What good is money if you can’t enjoy it? Keep moving. It’s good for you. I like this piece from Outside Online. The message is, your brain is much healthier when you exercise your body. Kate Wheeling writes:
Human beings evolved to move. Our bodies, including our brains, were fine-tuned for endurance activities over millennia of stalking and chasing down prey. “We’ve engineered that out of our lives now,” says Charles Hillman, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who has spent decades studying the link between exercise and cognition. The toll our relatively new sedentary lifestyle takes on our bodies is clear: For the first time in U.S. history, younger generations are expected to live shorter, unhealthier livesthan their parents.
While the myriad ways exercise can shape our bodies are well known, researchers have long suspected the same might be true of the brain. Decades of research have gone into examining the effect of exercise on attention, memory, and visual sensitivity, according to Richard Maddock, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis. “There is a very consistent finding that the brain works better after exercise,” Maddock says. But why that is has been harder to figure out.
“Few studies have really looked at what’s actually going on in the brain while we’re moving,” says Tom Bullock, a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Only recently has technology given scientists the tools to zero in on the mechanisms at play. Aerobic exercise appears to lead to changes in both the structure of the brain and the way it operates, which together bolster learning in kids, give adults an edge on cognitive tasks, and protect against the cognitive declines that often come with age.
Read more here.
