“A gentle stroll several times a week not only boosts fitness levels – it also makes you brighter. New research has shown that walking “at one’s own pace” for 40 minutes, three times a week can improve intelligence. Scientists say moderate walking enhances connections between the brain’s circuits, combats a drop in brain function linked to ageing and even improves performance in reasoning tasks.
Psychologists at Illinois University found brain function levels among nearly 100 self-confessed couch potatoes improved dramatically after a year in which they walked a few times a week. All the volunteers, aged between 18 and 35 and 59 to 80, led a sedentary lifestyle before the study, with less than two bouts of physical activity of 30 minutes or more during the previous six months. Professor Art Kramer, who led the study published in the science journal Frontiers in Ageing Neuroscience, said:”Almost nothing in the brain gets done by one area – it’s more of a circuit. “These networks can become more or less connected. As we get older, they become less connected, so we were interested in the effects of fitness on connectivity of brain networks that show the most dysfunction with age.”
The team found that older adults who are more fit tend to have better connectivity in specific regions of the brain than their sedentary peers. Those with more brain network connections also tend to be better at planning, prioritising, strategising and multitasking. The new study used brain scans to determine whether aerobic activity increased connectivity in the brain’s networks. The researchers measured participants’ brain connectivity and performance on cognitive tasks at the beginning of the study, at six months and after a year of either walking or toning and stretching. At the end of the year, brain network connectivity was significantly improved in the brains of the older walkers, but not among those who did only stretching and toning exercises.”
Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
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Tempting to assume that it’s due to the “switching off” effect of going for a walk (or doing some other aerobic exercise without your ipod) which stimulates the consolidation of recent inputs into permanent links or memories in your brain, rather than the exercise itself.
You know, correlation != causation
So why is this article accompanied by a photo of someone *running*?
I’m sure it has nothing to do with the stimulation in change of scenery and enforcing near daily information gathering.
Gotta be the exercise itself…
I started to walk for 40mins, 5-6 times a week and I do actually feel better all-round for it, but not only in fitness terms. My brain also feels more ‘awake’, if that makes any sense, more acute. As well as the connectivity aspect, I think it would encourage the release of certain chemicals in the brain that would perhaps lighten the mood and in turn free your brain from negative thought allowing you to think more about matters in hand.
Or the exercise made them less lazy and so they did more mentally productive tasks.
If only I could get off this bleeding computer!
Walking makes you smarter? I’d rather say TV dumbs you down. Watching marathons of Eastenders can’t be that beneficial to your neuronet. Get the couch potatoes to watch Bloomberg, BBC News, Sky News, BBC Parliament, CNN, etc. and, if their brains don’t explode from information overload, see if they get smarter by exposure to this thing called “thought” and this other thing called “wow, I didn’t know that, this is so cool!” rather than walking 40 minutes. Get them to take notes and then make them link those notes and try to make sense of everything (and give them an electric shock each time they think they found the holy grail of getting rich quick).