The other part as I mentioned in my comment above, is whether they might have built a good device. You seem to think they do, so do I, and I have worked at a computer for 22 years.

I find that I like Heart Math less after reading Scott post. I would of cause have hoped to like them better after reading it, as the post have gotten me to know Heart Math better, and that should preferably have made me like Heart Math even more. But it is hardly Scotts blame, that ‘knowing Heart Math better’ makes me like them less. I’m guessing you got struck on that account.

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Example procedure for making any 2 periodic signals look roughly alike on graphs where one gets to omit and/or manipulate labels, wave sections shown, and transformations performed at will:
1. Filter out / heavily dampen frequency components that are not very close to the dominant frequency, leaving behind a signal that will appear to be mostly a sine wave with little bits of jitter in sections where all components near the dominant frequency are in phase. (This is even easier for ‘regular-wave’like signals such as heartbeats, as they typically will not have strong components near the dominant frequency.)
1. a) Perform a Fourier transform on each signal.
1. b) Find the dominant frequency of each signal (the highest spike in the transformed signal). If there are multiple frequencies tied for dominance, pick any one.
1. c) Apply a very narrow and sharp bandpass filter to each signal with the passband centered around the dominant frequency. Exact details of “very narrow and sharp” will depend on the signals provided, and this is the main step to come back and tweak if initial results are unsatisfactory. As an example starting point, pick any filter such that all frequencies more than 2% away from the dominant frequency have their amplitude reduced by at least 10 dB.
1. d) Invert the Fourier transform to get back a time-varying signal for each original signal.
2. Look for a section in each new signal such that all the non-negligible components in the passband are in phase or close to it; this section should look mostly like a sine wave with some jitter. If no satisfactory section can be found, tweak the passband filter used on that signal and note that those filters often affect phase. (This can usually be skipped for ‘regular wave’like signals, because they tend not to have non-negligible components other than the dominant frequency that can get into the passband and so they wind up without multiple component phases in need of matching.)
3. Plot the chosen section of each manipulated signal with the x-axis in periods of the dominant frequency and the y-axis normalized so the amplitudes look similar.
4. Fiddle as needed.

(source: had to take signal analysis course; was extremely rushed and not able to do well but retained the rough gist of it)

Obviously, this sort of thing is much harder to hide when one is required to show their raw data and what processing one did.

Note also that electrical engineers can be on biomedical device teams for good and legitimate reasons; for example, signal analysis (and designing devices that can perform signal processing) is also good for recognizing abnormal heart rhythms.

Report comment

However they may despite their scrazed science have built a biofeedback device which is useful. I have known several engineers highly skilled at building an engine and observing nature in order to perfect their machine (doing science), but who didn’t have a clue as to decompartmentalising that science knowledge. A Standard problem. I think the same may have happened at HeartMath, but then they thought themselves skilled and proceeded down a crazy road doing ‘science’ (not that I know what came first, crazy science or HRV devices from them). I think they should have their due credit for building the emWave device – whether they stole the idea of biofeedback HRV or themselves decided to measure heart rate of meditating people – found HRV – and then built a biofeedback device for HRV.

I have found there are good things to be said about their emWave2 device. I and my wife find it useful for stress-relief. My wife has constant thoughts in her head, and has had music her head non-stop for the last half year (except when listening to music more or less) – poor her. But she finds it easier to meditate when something beeps at her that she’s doing it right. Regarding their three steps to coherence training both I and my wife found that thinking happy thoughts messes with the process, its far more useful to visualize the heart beating faster and slowing down, and gives almost immediate feedback from the device that we are doing good. But then I can easily imagine that their science for how to best use the device is also flawed. I can feel a difference between a 10 min session where I get it to beep happily (high HRV) and where I fail to get it beeping. That also goes if I don’t hear the beeps (but read results after session). Or so I think.

Regarding sensitivity of their emWave2 device their ear sensor works for me, whereas a brand new Polar bluetooth H7 sensor + app does not work for me. I believe I have thick skin and sensors have some difficulty getting a good signal. This is just to say, even crazy people sometimes get it right.

But please, if you have money to donate I’m all with Scott that HeartMath is probably not best value for money for furthering HRV science.

Report comment

Report comment

Agreed there is a level of sophistication at which HeartMath’s website raises flags, but it’s a much subtler level than the orgonics people.

Report comment

Report comment

However, the claim is made that intention altered the absorbance over 3x what would be expected from complete denaturation by other methods. That is flat out wrong.
A 20 ug/ml double stranded DNA sample should have an absorbance of around 0.4, so we will assume that we’re reading tenths on the y-axis. Single stranded DNA will absorb about 37% higher than the same amount of double stranded DNA. Tripling that effect would mean more than a 100% increase in the 260nm absorption. This would jack up the reading above 0.8, if the implied scaling is correct. Regardless of the missing units on the graph, that tripling is clearly not the case.

Someone asked earlier if anyone knew how much placental DNA would spontaneously denature. The answers is: It depends on what the DNA is suspended in.

I checked Sigma, and they no longer sell placental DNA in a lyophilized form, if they ever did, so this is a bit of speculation. It’s common to ship lyophilized DNA with salt content, so when it is reconstituted the DNA is appropriately buffered in TE, but it’s not always the case. The sample in the paper was reconstitituted with deionized water. DNA in deionized water will spontaneously denature. The backbone has a very strong negative charge from all of the phosphates, and without cations in solution to deal with the charge, the strands will separate on their own.

By the same token, in a correct buffer DNA will spontaneously renature due to the complementarity of base pairs.

The upshot of that, is there is a real time sensitivity to DNA denaturation, and renaturation, as well as a dependence on the aqueous environment of the DNA.

Regardless of what their claims are, they don’t understand the system that they are trying to take measurements with.

I remember the initial report on their website when they were getting this study rolling. In that case, they were using an ND-1000 NanoDrop as their UV-VIS system. (Awesome machine, by the way!)

They were performing analogous experiments, but the DNA concentration was low, pretty much at the detection threshold of the instrument. At those low levels, small changes in absorbance would correspond to large changes in % denaturation, and that’s exactly what they reported. The problem: They didn’t read the manual. According to documentation, the machine is accurate to +/- 0.02 absorbance units (if I remember correctly). All of the changes they were recording were within that 0.02 instrument accuracy wobble.

So, I would guess one of two things:

They REALLY understand what they are doing, and game things just right given that knowledge. (Unlikely.)

They have no idea what they are doing, don’t understand the systems that they are using, and are looking for proof to justify rather than falsify their conclusions because they are just so super-excited about what they BELIEVE they have discovered. (Likely.)

Report comment