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Abstract

The explosive technical advances of the 20th century were not without significant drawbacks in our interpretation of scientific knowledge. A prominent example of this was the sense of the human heart as merely a pump. In contrast to the understanding of the heart previously recognized by the most important civilizations in human history, the cardiac sciences in the 20th century deprived the heart of its pivotal role as the seat of the emotions in learning,decision-making, and intuition, which had been the implicit understanding of ancient civilizations. The heart is a sensory organ, and it acts as a sophisticated information encoding and processing center that enables it to learn, remember and make independent functional decisions. In 2014, therefore, it is somewhat embarrassing to practice in the cardiac sciences without acknowledging the electromagnetic, neuro-cardiac, biophysical, and energetic interactions of the human heart with the surrounding environment. Our new perspective is to seethe human heart as the center of a spectrum of sciences ranging from genes to galaxies.