connected to the world. It controls our exploratory attention, it processes emotional and nonverbal information. Meta-analysis shows that the right hemisphere predominates in receiving and interpreting information from the heart and body. Real world experience originates in the right hemisphere (and heart), before being moved to the left for processing, then returned to the right for synthesis into a holistic context. The implication is that it is our energetic, emotional right hemisphere that tells us what to focus on, not the disconnected, analytical left.

A really good example of this concept can be found in the world of AI. Picbreeder was a project started by computer scientist Ken Stanley. Try it for yourself here. First you will be presented with a set of random pictures. Select the one that is interesting to you and click 'mutate'.

I picked the one on the top right and this was the result.

You can repeat those steps to mutate an image as many times as you like. Stanley’s research showed that Picbreeder’s users created diverse and recognizable images far faster than could be predicted by chance alone. The special evolutionary ingredient was the human decision on which picture was interesting. Our heartfelt sense for beauty produced novelty. But Stanley also discovered that the stepping stones to recognizable pictures almost never resembled the final outcome. If users tried to deliberately breed a butterfly or skull, they couldn’t do it.

You cannot ask ChatGPT, “What should I do with my life?”.

This experiment catalyzed a profound insight for Stanley. He realized users could only produce true novelty by seeking it one step at a time. It’s like crossing the river by feeling the stones with your feet. Stanley subsequently argued that few major inventions were developed with that particular breakthrough in mind. Penicillin, velcro and microwave ovens were all discovered unintentionally. They were each the result of a visionary who followed an interesting thread one single step at a time and produced unexpectedly beautiful results.  

Perhaps it’s our heart that determines what we are attracted to; what we find beautiful. And this relationship with the world produces novelty. AI doesn’t have a heart. Therefore it cannot determine what is relevant or beautiful. In environments with unlimited context that require deep embeddedness, AI gets lost in an infinite number of options. You cannot ask ChatGPT, “What should I do with my life?”. Answering that question requires infinite context on your life’s details as well as connection to these hidden forces of attraction that guide our evolution. Moreover, AI text and art lacks that true spark of humanity that means it will probably always trip our sense of the uncanny valley.

Love is an attractor force in our environment that helps us make decisions in limitlessly complex environments.

What is the heart most associated with in our culture? The answer is obviously love. The linguistic limitation on the word ‘love’ is one of the most damaging constraints on Western culture. In contrast, I am fond of the claim that Sanskrit has 96 different words for love. Love is an attractor force in our environment that helps us make decisions in limitlessly complex environments. We intuitively understand this concept when it comes to romantic partners, but we need to extend that framing to include information that we are attracted to. Whether it’s electromagnetic or in some way quantum, our hearts are probably connected to this love force in ways we don’t yet fully understand. Whatever that embodied connection ultimately proves to be, AI currently lacks it.

This paradigm shift will be reflected in moving away from being driven by dead, abstract ‘head’ metrics like engagement and profitability, towards the heart’s desire pursuit of vibrant novelty.

A reunion with limitless potential will be reached if (and it’s a big if) the ‘brain’ of AI can be brought back under the guidance of our uniquely human heart. This paradigm shift will be reflected in moving away from being driven by dead, abstract ‘head’ metrics like engagement and profitability, towards the heart’s desire pursuit of vibrant novelty. This approach has the potential to create unexpected abundance and beauty — as the Picbreeder experiment illustrates. If we pursue the abstract we will become equally lifeless. If we pursue what we love, we will come alive. Rather than imprisoning ourselves in a lifeless technological singularity of our own creation, there might even be something revolutionary to be gained from aligning ourselves with the vibrant power of love. As priest, palaeontologist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard De Chardin put it: 

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”