The Brain - Exercise Link In Five Minutes or Less

If you're looking for a quick take on how exercise helps the brain, The New York Times' "Phys Ed" column will give you the highlights in about five minutes.

Writer Gretchen Reynolds provides a nice overview of the revolutionary findings of the last ten years, beginning with the discovery that the brain's endowment of cells is not doomed to shrink with age, but that the brain can create new neurons. And exercise seems to promote this growth.

The most important recent finding, Reynolds says, is that exercise may to reduce age-related shrinkage of the hippocampus -- a part of the brain that is key to creating memories and learning facts. Subjects who worked out four hours a week had twice the blood volume pumping through their hippocampus than before they began the exercise regimen. The impact? The researchers found that aerobic fitness was directly linked to performance on a word-recall test -- people with the largest improvements in oxygen intake showed the best performance on the mental drill. They hypothesize that new neurons were being formed in the subject's hippocampi, driving the improved cognitive performance.

Another recent study seems to indicate that exercise doesn't just stimulate growth of new neurons, but helps integrate them into existing networks and build new blood vessels in the brain.

What it all means, Reynolds says, is that "... an expanding body of research shows that exercise can improve the performance of the brain by boosting memory and cognitive processing speed. Exercise can, in fact, create a stronger, faster brain."

The most intriguing bit is a quote from Dr. Fred Gage of the Salk Institute: "We've always known that our brains control our behavior, but not that our behavior could control and change the structure of our brains."

The article, "Lobes of Steel," appeared in the Sunday "Play" magazine's September issue. A summary is here but the entire text is not available online unless you pay for it.

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The exercise - cognition link has now been officially discovered by the national media. The NYT piece follows Newsweek's cover story on how exercise benefits the brain.