Heart rhythm may determine a person's wisdom, according to new research showing that fluctuations of heartbeats can significantly impact judgment.
Researchers from the University of Waterloo say that their latest findings suggest the heart and brain collaborate to promote wise decision-making.
"Our research shows that wise reasoning is not exclusively a function of the mind and cognitive ability," said Igor Grossmann, professor of psychology at Waterloo and lead author of the study.
"We found that people who have greater heart rate variability and who are able to think about social problems from a distanced viewpoint demonstrate a greater capacity for wise reasoning," he added.
The latest findings, which show that heart rate variation and cognition work together in reasoning, support previous studies suggesting that psychophysiology can influence wise judgment.
The researchers defined wise judgement as being able to recognize the limits of one's knowledge, being aware of different contexts of life and their consequence, being able to acknowledge other people's points of view, and having the ability to seek reconciliation of opposing viewpoints.
Heart rate variability, which is the difference in the time interval between heartbeats, has been linked to the nervous system's control go organ functions, the research team noted.
The latest findings reveal that people with more fluctuations in heart rates were more capable of objective reasoning when asked to reflect in a third-person perspective on a particular social issues. Interestingly, the link between heart rate and wiser judgment disappeared when participants were asked to think from a first person point of view.
"As hypothesized, in the self-distanced condition, each HRV indicator was positively related to prevalence of wisdom-related reasoning (e.g., prevalence of recognition of limits of one's knowledge, recognition that the world is in flux/change, consideration of others' opinions and search for an integration of these opinions) and to balanced vs. biased attributions (recognition of situational and dispositional factors vs. focus on dispositional factors alone). In contrast, there was no relationship between these variables in the self-immersed condition," the team wrote.
"We already knew that people with greater variation in their heart rate show superior performance in the brain's executive functioning such as working memory," Grossmann said.
"However, that does not necessarily mean these people are wiser - in fact, some people may use their cognitive skills to make unwise decisions. To channel their cognitive abilities for wiser judgment, people with greater heart rate variability first need to overcome their egocentric viewpoints," he added.
The findings were published in the April 8 issue of the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
