Ten minutes of mild, walking exercise can immediately alter how certain parts of the brain communicate and coordinate with one another. It can improve function memory according to a new neurological study. These findings suggest that exercise needn’t be long and intense in order to benefit the brain and for the effects to begin more quickly than many of us may expect.
Exercise can change our brains and minds.
The evidence for this is extensive and growing. Studies have shown that when mice and rats run on a treadmill, they develop more new brain cells. Many of the new cells are clustered in the hippocampus, a portion of the brain that is essential for memory creation and storage.
The animals also performed better on tests of learning and memory.
Equivalent experiments examining brain tissue are not possible in people. But some past studies have shown that people who exercise regularly tend to have a healthier and larger hippocampus than those who do not, especially when they grow older. Exercise can help us focus and even learn better than if we just sat still. These studies have involved moderate or vigorous exercise such as jogging, brisk walking, and often for weeks or months at a time. Whether a single or brief spurt of easy exercise will produce desirable changes in the brain has remained unclear.
Scientists invited 36 students to the lab and had them sit quietly on a stationary bicycle for 10 minutes and on a separate visit, they pedal the bicycle at a pace so gently that it barely raised their heart rates.
The exercise was performed at about 30% of each volunteer's heart rate reserve or the difference between a person's maximum heart rate and their resting heart rate. Brisk walking should raise someone's heart rate to about 50%. The exercise was very easy and only lasted for 10 minutes.
After each session, sitting or slow pedaling, the students completed a computerized memory test during which they would see a brief picture of let’s say, a tree, followed by a variety of other images, a new set of images of either the same or a similar one. The students would press buttons to show whether they thought each image was new or the same as an earlier shot. The test is difficult since many of the images closely resemble one another. It requires rapid, shuffling through recent memories to decide whether the picture was shown or not.
The scientists had each student repeat this sequence — riding or sitting on the bike for 10 minutes and then completing the memory testing. The testing took place inside an M.R.I machine that scanned the young people's brains while they responded to the images. The researchers then compared results and found that the effects of exercise, undemanding as it was, were very clear. The young people were better at remembering these images after they had ridden the bike, especially when the images most closely resembled one another.
The harder their memories had to strain, the better they performed after the exercise.
Their brains also worked differently after they had ridden. The M.R.I scans showed that portions of each student's hippocampus lit up in synchronized fashion with parts of the brain associated with learning, indicating that these physically separate parts of the brain were better connected now than when the students had not first exercised.
It's exciting to see these effects occurring so quickly after such light exercise and movement. These findings show that exercise can change people's brains and minds right away without requiring weeks of working out. Even movements so slight that anyone can do this. Even those who are out of shape or possibly disabled can complete the exercise.
At a molecular level, such gentle exercises affecting the brain's operations are still unknown. They hope to explore those issues in future studies and look at the impact on younger and older people. It's not exactly about marathons, it's how simple movement can help people improve their memories with a short walk or an easy session of yoga or tai chi that can improve your health.
