Your wisdom may be determined by how your heart beats. Variation in beats and the thinking process allows serious issues to be considered in depth. Igor Grossman – a Waterloo psychology Professor – has provided the ground-breaking studies and has identified how wise judgements can be impacted by psychophysiology.
The professor explained that when a person has a variability on their heart rate, they will also be able to show logical thought. This is the first study that has been able to show that a variable heart beat allows less bias when passing judgement. It is an extension of previous studies that have shown how wise judgements have been made.
One area of wise judgements is considered to be the ability to understand the limit of your personal wisdom, as well as to realize the benefits of accepting the views of others especially when they don’t fall in line with your own.
The study is the first to show that the physiology of the heart, specifically the variability of heart rate during low physical activity, is related to less biased, wiser judgment. Image is for illustrative purposes only.
Previously it was a cardiac vagal tone that was thought to be the catalyst for high-level executive functioning. The question now is whether or not a heart rate variability is a link to wise reasoning and it seems that under certain circumstances it can be. Egotistical impulses will be overcome and the art of reason will take over. This only tends to be the case however when the issue is self-distanced rather than self-immersed.
With further tests, it was shown that there was a link between HRV recordings and the idea that opinions can change yet with self -immersed conditions there was not a relationship.
Source: Nick Manning – University of Waterloo / Original Research article; journal.frontiersin.org