August 8th, 2008 @ 9:10 am
Brain-er-cise
How Your Inner Athlete Makes You Smarter | LiveScience
Because it burns calories so quickly, aerobic exercise is a threat to the body’s energy reserves. Heeding this danger, the body acts to protect one of its most precious, and energy-demanding, organs: the brain.Unlike cells in less critical organs, neurons are extremely vulnerable to disruptions in energy supply. “If deprived of energy for more than one minute,” said Gomez-Pinilla, “the neuron dies.” For that reason, he continued, “all the physiology of the body is designed to protect the brain.”
By acting as a mild stressor, exercise is an alternative way to spur many of the protective benefits associated with calorie restriction and the release of brain-building growth factors, said Carl Cotman, director of the Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia at the University of California in Irvine.
HA! Score one for cardio @ the gym.
And we don’t have to pump iron to remain an intellectual powerhouse; anaerobic exercise such as weight-lifting and resistance work, says Gomez-Pinilla, “is not that relevant to the brain.”
That explains why the positive effects of exercise still leaves meatheads well, meatheads.
