Running to Increase Your Brain Fitness

An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights the potential effects of aerobic activity on the brain. The researchers found that running in increased memory and the creation of new nerve cells in mice.

The mice who ran performed much better on several tasks that required that they tell the difference between two visual patterns.The effect of running was very clear in adult mice. In mice who were very old, though, running didn’t make much difference, and they didn’t get much boost from the exercise.

John Grohol at PsychCentral also posted about the article, noting that some newspaper accounts barely mentioned the fact that the study was done with mice. He even points out that it was done with a specific variety of mice, and suggests that the relevance of the study may be limited. It’s true that it is very hard to know whether studies about mice really mean much for humans, since findings in animals often don’t generalize to humans.

As Grohol notes, the research is pretty clear that exercise can improve cognitive functioning in people as well as animals.But I’m not as concerned as he is that the results of this study will only apply to one strain of mice. Animal research has its problems when we apply it to human research, but in this case studies in humans have consistently shown similar results to those in animals. It may still be true that the reasons for changes in cognitive function in humans and animals may be different, but that means we would have to come up with two separate mechanisms for change. That’s actually making the situation more, rather than less, complex.

Dr Grohol makes an excellent point about human and animal research. Too often, we jump from preliminary findings to the real world. In areas in which animal and human studies generally agree,though, animals studies can extend and help find new directions for research at considerably less cost than similar studies in humans.

Reference:

Creer DJ et al. Running enhances spatial pattern separation in mice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online first January 19,2010 doi:10.1073/pnas.0911725107