Contributor: “Dr. J”Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.
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In a former column I was asked about the importance of exercise. Because of how much I like the feeling of being fit, my response was as follows:
Maybe there’s a pill somewhere that will make you fit. Until I find it, the old way of gradually increased aerobic activity is the only way I know of to accomplish this. Really, if I was that rat in the cage that they test drugs on and I was offered the fitness pill, I might take it, but I know I would ask them to leave the wheel in the cage!
Well, it looks like that was not only a good idea for being fit, but also for thinking fit because the latest neuroscience research suggests that exercise does more than any other behavior to give us a fitter brain.
Justin S. Rhodes, a psychology professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, and his team looked at four groups of mice, each in a different type of enriched or stark environment. All the animals were given a structured series of tests to measure their ability to reason things out. After several months, the scientists put the mice through the same tests.
The only factor that made a significant difference in the results was whether the rats had access to a running wheel.
Animals that exercised, no matter whether they had any other enrichments in their cages, had healthier brains and performed significantly better on cognitive tests than the other mice. Animals that didn’t run, no matter how enriched their world was, did not improve their brainpower.
The brain, like muscles, experiences a functional decline with underuse and age, especially in the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved with memory and certain types of learning.
Exercise, however, seems to slow or even reverse this, much as it does with muscles. Scientists have found that exercise stimulates neurogenesis, the formation of new brain cells. Mice and rats that have run for a few weeks generally have about twice as many new neurons in their hippocampi as animals who are not active. In addition, however, was the critical point that neurons formed during times of exercise can improve our intellect because they have the ability to join and function within existing neural networks.
Brain cells that arise with learning a behavior will usually only function for doing the task that caused their formation in the first place. Brain cells that are formed during periods when the rats are running seem to have an additional effect on these neurons. These neurons not only functioned during running, but they also functioned when the animals practiced other behaviors. In the mice, when running, unlike just with learning without any activity, newly created brain cells were capable of many tasks.
For us, this means that it’s fine to do crossword puzzles or play Scrabble, and even attend classes where our brains are actively thinking, but nothing will restore and improve our brains better than an aerobic activity.
It is possible that with older people, lifting weights may also have these brain benefits, but I recommend that your weight lifting be accompanied with some type of aerobic activity, which can include walking, to get the full benefit.
If you don’t have a wheel in your cage, I suggest you find a cage that has one, and use it!
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Leave the Wheel in the Cage: How Exercise Gives Us a Fitter Brain is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog
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