Why Running Sharpens Our Wits

(CC) lululemon athletica/Flickr

Sometimes Sharp Wits Were Our Only Weapons

As evidence that I have too much time on my hands, I was recently wondering about the origin and evolution of human speech, and the question occurred to me, “What was the very first word?”

Human language had to begin with one word, the same way a long journey must begin with a first step. But what was it? I don’t mean the specific mix of vowels and consonants way back then, of course, but I’m sure there’s a word in contemporary English for the first utterance a human being ever made to communicate something to someone else.

It had to be something very basic and very survival-oriented. Given that, my bet for word #1 is some version of: Run. Or, more accurately, Run!! As in For your life. You could be pedantic and claim that the first “word” was actually more of a screech, and its actual meaning was “Danger!” But when the rest of the tribe or group heard it, they didn’t hunker down or retreat into a circle or try to spot the source of the danger, they took to their heels, so I decided to stick with Run.

Then I moved on to other, more relevant and useful things to think about. Until I read a recent post by my colleague Dr. J on the subject of the benefits of being active. Toward the end of his column there was the following paragraph.

“I’ve planned every elective surgery, and realized how to solve almost every problem that I’ve faced, while running. I’ve read about how our brains become more active after 30-45 minutes of continuous aerobic activity. Studies have demonstrated more individual brain hemispheric activity as well as additional cross callosum activity between the two hemispheres. Rather than being right or left brained, we become of one brain!”

Frankly, the good doctor lost me at cross callosum, but he flicked a switch in my memory that brought up my “The first word was Run” woolgathering. Because I’ve had the same experience while running, a kind of mental energy or invigoration that has produced article ideas, essay topics, gag lines and occasionally the breaking of a writer’s block.

The fact that exercise revs up our mental processes is not news: we know that running, either on a jogging path or in a wheel in a lab cage, improves the cognitive functioning and problem-solving skills of humans and animals alike, and we suspect that exercise somehow boosts the production of neurotropic chemicals in the brain that strengthen brain cells and neural connections and generate new neurons.

But that just explains the biology at work here, the mechanism by which exercise boosts brainpower. It doesn’t explain why that mechanism developed. Which is where the “First word” hypothesis comes into play. Today, people run for a variety of reasons, few of them involving danger or urgency. In contrast, when early man was running, it wasn’t for fun or exercise, it was as predator or prey, either chasing something or fleeing something. Either way, it was a matter of survival, which meant that it called for total mental focus and attention.

The very act of running sent a signal to the brain to ramp up, get the neurons firing, have every sense and every brain cell operating at peak power, the better to anticipate, evaluate, react and otherwise assess and respond to a survival situation.

My theory: That biochemical response, which probably developed long before homo sapiens did, is still at work; and running, regardless of why we do it, still kicks that brain-goosing process into gear automatically. As far as our body chemistry is concerned, we are running for our very lives. And in a sense, that’s partly why a lot of us do run. Maybe our bodies understand what’s going on better than we do.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Why Running Sharpens Our Wits is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/12/14/why-running-sharpens-our-wits/

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