Exercise May Help You Remember New Things Longer
Are you unable to retain your memory?
New research suggests exercise fours after the acquisition of new information boosts memory and retention. Then, they were divided into three tests: one that did no exercise, one that did a workout immediately after the test, and a third group which exercised four hours later. Although the study tested the effects of exercising after a four-hour delay, it’s possible that waiting two hours or six hours to exercise could have a better (or worse) effect on memory. With the research, 72 subjects were asked to learn 90 picture-location associations over the course of 40 minutes. The participants who did not exercise had the second-best performance, followed closely by those who exercised immediately after the task, according to the findings. The exercise was fairly intense, with the bike being programmed to be set at 80 percent of participants’ maximum heart rates.
Newly-learned information turns into long-term knowledge through a process of stabilization and integration of memories, the study team writes in Current Biology.
As yet, it isn’t entirely clear why delayed exercise, rather than immediate exercise, improves long-term memory.
Participants returned to the lab 48 hr after initial encoding and performed a second recall test in the magnetic resonance (MR) scanner.
“Our results suggest that appropriately timed physical exercise can improve long-term memory and highlight the potential of exercise as an intervention in educational and clinical settings”, they said.
Exercise immediately after learning does no good.
Activity in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with forming memories, was very similar among people in the delayed-exercise group during the recall task, but less consistent in the other participants, the researchers note.
Having a regular exercise routine may be helpful as well said Marc Roig, an assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal who studies the effect of cardiovascular exercise on memory.
Earlier studies on animals show brain chemicals such as dopamine and noradrenaline, released during exercise, can help improve memory. As such, it may be some time before we start seeing explicit exercise and delay prescriptions for optimum memorisation of that pesky eight times table or the periodic table of elements or the elusive PIN for my new debit card. Other studies have shown that specific chemical messengers activated by exercise play a role in sharpening our memory.
“They are neurotransmitters that release in several locations in the brain during physical exercise”, Fernández told Medical Daily.