an exercise in how to exercise

11 March 2005 at 17:01 (General)

yesterday I had a prac where, as a small group of seven people we have to design our own experiment to measure something to do with the cardiovascular system.  After about an hour of disagreeing on what exactly we were going to do I came up with a hypothesis to match our ideas:

“mental stress will have a greater impact on someones heart rate when they are standing up then when they are lying down”

I was told by a group member that this was too simple and we needed to flesh it out in order for it to meet the mark.  Fair enough I wasn’t going to argue..

so after the person who advised me of my error finished arguing and being confused another group member came up with:

“The application of mental stress will increase the heart rate.  the increase in hear rate will be greater in standing people than in people who are lying down”

Fair call.  pretty much says the same thing just using a few more words.

So I go and summon our demonstrator and she comes over, reads though it and starts discussing how we were going to go about measuring such changes.

Just before she leaves she asks to have another look at our hypothesis and suggests that it probably doesn’t need to be two sentences.  She recommends we simplify it to:

“Mental stress will increase the heart rate to a greater degree when standing than when lying.”

I gave a chuckle, seeing as it was eerily similar to something i’d heard before…

I wished I’d been wearing a hear rate monitor because there was a noticeable increase in heart rate due to mental/emotional stress. I guess pracs aren’t only about learning how to work through difficult science but also about learning how to work with difficult people.