Re: Do different games affect heart rate, such as real and a video game of pool

It sounds like you're asking me two related questions.
1) What causes heart rate to change ?
2) Do real games or video games increase one's heart rate ?

Lets start with trying to understand what sorts of things cause the heart rate to change. I'm sure you've observed that if you're playing a game such as soccer or basketball, your heart rate increases. This is because as you are running around, your muscles need more oxygen so that they can do their jobs. Your heart has to beat harder and faster to pump enough blood (which contains oxygen) to the muscles.

Heart rate doesn't JUST depend on how much running around you're doing. It can also be controlled by your state of mind. Have you ever been nervous about something ? Did you notice that you were sweating and your heart was racing, you might have felt queasy... - even though you weren't doing any running around at the time. This is due to something called your autonomic nervous system (ANS). The job of the ANS is to help control your body's internal organs such as the heart, the gut, etc. The ANS is divided up into two parts - the sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system's job is to get your body all revved up to face some challenge - it increases heart rate and blood pressure, slows down digestion, etc. The parasympathetic's job is the opposite, to cause your body to relax - increasing digestion, lowering blood pressure and heart rate, etc. These two systems are constantly active and balancing each other out, but in different situations one side is stronger than the other.

If you're interested in learning more about the autonomic nervous system, check out this site :
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/auto.html

There are other factors that control heart rate as well, but I think that for your question, these two are the keys.

So what happens when you're playing a game ? If it's an athletic game, well, obviously your muscles will need oxygen, and your heart will beat harder and faster. You'll probably also be excited during the game, so your sympathetic nervous system will be charged and will help increase your heartrate, etc. I think that you can easily get excited about a video game as well, and so your heartrate will increase, even though all you're really doing is sitting down in front of a screen. If you were to compare the heartrates of a person playing soccer in real life with that of the same person playing soccer on the playstation, my bet would be that in both of those cases the person's heartrate would be higher than when he's just standing there doing nothing. However because in a real game of soccer, the person is actually running around, I think that the person's heartrate would be higher when he was playign in real-life compared to when he was playing the computer game. For a game like pool, I think that a person could get excited enough to increase his heartrate when he was playing either virtually or in real life. I don't know if there would be a difference between the increase in heart rates when he plays virtually vs. in the real world.

Best,
Vidya Bhalodia