Learning And Exercise

Over the past decade, in study after study in animals and people, exercise has been shown to improve the ability to learn and remember. But the specifics of that process have remained hazy. Is it better to exercise before you learn something new? What about during? And should the exercise be vigorous or gentle?

Two new studies helpfully tackle those questions, with each reaching the conclusion that the timing and intensity of even a single bout of exercise can definitely affect your ability to remember – though not always beneficially.

To reach that conclusion, scientists conducting the larger and more ambitious of the new studies, published in May in PLoS One, first recruited 81 healthy young women who were native German speakers and randomly divided them into three groups. Each group wore headphones and listened for 30 minutes to lists of paired words, one a common German noun and the other its Polish equivalent. The women were asked to memorize the unfamiliar word.

But they heard the words under quite different circumstances. One group listened after sitting quietly for 30 minutes. A second group rode a stationary bicycle at a gentle pace for 30 minutes and then sat down and donned the headphones. And the third group rode a bicycle at a mild intensity for 30 minutes while wearing the headphones and listening to the new words.

How Exercise Can Help Us Learn – By Gretchen Reynolds

– See more at: https://dradatya.com/category/blog/page/16/#sthash.UFEckxC7.dpuf