What it Means to Follow Your Heart (According to the Little Voice in the Back of Your Head)
By Rachel Orenstein UA’24 and Jim Stellar
There is a piece of advice which seems to permeate every possible situation, an applicable answer to any uncertainty in any sphere of life. It is vague but timeless. It is the most common piece of advice Rachel heard in the tailwinds of her undergraduate career, in some variation or another, across a spectrum of personal advisors.
“Just follow your heart.”
Okay. Sure. But how?
It can be frustrating to hear. It is not as though your heart steps out of your chest, grabs your hand, and chases after some personal greatness with you in tow. There is no trail to follow, no list of steps written down specifically for you. “Follow your heart.” What a cop-out piece of advice! What a non-answer. And yet, worst of all, this suggestion is entirely sound. Following your heart is the best thing you can do. It is what she herself now advises to others in a similar position – facing graduation and the independence of a career, armed with all the resources associated with education, with a strong sense of self, yet entirely lost.
If you are to truly “follow your heart,” it may be helpful to understand exactly what that means. In an email to Jim discussing this idea (as well as what to do with her own life), Rachel wrote the following:
“I’m coming to suspect those ‘nagging thoughts’ in the back of my head might be what people refer to as the ‘heart’ I’m supposed to follow. But instead of my chest, the feeling is manifesting in the back of my skull. (The monkey brain? Subliminal background messaging from my own subconscious? Not sure. Definitely the limbic system, though.)”
If there is a tagline for the lab, under which this blog generally sits, it is the oft repeated (by us) quote from the seventeenth-century thinker Blaise Pascal: “The heart has reasons of which reason does not know.” Of course, this also refers to the limbic system, as any neuroscientist would say, but the idea of a perceived location in the “back of the skull” is also an interesting reference. It implies the older part of the brain, where the life-mediating areas of respiration and feeding exist, are trying to tell the rational, forward-thinking part of the brain something, such as what to do immediately after graduation from college. This is not an academic issue for anyone who is in her senior year of college or who has just graduated. The perceived location of this little voice is not an “academic” issue to neuroscientists.
In truth, it is not really an issue at all. It is simply a way of thinking about something that is not as intuitively understood as it perhaps should be. A quiet guide in the background of our desires, barely noticeable but influential nonetheless: the “heart,” as it is symbolically rationalized. Much like the rest of those early brain structures, the way we symbolically consider our conscious existence may directly reflect physical structures.
The modern human brain is built on layers of evolution, as exemplified by the “Triune Brain” model developed by neuroscientist Paul MaClean in the 1960’s. The core, our “reptilian” brain, contains the brain stem and cerebellum, responsible for autopilot and the fight-or-flight response using breathing and coordination – essentially, the involuntary processes of our body. The paleomammalian layer, containing the hippocampus and the amygdala, among others, is responsible for the limbic system. Emotions, most notably social bonding and learning from experiences (memory), reside here. The third and most recent layer is the neomammalian brain, or the neocortex. This structure is what differentiates us from our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, providing the capacity for language, planning, reason, and abstract thought. These mental processes require a kind of symbolic logic.
But what is symbolic logic?
Spatial mapping.
This little voice in the “back of the skull” may truly exist in an inner structure on which the conscious part of the brain operates. It is then projected onto the self-aware neocortex for metacognitive consideration. So, the brain might therefore represent our emotional (limbic system) processes in a way that mirrors its physical processes. Let us explain.
As Jim likes to say, his wife is “like a rose.” For this comparison to be true, his brain must categorize both a rose and his wife within the same concept. Beauty, perhaps. Everything the brain knows to be true about roses and his wife, through personal experience as well as social connotations and educational insistence from a young age, is compiled into his connection of the two. Within his brain, Jim’s wife and the most beautiful flowers occupy the same conceptual space.
In a similar vein, a central link in the brain weighing decisions between two other sections of the brain is conveyed to the rational, conscious neo-cortex as the feeling of metaphorically “weighing” or “balancing” two options. All parts of the brain are made from neurons, but it seems that the cerebral cortex is required for the kinds of symbolic logic that underlie attributional models of the world like the representations made in language and thinking. The word “key” does not actually physically exist, but that particular collection of letters, which may or may not physically exist as pencil markings on a paper (themselves symbolic), is understood as well as any other word in any other language to its own speakers. Or, as another example just to clarify what we mean: our symbolic understanding of consciousness (not our actual consciousness, but symbolic mental imagery perceiving it) as some all-encompassing, higher-level combination of thoughts and emotions may just represent the physical sensation of neuron-interactivity. It is an involuntary process to which we are accustomed, and so the physical feeling is ignored just like breathing or digestion without blockage (which is when pain occasionally arises). When reminded of breathing, it becomes somewhat voluntary; when reminded of brain activity (perhaps by the prompt of a blank page on which a student must write an essay), thinking also becomes slightly more voluntary.
But how does the cortex represent the more emotional processes of the limbic system such as the emotional rewards and punishments associated with experiences? For example, how does the memory of a good or a bad internship guide cognitive career planning? And why does it seem like a “little voice” and of all places in the “back of the head?” Why, more commonly, is it known as “the heart?”
Well, “the heart and the head” is truly “the head and the head,” but in different ways. Rational decision-making from the neomammalian neo-cortex (“reason”) relies on the perceptions of the limbic system in the lower brain region (“the heart,” which chooses in ways that reason itself does not precisely understand, according to Blaise Pascal in our favorite quote from above). To “follow your heart” is to acknowledge the influence of the limbic system on decision-making. To properly do this, particularly in choosing a career path after an undergraduate education brimming with professional experiences, one should consciously reflect on experience. This blog intends to provide students with a space to do just that, among other goals.
In another email to Jim regarding his mentorship and Rachel’s career path, she wrote, “life is just experience, so experiential education is perhaps the most direct way to inform a life path.” Jim promptly connected that “…our vaunted cognitive powers may have been designed to follow our emotional reactions because that is what life is – such reactions to experiences. David Hume was right. This idea gives more power to the ‘value network of cortical regions’ that we wrote about in our posters and long blogs.” Although emails seem to be an effective reflection space for the two of us, it is through writing more generally that the brain is provided its most direct, uninterrupted route through which to project a symbolic logic of inner “gut” feelings provided by the limbic system onto the conscious mind. Understanding your heart well enough to “follow” it requires time, reflection, and persistent self-awareness. Completion of an internship, for example, informs a career path true to your heart only if you understand why you feel a certain way about the experience.
Fulfillment is possible, and it feels like a heeded heart smiling within your chest. The little voice in the back of your head may seem like a small, nagging thought, but it is imperative that you listen to absolutely whatever it says (or its silence, which is just as telling). Consider those words which rise from the deeply instinctual part of your brain – so deep it feels like your beating heart – because they truly will guide you. In any search, follow what you know. Follow your heart.
