How Exercise Boosts Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

How Exercise Boosts Your Brain

singularityhub.com

72 pointsjamesbritt21 comments

So the next time you sit down to watch television, or, um, surf the internet, remember: your BMP count might be getting into dangerous territory.

Try to imagine that same sentence with "to read a book" substituted for "to watch television, or, um, surf the internet". Hard, isn't it?

This is anti-technology bigotry. Pretty surprising at singularityhub.com, huh? That's how pervasive it is.

I would assume they picked the examples because it's singularityhub. Most of their readers are likely to be technology/gadget centric and a message about more tech centric activities was probably expected to resonate better than a message about something as "old fashioned" as reading a book.

Beside, be honest. What percentage of the population do you think actually spends more time reading books than watching TV and surfing the internet?

BTW: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, watching TV accounted for more than half the total leisure time for Americans 15 years and older. (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm)

I used to. I don't watch TV, but I probably spend too much time on the computer. Just a few years ago I would read more than any other activity.

Maybe surfing the net is more addictive than reading a book.

I must have seen a million of these "benefits of exercise" posts by now - everybody seems to think that exercise is a good thing, but making another post isn't going to change anything, people are still not going to exercise; making a drug that simulates the effects of exercise would change everything.

So why aren't people working on that?

They are, but it takes years to get from "tested on mice" to "safe for humans".

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0403/03.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25949447/#slice-2

When it does happen though, I think it'll be a massive breakthrough for public health. There are tons of diseases whose prevalence would be slashed just by raising the fitness level of the general population.

So why aren't people working on that?

I would hope they are. Of course if something like that actually comes out there will be lots of pushback from those with overdeveloped Protestant work ethics. No pain no gain, it's "cheating" to just take a pill, etc.

Oh, but the situation is even worse than that-- the Protestant work ethic already caught you (or us, or many people, whatever).

I'm talking about the assumption that exercise is some sort of pain for gain tradeoff that you would suffer through in exchange for a later reward, but is itself unpleasant or undesirable without the health benefits. This insiduous paradigm seems to be everywhere in (at least) American culture.

And so the magic pill already exists! And there's no patent. No copay. No HMO can deny you it. And it's fun!

At least hear in the US, I've never seen the public apposed to taking the easy way out. Witness the massive(no pun intended) diet and weightloss industry.

How about using electricity to make your muscles move without effort on your part? (Of course this won't do anything for your central nervous system or coordination.)

Heart health is brain health. Simple as that.

Well, as a brief mention said in the article, any exercise benefit to the brain used to be thought of mainly as an increased blood flow and oxygen uptake.

But more recent research is focused on the hippocampus and neurogenesis, actually growing new neurons by exercising. Unfortunately, there's no test that can actually prove the new cells are responsible for new learning.

This happens to be the focus of my current research paper. :-)

Cool. So might the new neurons be more for motor control than say, mathematics?

Well, the hippocampus is related to long term memory and not motor control, as I understand it. So it's doubtful.

I'm having a hard time finding studies that adequately control for fitness level though. Most tend to focus on acute exercise. They run people for a while then immediately sit them down for a cognition test.

I'm more interested in the influence of long-term fitness level. That's not as often studied.

We all know exercise is your best shot at having a healthy heart, a strong immune system, and maybe even a 100th birthday party.

Wasn't this just recently proved false (here on HN)? The sentence may as well read "We all know the sun orbits the Earth" or "We all know that you have to write real programs in C".

Or rather, if you spend most of your day sitting behind a computer, then it doesn't matter how much you exercise, you'll likely be dead by eighty. (Which is quite a liberating viewpoint if you simply accept it.)

I think you are talking about this NYT column:

"The Men Who Stare at Screens", http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/phys-ed-the-men-who...

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514818

In the context of the benefits of exercise, i'd imagine we need to be careful not to conflate health and longevity before we debate things being 'proved false'.

Also, obligatory [Citation required]

Proved was the wrong choice. Implicated is probably more accurate.

But really, there was some article very recently that made all the same points.

Uh... no. There was the results of a survey that seemed to indicate otherwise, but a survey is, ya know, a bunch of data of what people answered to questions.

"Truth" doesn't work the way you seem to think it does.

Another theory is that low calorie diet leads to longevity. Too many theories. :)

It's good that we have a lot of observed correlations between various activities (exercise, low-calorie diets, etc.) and longevity. That way we can figure out what's going on biologically, and try to find easier and more effective ways of living longer, healthier lives. Science!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com