As active and functioning members of society, we make roughly around thirty five thousand decisions in a day. Some of these decisions may be as simple as deciding what you are going to have for breakfast or maybe you are deciding what your priorities are for the day. As we all know, we all have to make decisions that might have an impact on our lives some time in the future. Decision making is a part of what we all do in society. But what most people don’t know is that the decisions that we make are directly impacted by the rate of our heart. Most of the time when we are making life changing decisions, our heart rate increases. All of a sudden, you start thinking about all the ways something could go wrong. You start thinking about everything that could mess up. If you are the kind of person who stresses about important decisions, this is the right blog essay for you to read about. Even if you are the kind of person that doesn’t stress about the decisions that you make, you could learn more about how your ability to control your heart rate and emotions could benefit you when you are making important decisions. Nonetheless, the decisions that we make in our everyday lives are directly affected by our heart rate.
In an experiment led by Dr. Rudebeck, three Rhesus monkeys were brought together to decide between receiving two rewards. The rewards were either receiving a lot of tasty juice or a little. The monkeys consistently chose to drink more juice and they made their decisions faster when their heart rate increased. In this experiment they also found that, when the monkeys’ heart rate increased then the activity of the cells in the brain would also change by either speeding up or slowing down. The more technical explanation of this would be that they found that the activity of about a sixth of the neurons in the area correlated with the fluctuations of the heart. Taking this information to mind, we can conclude that our decisions are wholly determined by our motivations, whatever that motivation may be.
In the article, “Interaction Between Decision Making And Interoceptive Representations Of Bodily Arousal In Frontal Cortex” by Atsushi Fojimoto, Elizabeth A Murray, and Peter H. Rudebeck, all three of the researchers found that as a result of the experiment that they held with the three monkeys, it was concluded that we often make better decisions when our heart rate increases. Monkeys H, N, and V all successfully chose the option that led to the greatest amount of reward on almost every trial.
The discussion in this topic is how the processes interact at the level of single neurons. In the experiment, the researchers found that the higher the heart rate and reward size that they had, the faster the reaction times would be in the macaques (the monkeys). They also discovered that there was a population of neurons in the OFC (Orbitofrontal Cortex) and in the DACC (Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex) that encoded the heart rate on each trial. As a result of this, the representations of heart rate were independent of reward value, this meant that heart rate and reward value signals are represented separately in the frontal cortex.
Works Cited:
The Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine. "How a racing heart may alter decision-making brain circuits." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 30 August 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210830140224.htm>.
K. Lambourne, P. Tomporowski, The effect of exercise-induced arousal on cognitive task performance: A meta-regression analysis. Brain Res. 1341, 12–24 (2010).
M. Wilson, M. Daly, Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future? Proc. Biol. Sci. 271, S177–S179 (2004).