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TThere is no shortage of research indicating that exercise is good for our brains. And those who exercise can not deny that it offers a sense of clarity and sharpness difficult to find elsewhere. But most of us are basically lazy and can not help wondering: what is the absolute minimum you can do and reap the enormous cognitive benefits that come with your work? As researchers publish in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences write, the answer is very little.
The diet proposed in the study is encouraging: ten minutes of moderate exercise of an intensity comparable to that of tai chi or yoga. This will probably not even make you sweat, but the authors of the study, Michael Yassa, Ph.D., a neurobiologist at the University of California at Irvine, and Hideaki Soya, of the Faculty of Sciences of the Health and sports at the University of Tsukuba, have found that even a short and moderate workout can grease the workings of an important brain circuit involved in memory.
"One question that is missing is what is the right prescription, what is the right formula for doing exercise?" reverse. His recent findings, combined with a previous study, suggest that a light exercise might more beneficial for memory than intense exercise. "In a previous study, we found that when we compare the light and the moderate, we found a greater benefit for light weight," he adds.
His previous discoveries led him to conduct this study on 36 volunteers. In his experiments, the volunteers did 10 minutes of light exercise (defined as a workout that takes you to 30% of your VO2 peak) on an ergometer and then finished a memory task while Yassa was performing tests. The control group members did not exercise but also completed the memory task and had their brain scanned.
As expected, light exercise correlated with improved performance of the memory task compared to the control group. More interestingly, the improvement in the task was related to the extent of physical changes in the brain measured by the scanners.
The scans revealed "increased connectivity" in a specific circuit of hippocampal neurons, an area of the brain that plays a role in memory. Normally, the neurons of a subunit of this memory circuit called a dentate gyrus establish connections with a neighboring subunit called CA3. When the individuals did light exercises, Yassa noticed that this circuit seemed more active than usual, more signals from the dentate gyrus to the CA3 region via this neural highway. The team writes that improving the performance of the memory task correlated with an increase in connectivity observed in brain scans.
Yassa's earlier work has shown that over long periods of time, physical exercise can actually help create new neurons in this region of the brain, leading to increased connectivity. In the new study, he and his team show that 10 minutes of exercise are not enough to create a new batch of neurons, but it still has effects on the memory circuit of the brain. A light exercise seems to pave the way between the dented gyrus and the CA3, allowing somehow more communication between them.
But Yassa still does not know what's causing this.
"We suspect that its functioning is much more related to synaptic cabling than to neurogenesis," Yassa explains, referring to the birth process of new neurons. One of the first hypotheses explaining the results is that a light exercise can increase the levels of certain neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with each other, which increases the communication of neurons.
"It's a striking evidence in terms of intensity of exercise," Soya adds. The most interesting part of this study is perhaps that these researchers actually practice what they preach. Researchers at the Soya Laboratory are now encouraged to take 10-minute walks throughout the day. When they return to the lab, their seahorses ready to shoot, they will likely continue to find new publishable results.
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