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MOTIVATION:

Everyday we experience random changes in our heart rate. Certain things get our  heart to race, such as.. drinking too much coffee, or listening to intensely moving music. Certain things get us feeling mellow and calm, such as.. watching a baby laugh, or practicing yoga. Why does this happen? Is it only because of external factors? Can an individual's body make-up/genetics/structure have any influence on heart rate? Can we consciously control how fast or frequent our heart beats?

OBSERVATIONS:

INTERPRETATIONS:

Michelle: My pulse was initially very high(95.3).  In order to determine if i could change my hear rate, i tried to listen to "exciting"music, to test if my heart rate could increase, and tried to breathing techniques and listening to "calming" music to see if i could decrease my heart rate. Although listening to "exciting" music seemed to increase my heart rate-my heart-rate increased from 95.3 to 100.5 listening to "calming" music didnt seem to decrease my heart rate-my heart rate only decreased from 100.5 to 99.8 This however, was still higher than my initial heart rate.  However, when I tried breathing heavily, I noticed a significant decrease in heart rate-from 95.3 to 50.6. I think that breathing heavily decreased my heart rate more than listening to calm music because it was a more direct, "active" attempt to change my heart rate. Although listening to calm music may have decreased my heart rate, it was not significant enough to determine if there was any real change.

Yashaswini: My initial heart rate was relatively low, around 73.9. I consciously tried increasing my rate by thinking of a loved one for a minute. I could feel my veins pounding and on measuring the data recorded, I observed my heart rate had gone up to 102. 9!
In the second part of my experiment, I listened to classical music on my iPod with my eyes closed, while I consciously tried to control my breathing. I could initially feel my veins throbbing a lot, but after a while, my heart rate slowed down to 82.1! Even though this was still significantly higher than my initial heart rate of 73.9, it had gone down a lot compared to the rate it had reached on being stimulated by thought and intense emotion.

CONCLUSION
After observing the effects loud, bass music, deep breathing, calm music and emotion/thought had on the two of us, we can conclude that our heart rate can be altered, for a short duration, by external factors. We’re not sure if this alteration can be sustained for a long period of time, i.e. if our heart rates can be controlled over a large period of time. Also, we feel that listening to loud music with heavy bass and being over powered by intense emotions increased the tension in our.. muscles (?) and stimulated the release of adrenalin, the “fight or flight” hormone. This is probably what increased our heart rate.
Also, listening to calm music did not have the same effect on the two of us. While the change in Yashaswini’s heart rate was significantly noticeable, the change in Michelle’s was almost negligible. Thus, we also conclude that genetic factors and individual body make-up also affect what factors affect our heart rates and to what extent.