How is your doctor and therapists making sure you get enough exercise to have your brain have similar connections as runners do? Do they even know how much exercise that is? What heart rate and length of time?
http://neurosciencenews.com/evolution-brain-exercise-6982/amp/
Summary: While
much research has shown that exercise can be good for our brains, the
link between how physical activity benefits the brain is not clearly
understood. In a new study, researchers suggest the link between brain
health and exercise could be a product of our evolutionary history and
our hunter-gatherer past.
Source: University of Arizona.
Mounting scientific evidence shows that exercise is good not
only for our bodies, but for our brains. Yet, exactly why physical
activity benefits the brain is not well understood.
In a new article published in the journal Trends in Neurosciences,
University of Arizona researchers suggest that the link between
exercise and the brain is a product of our evolutionary history and our
past as hunter-gatherers.
UA anthropologist David Raichlen and UA psychologist Gene Alexander,
who together run a research program on exercise and the brain, propose
an “adaptive capacity model” for understanding, from an evolutionary
neuroscience perspective, how physical activity impacts brain structure
and function.
Their argument: As humans transitioned from a relatively sedentary
apelike existence to a more physically demanding hunter-gatherer
lifestyle, starting around 2 million years ago, we began to engage in
complex foraging tasks that were simultaneously physically and mentally
demanding, and that may explain how physical activity and the brain came
to be so connected.
“We think our physiology evolved to respond to those increases in
physical activity levels, and those physiological adaptations go from
your bones and your muscles, apparently all the way to your brain,” said
Raichlen, an associate professor in the UA School of Anthropology in
the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
“It’s very odd to think that moving your body should affect your
brain in this way — that exercise should have some beneficial impact on
brain structure and function — but if you start thinking about it from
an evolutionary perspective, you can start to piece together why that
system would adaptively respond to exercise challenges and stresses,” he
said.
Having this underlying understanding of the exercise-brain connection
could help researchers come up with ways to enhance the benefits of
exercise even further, and to develop effective interventions for
age-related cognitive decline or even neurodegenerative diseases such as
Alzheimer’s.
Notably, the parts of the brain most taxed during a complex activity
such as foraging — areas that play a key role in memory and executive
functions such as problem solving and planning — are the same areas that
seem to benefit from exercise in studies.
“Foraging is an incredibly complex cognitive behavior,” Raichlen
said. “You’re moving on a landscape, you’re using memory not only to
know where to go but also to navigate your way back, you’re paying
attention to your surroundings. You’re multitasking the entire time
because you’re making decisions while you’re paying attention to the
environment, while you are also monitoring your motor systems over
complex terrain. Putting all that together creates a very complex
multitasking effort.”
The adaptive capacity model could help explain research findings such
as those published by Raichlen and Alexander last year showing that
runners’ brains appear to be more connected than brains of non-runners.
The model also could help inform interventions for the cognitive
decline that often accompanies aging — in a period in life when physical
activity levels tend to decline as well.
“What we’re proposing is, if you’re not sufficiently engaged in this
kind of cognitively challenging aerobic activity, then this may be
responsible for what we often see as healthy brain aging, where people
start to show some diminished cognitive abilities,” said Alexander, a UA
professor of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and physiological
sciences. “So the natural aging process might really be part of a
reduced capacity in response to not being engaged enough.”
Reduced capacity refers to what can happen in organ systems throughout the body when they are deprived of exercise.
“Our organ systems adapt to the stresses they undergo,” said
Raichlen, an avid runner and expert on running. “For example, if you
engage in exercise, your cardiovascular system has to adapt to expand
capacity, be it through enlarging your heart or increasing your
vasculature, and that takes energy. So if you’re not challenging it in
that way — if you’re not engaging in aerobic exercise — to save energy,
your body simply reduces that capacity.”
In the case of the brain, if it is not being stressed enough it may
begin to atrophy. This may be especially concerning, considering how
much more sedentary humans’ lifestyles have become.
“Our evolutionary history suggests that we are, fundamentally,
cognitively engaged endurance athletes, and that if we don’t remain
active we’re going to have this loss of capacity in response to that,”
said Alexander, who studies brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease as a
member of the UA’s Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute. “So there really
may be a mismatch between our relatively sedentary lifestyles of today
and how we evolved.”
Alexander and Raichlen say future research should look at how
different levels of exercise intensity, as well as different types of
exercise, or exercise paired specifically with cognitive tasks, affect
the brain.
For example, exercising in a novel environment that poses a new
mental challenge, may prove to be especially beneficial, Raichlen said.
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