Oneself as a Biological Entity. I. The Heart and Its Control

We didn't have one hypothesis overall, but instead introduced different variables and created hypotheses for each.

(We did not get to do as many trials as we would have liked to, but our thumb pressure reader thing was malfunctioning. We did fix this, however.)

Rachel's regular BPM was 75.

VARIABLE ONE: Holding breath. We did two parts for each trial: one while holding breath, and one immediately after, each for 30 s. We hypothesized that while Rachel held her breath, her BPM would slow down to "ration" the oxygen she had, and immediately after exhaling her BPM would speed up to compensate.

Trial One, part one: 37 BPM

Part two: 48 BPM

This was done with the first, malfunctioning thumb pressure reader. We essentially discarded this data, but have informally reported it here.

Trial 2.1: 70 BPM

Part 2.2: Immediately after stopping holding her breath, Rachel's BPM dropped to 40, then jumped to 100 BPM, leveled off to 80

Trial 3.1: 70 BPM

Part 3.2: Initial drop to 30, then rose to 95, and leveled off at 80.

Therefore, our hypothesis was correct. We did not anticipate, however, the initial drop in BPM in part two of each trial. We believe this may be because once Rachel exhaled, she had less oxygen than even before. So, before her BPM could regularize itself, it had to "readjust."

SECOND VARIABLE: Hilarious you-tube videos.

Hypothesis: Rachel's BPM would raise while watching the videos because excitement and BPM have a positive correlation.

Rachel's BPM rose about 5 to 80 BPM. The you-tube videos did not have as much of an effect as we anticipated (we thought her laughter and the anticipation of seeing something reliably amusing would raise it further). But perhaps, because she was too familiar with them (and the pretense of the experimental setting) affected the data.

THIRD VARIABLE: Patti Smith.

Hypothesis: Rachel's BPM would raise substantially due to the rockin' sounds of punk-rock goddess Patti Smith.

Rachel's BPM, again, rose about 5 to 80 BPM. While it did raise a bit more (about 85) during particularly loud or quick segments, this result was, like our youtube variable, not as high as we had anticipated.

FOURTH VARIABLE: Rachel's reaction to University of Florida/John Kerry tasing video.

Hypothesis: Rachel's BPM would raise a lot because this video is disturbing, sad, and troubling.

In this case, Rachel's BPM did raise substantially: off the charts, to above 100. It had small spurts, perhaps related to Rachel knowing what would happen in the video (she was familiar with the story), but still being unable to anticipate the full volatility of her reaction.

We would have liked to perform more experiments (and perhaps with more participants) if we'd had more time. It would be interesting to see differing reactions to some of these variables as, for example, Andy had never heard of Patti Smith, and perhaps other participants would not have been so upset (or more upset) by the tasing video.

CHEERS,

Andy, Caitlin, and Rachel

Luisana, Eri, Katie

Hypothesis:

Everyday activities have different effects on the heart. Things that woud be enjoyed would lead to a slower heart rate. Things that would cause discomfort or need additional energy to perofrm would cause the heart to undergo a faster heart rate.

Conclusion:

Watching something that causes tension or experiencing physical exertion definitely shows signs of accelerated heart rates. Something that evokes endearment makes one more relaxed and allows them to function with a slower heart rate.

Kaitlin Cough, Elizabeth Harnett

We first thought of different activities that would effect our heart rate, and we came up with: Jumping Jacks, Sitting down, Lying down on the table, talking, listening to classical music, holding our breath and watching something funny on Youtube. We decided that each of us would do one minute trial for each type of actitivity. First we measured our resting heart rate so that we could compare it to the other activities.

Kaitlin's resting heart rate: between 68 and 75 (heart rate), 0-25 (pressure)

Elizabeth' resting heart rate: around 80 (heart rate), 0-20 (pressure)

We had some ideas about heart rate before we started the lab. First, we believed that the fluctuation of the alititude was directly correlated to the heart rate: the higher the heart rate, the higher the altitude of the wave. We thought that every pump of the heart made the graph go up (the dialostic pressure). We also noticed with the resting heart rate that when you take a deep breath your heart rate shoots up as does the pressure because of the influx of oxygen.

Here are some of our trials:

Lying on table for one minute:

Kaitlin: 60-70 (heart rate), 0-15 (pressure)

Elizabeth: 70 (heart rate) 0-5 (pressure)

Talking to each other for one minute:

Kaitlin: When talking normally between 70-80 heart rate, 0-20 pressure

Elizabeth: 70-80 for the steady heart rate, but was also erratic; heart rate directly correlated to subject, Pressure: average between 0-25; dips from -50-25

Observations:

Found that depending on subjects we were talking about (crew! devils!) heart rate drops dramatically (20 beats)

Directly correlated between pressure and heart rate

Perhaps related to diastolic/systolic pressure buildup/release?

Listening to Classical Music for one minute:

Kaitlin: 65 heart rate, with really low periods and some jumps, 0-5 pressure

Elizabeth: 80 heart rate, pretty balanced, 0-25 pressure

Holding Breath for one minute (or tried to):

Kaitlin: heart rate fluctuates from 0 to 400, on average around, pressure went up to around 200 when heart rate was high, went heart rate was 0 pressure was -10 to 25

Elizabeth: heart rate was very steady, around 100BPM, while pressure was also steady: around 11.4

RETRY: Kaitlin, still erratic but balanced a little more around 100, pressure -5-20

Watching something funny on Youtube for one minute:

Elizabeth: very erratic, no real average, up with laughs? Pressure -50 to 25

Kaitlin: when not laughing very low, 20 BPM, but when laughing goes all the way up to 1000?

Jumping Jacks (Jumping Jacks for a minute, record for a minute):

Elizabeth: in spurts of very high and very low, from 20-140BPM, starts to level off a bit toward the end; Pressure very high at first, begins to level off to -20-15

Kaitlin: spurts as well, 20-150 BPM, pressure very erratic -50-100

We found out that your heart rate directly effects your pressure, physical and stressful activities make your heart rate and pressure go up, whereas more relaxing things such as sitting and resting keep your heart rate down.

Our idea: We think that each wave is a beat, so when you take a breath your heart beat is faster and that's what makes the wave fluctuate.

We hypothesized that audio stimulation would cause the least increase in heart rate, mental stimulaton would cause more, and physical stimulation would cause the most. While testing each, we intensified the stimulation, getting gradually louder, or more difficult, or more demanding. We tested this hypothesis on 2 subjects. Subject 1's results are in pink. Subject 2's results are in purple.

Soft Music 73 +/- 2 57 +/- 2

Medium Music 73 +/- 2 63 +/- 4

Loud Music 73 +/- 2 70 +/- 2

Easy Math 71 +/- 3 60 +/- 3

Medium Math 72 +/- 1 64 +/- 3

Hard Math 72 +/- 1 70 +/- 5

Sitting Still 73 +/- 3 57 +/- 4

Bouncing 75 +/- 2 71 +/- 1

Criss Crossing 85 +/- 2 85 +/- 3

Summarizing our observations for subject 2, we can see that different levels of stimulation do affect heart rate. In concordance with our hypothesis, there was an increase in heart rate the most for physical and the least for audio (at least for subject 2). In the case of subject 1, there was a similar pattern, however we believe that the presence of a heart murmor may have affected her heart rate readings. Though she did increase heart rate with intensity for most of the trials, she had incredibly varying numbers and great fluctuation that was obviously impacting her average.

These findings cause us to believe that there is a connection between your pulse and your brain. We would like to do more tests to stimulate the brain and record pulse findings such as "thinking about your heart rate", visual stimulation, and stimulation of the taste buds.

This lab was an investigation of the human pulse. Who or what controls this pulse, and why does it fluctuate? To answer these questions, we measured the beats per minute of our own pulse under different conditions and in response to different stimuli.

We selected list of test conditions based on elements we thought might influence fluctuation, such as stress or thought. We compared these to our resting heart rates, which are as follows:

Samar the Beautiful: 73.96 BPM

Ruth the Not Lame: 71 BPM

Catrina the Supuhstar: 83.48 BPM

This is what we observed........

Embarassing Questions (Ruth): 99.14 BPM

Pushing on a Vein (Catrina): 59 BPM

Breath Holding (Samar): 89.67 BPM

Heavy Breathing (Ruth): 80.98 BPM

Arithmetic (Ruth): 78.67 BPM

Puzzle (Samar): 78 BPM

Tickling (Ruth): off the charts, couldn't register

Our observations suggest that outside stimuli definitely effect heart rate and pulse. Embarassing questions caused a huge leap in heart rate, probably due to a combination of embarassment and laughter. Working on a puzzle, however, did not seem to have a noticable effect on the rate of pulse. Strong emotions and physical responses seem to warrant a higher rate of pulse, but thinking hard like in arithmetic and puzzles didn't.

One new question raised was what makes certain stimuli more "upsetting" than others. There must be something internally that determines what effects pulse, and we need to make observations about the human body to determine what this is. For example, why were the questions asked embarassing? Also, we know laughter effects pulse, so we have to figure out what makes someone laugh.