Being able to count your own heartbeats correlates with better decision making

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/listening_to_your_pulse.php

by cwan • 17 years ago

17 12 17 years ago

prat• 17 years ago

Interesting. But shouldn't the title be something like "Those better at counting pulse are better at decision making". Right now it suggests that if you count before making a decision, it will be a good decision.

cwan• 17 years ago

True - thanks. I've modified it by parsing the first sentence in his post.

simonsarris• 17 years ago

How I wish we had some data on the same people, before they had their heart replaced by the new pulseless heart* and then afterwards!

* http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/...

modelic35• 17 years ago

Pulse or no pulse is not relevant for the results. They just needed some metric to measure bodily awareness.

robotrout4• 17 years ago

I found the conclusion of this author, and, presumably, the scientists, to be questionable.

Rather than to praise "the body" for "knowing 40 cards before the brain, which deck was the bad deck", I would submit that no praise is necessary.

We all learn, eventually, to discount failed trials in the experiments of daily survival. We don't quit asking out girls the first 10 times in a row we're shot down. We don't quit fishing the first 10 times we come back empty handed. We don't quit trying to light a fire, the first 10 times the spark from our rock doesn't ignite our dry grass.

We do, eventually, figure out when the game is rigged. When the girls are married, the fish are sleeping, and grass isn't really that dry, we do, eventually, give up. We're not idiots. However, we've learned that the body is not as smart as we are. Too often, it's told us to quit, when, by ignoring it, we've succeeded. The body's responses are the instinctive, reptilian responses of the cortex, while we succeed on this planet by using our mammalian frontal lobe to find less obvious solutions.

So ...

My point is that, the scientists rigged a test, where the reptilian response of our body was the correct one, and then brag about how smart our body is. In this instance, like a stopped clock, it happened to be right. But I'm not trading in my frontal lobe just yet.

modelic35• 17 years ago

I think you misinterpreted the results. The point is that better bodily awareness enhances other cognitive abilities which sounds quite reasonable.

robotrout4• 17 years ago

I fail to see how "bodily awareness" can "enhance cognitive abilities". You'll have to spell it out a little more carefully than that for me to understand you, as that sentence alone makes no logical sense to me.

I don't think they, or the author, are so far down the rabbit hole as to imply anything like that. What they are implying is more rational, but still, in my opinion, is wrong.

Being able to count your own heartbeats correlates with better decision making

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