Wisdom is a matter of both heart and mind, according to a recent study.
The study from the University of Waterloo and the Australian Catholic University found that the fluctuations of your heartbeat may affect your wisdom, suggesting that heart rate variation and thinking process work together to enable wise reasoning about complex social issues.
The work by Igor Grossmann and colleagues breaks new ground in wisdom research by identifying conditions under which psychophysiology impacts wise judgment.
Grossmann noted that the research shows that wise reasoning is not exclusively a function of the mind and cognitive ability as they 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.
The researchers found that people with more varied heart rates were able to reason in a wiser, less biased fashion about societal problems when they were instructed to reflect on a social issue from a third-person perspective. But, when the study's participants were instructed to reason about the issue from a first-person perspective, no relationship between heart rate and wiser judgment emerged.
Grossmann added that to channel their cognitive abilities for wiser judgment, people with greater heart rate variability first need to overcome their egocentric viewpoints.
The study opens the door for further exploration of wise judgment at the intersection of physiological and cognitive research.
The research appears in the online journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
