People typically speak about exercise in terms of physical benefits and bodily health. But what about exercise and your brain? This mind-body connection has interested John J. Ratey for years. In fact, he has been talking about the subject since his first lecture to medical professionals in 1984 and has since written a book – Spark, along with Eric Hagerman, which focuses on the science of exercise and the brain.
Ratey goes so far to say, “the point of exercise is to build and condition the brain.”
So just how does exercise affect your brain? In this post, we’ll have a look at memory and learning and the type of exercise that improves these areas.
Memory and Learning
According to Heidi Godman, executive director of the Harvard Health Letter, “In a study done at the University of British Columbia, researchers found that regular aerobic exercise, the kind that gets your heart and your sweat glands pumping, appears to boost the size of the hippocampus, the brain area involved in verbal memory and learning. Resistance training, balance and muscle toning exercises did not have the same results.”
These findings seem to suggest that not all exercise affect memory and learning in the same way in terms of hippocampus size. So you may want to make sure that you have aerobic exercise in your agenda for best results.
How Much?
To get the benefits of improved memory, you may not need to invest that much time exercising. According to a study cited in The Guardian, 10 minutes of “light physical exercise” can boost connectivity in the parts of the brain involved in formation of memory and storage. In the study, people who exercised performed better at remembering differences between tricky similar images that they had been shown earlier on.
While these findings stress “light exercise – such as 10 minutes of slow walking, yoga or tai chi” and don’t emphasize building up a sweat, they are pretty astonishing.
Apparently, exercise can help your brain in more way than one. The main thing is to get started.
Do you find exercise to help your brain functioning?
Please share in the comments below.