2the hearts rhythms can facilitate a rapid shift to the psychophysiological coherence mode, withprofound system-wide consequences.In the light of these ideas, we can now postulate that information relative to global-scaleintegration (the organization and function of the body as whole) is encoded in the interbeatintervals of the heartbeat. Thus, the heart effectively acts as the central conductor of rhythmicactivity in the body: the neural, hormonal, biophysical, and energetic patterns generated by thehearts rhythmic activity provide a global synchronizing signal for the system as a whole.Neurological InteractionsOf all the organs in the body, the heart has the most extensive neural connection with thebrain. Until relatively recently, much attention in biology has been focused on understandinghow the brain regulates all organs in the body, including the heart. However, as discussed above,more recent understandings have begun to portray quite a different picture, in which the heartactually exerts a significant influence on the brain. In this section we describe the various waysin which the heart affects the brain and body via neurological pathways, and we examine inparticular its influence on the activity and function of higher brain centers and processes. In orderto understand this heartbrain relationship, it is necessary, first, to review some recent findingsof how the brain processes information and how the organization of neurological activity iscritical to brain function. This organization can be described in terms of the three concepts ofcoherence introduced at the beginning of this article: coherence as global order, asautocoherence, and as cross-coherence.The brain is often analogized to the functions of a computer. But in terms of informationprocessing and computation the brain is nothing like a digital computer. It does not assemblethoughts and feelings from digitized bits of serial data. Rather, the brain is more like an analogprocessor that relates whole patterns and concepts to one another; it looks for similarities,differences, or relationships between them. The brain is a highly efficient processor and analyzerof information that is exquisitely sensitive to noveltyto rate of change and to the differencebetween patterns.At the macro-level of organization, global coherence must be present in order for the brainand nervous system to function efficiently and effectively. This means that the neural activity,which encodes information, must be stable and coordinated. It also means that the variouscenters within the brain must be able to dynamically synchronize their activity in order forinformation to be smoothly processed and perceived.For example, autocoherence and cross-coherence in the electrical activity of diverse regionsof the brain are necessary for sensory perception to occur. Our coherent perception of an objectin the external world actually comes from millions of units of fragmented sensory informationthat are made globally coherent by being brought together and organized into a single consciousexperience.INTEGRAL REVIEWDecember 2009Vol. 5, No. 2A depiction of such macro-scale organization of neural activity is offered by studies using theelectroencephalogram (EEG), which measures macro-scale activity occurring in the dendriticfields of the neurons. These fields reflect excitatory or inhibitory synaptic action over a largenumber of neurons. (A single scalp electrode provides estimates of synaptic action averaged overtissue masses containing between 10 million and 1 billion neurons.) There is a voluminousliterature concerning the