What if regular exercise is the best cognitive exercise?
blog.vslira.net
blog.vslira.net
Solving problems, learning and building new things all day can be very mentally exhausting. Cardio, sports, lifting; helps re-balance the physical with the mental. I am sure there are more scientific words and biological descriptions that I lack the vocabulary for. If I get too mentally focused on a project/job/problem and go days without matching it with vigorous physical activity, I end up not sleeping as well, am less tolerant, more scattered and brain fog tends to start rolling in. If I counter it with the physical exercise or physical energy expenditure the mental clarity comes back, I sleep better, and don't have hair-triggered verbal impulse control issues. Otherwise, if I let it go for too long, lethargy sets in - which I attribute to the body/physical and mind/mental trying to rebalance itself. I dont think it cares that it makes me feel like crap overall, more that it's neutral in just wanting a balance however that comes about.
I often refer to exercise as me taking care of my mental health - as opposed to being physically fit. That could be seen as "exercise [being] the best cognitive exercise". Looking at it that way, exercise creates a mental-out imbalance, which causes the stored energy in the mind to be stimulated and need more output creating the mental sharpness. Obviously I have nothing to back up the claims other than decades of experiencing this to be true for me time and time again; though I do believe there are better biological explanations than energy.
This everyday-ness has been huge for installing it as an automatic habit.
Chapter 10 in Hal Higdon's 'How to Train'.
The entire book is filled with training plans I hadn't even considered before - this particular one has worked really well for me in a way other plans have not.
10 minutes is nothing, especially if you read or watch TV while doing it.
It'll get easy eventually, and the habit will be established. Then you up it to 15, and keep doing that until you hit at least 30 mins every day.
Then you have a nice habitual time period that you can add, swap, or integrate other exercises into.
A gerbil-wheel exercise in extreme environments, perhaps (due to pollution, crime, extreme hot/cold weather, etc), but after an extended period, is that really how natural detergents in the body are made?
Although for me it's been the other way around: find an enriching exercise first and then schedule around performing it. For me, my only limit to participating in my exercise of choice is body recovery. If I had no recovery time I'd be in the gym for hours daily. As it is now I'm limited to 1.5-2.5 hrs every other day.
I've been enjoying golf for 3 decades now and skipped the gym and other sports. I still embrace it like the 1st day.
Golf is unique though. It takes a genius to break their own body with such a beautiful sport :)
We're all aware of Tiger blowing out a knee, but some stories coming out of the LPGA with pros living with excruciating pain from a relatively early age is just absurd:
Michelle Wie's interview this year with the statement of not being able to pickup her own child at times did not make sense.
https://golfweek.usatoday.com/2022/05/26/lpga-michelle-wie-w...
There are a few more golfers in the LPGA with back injuries in their 20's, knowing they only have one back (J. Korda this week for example).
I saw a Seve Ballesteros documentary about his severe back pains on VHS and have fortunately avoided pushing past the breaking point for a few extra yards.
As a technology native, golf has always felt amazing with both hands. Even my glutes grew up my back without trying as well... Provided you know your own body :)
Effortless energy is a breath of fresh air. Not many sports have that.
I'll just elaborate and say the key to what I said is making it habitual by adding into something you'd be doing anyway. The exercise bike is great because you can watch TV, read, or even play some types of games or other sedentary activities you may be doing anyway.
I find the best part of exercise being not feeling like exercise at all and being well outside of my normal operating parameters.
Just make sure it’s a thing you really enjoy, and think of it more as practicing getting really good at something rather than a chore.
I have enjoyed decades of golf so far with firm glutes and firm abs as an unitended benefit :)
I'm always tickled when I read these stories. I'm chasing an albatross personally to complete my scorecard (got a hole-in-one the 1st decade of playing).
https://www.thevillagesdailysun.com/news/in_todays_daily_sun...
https://www.tri247.com/triathlon-news/age-group/ironman-kona...
The key is to start early and build up enough strength and fitness to sustain you for awhile after the inevitable, irreversible decline sets in around age 70.
I know golf has a seniors tour, but always laughed at the thought of the NFL doing that (oh the humanity!) :p
I feel like that analogy is lacking. Nevertheless, it's unlike any other sport I've played, like ice hockey, for example, which is more like driving in NYC.
So far my only BJJ-caused back or shoulder injuries were from early on when I was either too inflexible (and so it was easy to push it too far), or too stupid to tap (hadn't realized what "too far" was). Take it slow, find good training partners, listen to your body, and take up complementary activities (some strength training, flexibility things like yoga, core training especially for the back).
I also do judo once a week, and that’s lots of fun but a bit scary compared to bjj. I probably won’t continue doing that when I get old, not sparring at least.
Anything <= 20 minutes away, I ride my bicycle. And yeah, I live in a suburb. The grocery store is about a 15 minute ride away, a bit uphill.
Taken from this point of view, cycling is actually multi-tasking: you're getting somewhere and getting your daily exercise. Cars don't actually save you time when it comes to these sorts of trips because they're forcing you to spend extra time explicitly exercising.
A long walk on its own versus... a long walk where you've clicked the record button on Stava is for some reason a completely different experience. One is idle, meandering, and boring the other is (somehow psychologically) building something and fun.
For instance, I care little about the measurements of any given run or walk, I rarely even look at them when I'm done, but just the recording itself on my Apple Watch subtly motivates me to work harder and go longer. It becomes more of a 'workout' than a passive activity.
Every week my friends and I meet up and run 3.5 miles. After the run, we all hangout and have a beer at a nearby bar. The meetup spot is 6 miles away and I ride my bike hard there, and at a leisurely pace on the way back. It's nice having this activity to look forward to every week.
I haven't signed up for any races since the summer, but I have it in the back of my mind that I will start again in the spring, so that helps me make time for bike rides (which I enjoy).
My friends don't like to run in the dark, so I will probably join a volleyball league this winter for some weekly socialization and activity.
So, I think waaaay eaiser to find stuff you will like doing or at least an activity with people you like being around. Check Facebook for group rides/runs in your area.
A 30-minute brisk walk may burn 200 calories, but calorie math is easier said than done.
You don't have to lose the weight/calories if you do not gain the weight/calories :)
I am also an older lifter and probably should have backed down at the earlier indications that a problem was developing. However it honestly was never more than some soreness that went away with warmups, so I wasn't really concerned about it.
On the mental effects, I can say that for me that exercise doesn't change much. I am generally in a better mood after a good workout, but with the recent injuries I have been feeling more frustrated and dejected. But these feeling are pretty much the same ones I have when I succeed or struggle with a programming task or other mental work.
Turkish getups are fantasic
Ask any serious runner how hard a taper can be before a big race and you’ll get some good insight.
Just need to work through physio and be patient with it. Pushing through the pain will just lead to more pain that takes longer to heal.
I find that a lot of fringe stuff like that can be reframed into other fringe or even more "normal" terminology. Which words or metaphors one uses are simply what clicks for them. If "energy balance" is the word that feels right to you, use it. ;-)
Same. I don't care about my physical health all that much but my friends/family think i am some sort of health fanatic. It is the only thing that has gotten me through tough times, its my escape.
That’s how I felt when I was younger and had a seemingly perfect bill of health regardless of exercise.
High blood pressure in my 30s changed some priorities.
More about change of scenery, getting out, and tearing myself away from social / personal / work entanglements. Just me vs the iron.
I especially preferred the kinds that heavily relied on sparring with partners during the class. It's _really_ hard to ruminate on everything you didn't get done today when the person opposite you will punch/kick you if your concentration falters =)
It's similarly hard to start overthinking when you're too tired to think, HIIT-style circuit training in a group worked pretty well.
Nowadays I'm a bit less stressed and can manage it better - just a walk in the nature and newageyly "being in the moment" is enough, no need for the extremes of youth =)
I also have had a long standing, 5x per week yoga practice which is a great way to strengthen and open the body. I’d look for a yoga school that mentions ashtanga if you’re looking for something more intensive, it’s a challenging practice.
Subjecting the ego to much needed reality checks makes for some nice folks.
However theres... unfortunately... always exceptions... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3PLLOreTLY
One way is to practice alone, at home, by doing some solo forms (a.k.a. kata) taken from the large existing number of Okinawan or Chinese origin, with or without weapons, and/or by hitting dummies or punching bags.
This way has the advantage of minimal cost, down to zero, depending on whether you buy some training equipment and weapons or not, and you can practice without following a schedule, whenever you have time or you are in the mood.
Practicing solo is easy if you have some prior experience of doing proper training sessions in some martial art. Even without experience, if the purpose is only practicing for health and not becoming skilled in real fighting, some instructional videos can be good enough for learning how to train.
The second way is to practice with a sparring partner. Sometimes this might be possible to do with a friend, if you happen to have an appropriate space, but this is quite unlikely, so you normally have to go regularly to some martial arts training hall or club.
In this case the choice of the martial art may be determined less by some intrinsic qualities, but more by what martial art training place happens to exist close enough to your home, to avoid wasting time with transportation.
Moreover, especially when practicing for health purposes, it may be less important which is the origin of the martial art, but much more important is how competent is the instructor that happens to teach at the club that you find near you.
Unfortunately, for a beginner it is difficult to distinguish competent instructors from incompetent instructors, but after some experience the differences will become evident.
Which martial art is more appropriate depends also on the age. For someone older, a training that puts less emphasis on striking/kicking, but more on throwing and breaking falls, e.g. aikido/judo/jujutsu, is more appropriate. Also training with weapons can be appropriate for older people, as in that case the weapons are not used against humans, unless they wear protective gear.
I am by no means an expert but as someone who is typing on a keyboard for income, aikido has way to much emphasis on wrist straining.
While it is possible to train in a careless way and suffer consequences, the straining of the wrists and of other articulations in aikido is actually very useful for avoiding the loss of articular mobility that happens to most old people, unless they do regularly other kinds of mobility exercises.
For someone who types a lot, regular mobility exercises for wrists and fingers are very important for avoiding the injuries caused by typing and by using a mouse, which are much more frequent than the aikido injuries.
As a personal anecdote, I have practiced for some time aikido without any kind of injuries, but later, when failing to do regular exercises, I have developed some tendon problems in my right middle finger from the scrolling wheel of the mouse (which I have healed by switching from using a mouse to the use of a stylus on a Wacom tablet in mouse mode; now I wonder why I have used mice/trackballs/touchpads/trackpoints for so many years, because a stylus is much more comfortable).
E: it also makes sure junk from metabolic processes are cleaned up etc.
Plus when you're done with exercise, the entire metabolic engine keeps going for 30-60 minutes (or even more depending on how hard you go), which also gives the opportunity for brain cells to recharge.
There was jocks vs nerds as a general dichotomy.
Last years we find it more and more to be a false dichotomy.
Just think that you can find "brasilian ju jitsu nerds" or software developers that work out quite a lot.
Not to mention pro-gamers who are not only practicing playing their game - but get physical workout in their training regimen to really go to the top.
Being physically fit IS caring about mental health there is nothing newage-y about it.
There is no mind-body separation, mind is body whether someone likes it or not. If you exercise your muscles to move in a specific way you exercise your mind as well. That is known phenomenon in strength sports - one can build up muscle mass as much as they want but they also have to adapt neural pathways for strength - which is mind.
The honest truth is if I’m truly coding a lot, working out is a strict downgrade in my long term output holding for all other variables.
Working out is good for you, but it’s a big detriment to mental energy. Perhaps working out late in the day solves this, but then again I’m most productive as a coder late at night. Days where I work out in the afternoon wreck my night time productivity.
If there is no basis for it, please stop spreading this stuff. I am trying to build my programming career and build muscle at the same time, and I don't need people being prejudicial towards me because they read some misinformed comment on HN telling them bulking is detrimental to coding.
Most important thing in life is to do things out of genuine interest and do them with confidence. Know the prejudices and know they exist for good reason so you can laugh at them, rather than running around trying to ref the world.
We’re just going over anecdotes and learned experience about the reality of physical exertion taxing total mental energy. You got very sensitive about it for some reason and are demanding data but no one said anything about data just lived experience (more valuable than data anytime it comes from someone experienced - I trust a single person who ate at every taco stand in LAs review way, way more than the average of every review on Yelp).
No one will feel sorry about “prejudice” against fit people, it’s like complaining about prejudice against rich people. If you don’t get why those exist and are valid then the world will rag on you (rightly) for being naive, it’s first-world-problemism at its finest.
You have already lost me. This is totally made up and most likely the opposite of the truth, and I would like to see some evidence for this claim.
> If you add in this sort of touchy and sensitive reactionary attitude it will only worsen that.
So you're saying I should just be okay with you making hateful stuff up and posting it, and that if I ask you for evidence I am being "sensitive" and "reactionary"?
Sorry I am not okay with you insinuating that `$fit = dumb` without evidence. You haven't provided any, which leads me to believe that your beliefs stem from your own insecurities more than anything.
https://www.gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-...
https://peterattiamd.com/ama27/
Of course if some people want to sacrifice healthspan for the sake of winning math and programming contests, that is a choice they can make.
My experience matches this when I tried to workout first thing in the morning. Then I tried lunchtime spin class before moving to working out and playing recreational sports after work/in the evening. I was far less productive when trying to spend the physical energy during the morning/afternoon than I was when releasing it at night. The biggest mental benefit (in terms of production) for me is rarely in the moments after working out and happen more in the next day(s). If I skip it for weeks it would take a few days of consistent, and preferably, high intensity physical activity to get both back to where I am most productive.
In my experience that separation between physical ability and smarts has always existed on some level. Yes of course there are engineers who work out, and soccer players who code, but I've generally seen that the best engineers do not work out much, and the best soccer players do not code much.
Some of that may in fact just come down to time and how much they're spending it on their craft. At the end of the day though, the very brightest and most talented software devs I know are simply out of shape.
But there is an idea where you do 3 workouts per week, do things each day to be productive in your trade and augment it with exercise to be even more productive.
Somewhat related - something that I do find quite curious from my own personal experience is that lifting heavy weights has a far greater impact on my ability to concentrate (and therefore perceived cognitive ability, I guess) than cardio/aerobic exercise does. Like night and day. I've recently started attributing it to creatine supplementation, but I do wonder if there's anything more to it than that.
Also, lifting heavy does train your central nervous system too, which might be a pathway to better cognitive ability? (This second part is 100% bro science, though)
It might be wrong but it's interesting and somewhat novel.
Can you explain what part of physical exercise is computationally hard for the brain?
Even pumpkin toadlets, who famously can't coordinate their landings, the problem isn't the size of their brain, it's their vestibular system.
I'm of the opinion that most animals are probably a lot higher up the sentience scale than is the current social consensus, but I don't think exercise is itself a major cognitive effort. Arbitrary games sure (not just the rules, anything social involves modelling multiple entities like yourself), but not the physical exercise itself.
Making an AI that learns to control a purely virtual body appears to be a fairly standard project.
1) https://youtu.be/XrOTgZ14fJg
2) https://youtu.be/882O_7hsAms
As soon as we make a robot that’s as good as a human child in every way, then I’m going to start worrying seriously about Skynet.
You can throw at it few gpus worth of computing power and still end up short.
Stereotypes are powerful things.
Maybe moving and maintaining a body requires body size proportional "raw" computational power and maybe human brains have mostly just qualitative differences not related to mass when compared to animals (ok, and a bit of extra proportional brain mass too).
If this is the case the connection between excercise and cognitive capacity could seem natural. Excercise requires massive neural resources and thus physical excercises also excercise the brain to a large degree and the whatever qualitative bit that humans have "on top" simply rides the wave to some improvement.
that said, i began spending a lot of time reading about exercising instead, which is surprisingly intellectually stimulating. there are a bunch of high level powerlifters, bodybuilders and weightlifters who do, for example, scientific paper reviews and criticism. i learned a lot about second-guessing findings there. road cycling is probably on of the most data driven sports out there (i kinda quit strength sports during covid and started cycling, which is probably even more time consuming).
there are intellectually aspects to - and surrounding - most sports to a degree, but i doubt intelligence is the decicive factor even in comparably tactical athletic disciplines (team sports).
but if i'd have to recommend ONE book, i'd say https://www.parktool.com/en-us/product/big-blue-book-of-bicy... - because you can't exercise at all on your bike if it's broken
for random study reviews: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/research-spotlight/ , for nutrition and supplements: https://examine.com/ , for cycling, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/c/DylanJohnsonCycling
I was referring to what you said about reading.
>i began spending a lot of time reading about exercising instead
if there's something interesting going on in the field of (strength) training science, it'll be linked and discussed there.
tbh., the guys there seem to adhere to the scientific method a lot more than the software developers i know.
if i do structured training i try to stay concentrated on the task at hand, i.e. pedalling technique, breathing, recovery (heart rate), keeping watts constant, controlling cadence and so on. i do long virtual endurance rides with the ERG on but tend to watch entertaining movies.
i don't seem to get into deep though states much during weightlifting, as the lifts require me to be concentrated and fully focussed and the pauses are too short to get lost on the one hand and require active recovery on the other.
the big difference here is that most people who want to use training time for intellectual improvement just listen to podcasts, but that's not really an option for me as i'm hearing impaired and barely understand anything.
That said, I lift twice a week for a total of about 4 to 4.5 hours, and that strikes an optimum balance for my age, physiology and everything else. I tried many other forms and failed to find that exercise-life balance.
Additionally a lot of conventional wisdom in exercise science borders on "voodoo", and some are challenging it [1].
[1] Search for Mark Rippetoe's articles on Starting Strength. See, for instance, https://startingstrength.com/article/why-you-should-not-be-r... (the name is a bit misleading).
To add an anecdote, my balance changes depending on my focus at the time. If I'm on a strength training arc, it's 3 days a week at 1-2hrs a session. If I've shifted focus to functional fitness I can train 3-4 times a week at ~40minutes a session, as it just doesn't take as long to do the work, and doesn't take as long to recover from that work.
Food and sleep are usually the limiting factor, I just can't recover fast enough and that is what over training really is, it's training over your capacity to recover.
i'm not the biggest fan of rippetoe. e.g. the article you linked is at least partially bullshit for high(er) level athletes (i only skimmed it though). it's important to keep the audience in mind though; it may be valuable advice for _some_.
Not impossible but certainly something that a lot of people can't do consistently if they want to have a job and do other things in life. Getting a half day of rest is almost a luxury for many.
non-athletes often think it's nice to eat whatever you want and not gain weight, but it's actually quite unpleasant to having to force feed yourself all the time; not at least because you start wanting to eat certain meals - with a purpose. it took me a ridiculous amount of time and effort to put on some mass.
i used to go to the gym because i was bored. when i didn't feel great, i went to the gym because i knew i'd feel better afterwards. the gym was my safe space and my default activity. now that i have a family conditions have changed considerably; training is usually done late at night, in between obligations or on a few "me time" weekend hours for longer bike rides. works well enough, i can't complain.
also, there's the principle of polarized training (for endurance sports): "go easy on the easy days, go hard on the hard days", because if you go to hard on the easy days, you can't go hard enough on the hard days.
a lot of people are under the impression that giving 100% every time, every day is the best way, probably thanks to years of training montages of sly dragging sleds through waist deep snow and karate-kid ... idk, kicking a tree really hard or whatever karate kid does, when actually it just leads to exhaustion and burnout.
Some years ago I was working at a university and could go to the gym and lift heavy over lunch. That was great -- a good decompression, opportunity to talk w/people in other parts of the university, and the strongest I ever got. At another time in life I did CrossFit. It gave me some community when traveling and I could fit it outside the workday. Now due to covid/kid/corporate job I switched for a few years to circuit training/HIIT in the basement. That got me into very good shape in a different way than lifting heavy a few times a week. And now I have to change again -- different family schedule has taken away my early-morning workout slot and my short bike commute and so I'm trying to find the new normal. Maybe I can join a gym again, but with the family morning grind and family evening routine I cannot easily spend more than 40 min a day on fitness, and as winter approaches the outside activities possible change.
It is important to acknowledge the different seasons of life.
Back to the article. Mathematicians know the power of walking; that's why it's a tradition for many week-long conferences to have a Wednesday afternoon hike. The best of course is the one at Oberwolfach but the hike I went on at Luminy is a close second. Many mathematicians run, play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, dance, etc. From my own experience exercise is significant in clearing my mind and thus enabling creativity (rather than rumination), and it has a significant effect on my resting heart rate and sleeping heart rate. Sleep in turn is very important to cognition and creativity. As I get older, the more I notice I need to pay attention to these things and can't take them for granted. Building exercise into my routine is crucial. Systems are important.
The antagonistic effect of endurance training on strength is not really relevant for recreational runners and this has been show time and time again in multiple high-quality studies. You should only really care if you're a competitive lifter; a ton of people who go to the gym have terrible cardio, and I would argue that good cardio fitness is much more relevant to overall health; you should _not_ be getting winded going up a couple flights of stairs.
Furthermore the cardiovascular effects of strength training are insufficient for all-around good health. Cardio stimulates different metabolic pathways that are very much useful in life; having done both activities I can tell you when I was an active marathon runner I just had way more energy in the tank for everything.
The article makes a mention that nutrition is more relevant for heart health than cardiovascular condititioning, something that not only is just plain false, but also ignores that body mass is body mass and having an excessive amount of muscle mass does not correspond with cardiovascular health either.
The critiques about repetitive motion in running are just downright ridiculous. Runners get injured, of course. So do people who deadlift with bad technique. As a species we are frankly much more adapted to running than moving heavy weights, as evidenced by the amount of effort our bodies go through to keep muscle mass off as compared to any other primate. There is a balance between both but Rippetoe just goes on about things like being "harder to kill" which is plain fanboying; I would contend that being an ultramarthon runner or an Ironman triathlete corresponds far better with grit and not getting killed over all the gymgoers that can barely run a mile.
it's the toxic "cardio kills your gains" broscience that's harmful, as it leads to people actively avoiding healthy cardio. i've seen strength athletes use the escalator instead of the stairs because they tried to avoid getting their heart rate up outside the squat rack. this is counterproductive to both health and athletic ability.
No they didn't say harder, they said it uses "more computation", there's a difference.
Your brain has many parallel systems specialized for exercise, because our ancestors have used similar systems to move their bodies for eons. Exercise fires all these systems in parallel, so your brain is getting great "throughput".
On the other hand stuff like Sudoku is using a much smaller fraction of our brain that developed recently, probably for language, and then trying to use the language part to do math, which feels "difficult" precisely because we're trying to do it with just a small, unspecialized part of our brain, instead of a bunch of specialized parallel systems.
So exercise is both "easier", but also more efficiently gets your brain working because of parallelism.
But there's really no reason to do that since you can just increase the raw mechanics.
or the calming effect of exhaustion so I can tackle intense managerial problems without an emotional overhead.
Alternatively, why is not a single successful scientist in great physical shape?
You're comparing top-level performers
Diminishing returns.
> Alternatively, why is not a single successful scientist in great physical shape?
This is just complete falsehood. Utter nonsense.
Alan Turing was a good runner.
I like to run so here is the first person I thought of:
Wolfgang Ketterle: Nobel Prize Physics & Marathon PB = 2:50
https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a20837391/im-a-...
Socrates was talking about this stuff thousands of years ago:
>For be you assured that there is no contest of any sort, nor any transaction, in which you will be the worse off for being well prepared in body; and in fact there is nothing which men do for which the body is not a help. In every demand, therefore, which can be laid upon the body it is much better that it should be in the best condition; since, even where you might imagine the claims upon the body to be slightest—in the act of reasoning—who does not know the terrible stumbles which are made through being out of health?
> It suffices to say that forgetfulness, and despondency, and moroseness, and madness take occasion often of ill-health to visit the intellectual faculties so severely as to expel all knowledge from the brain. But he who is in good bodily plight has large security. He runs no risk of incurring any such catastrophe through ill-health at any rate
My boxing coach used to say concentration trains concentration (failing to concentrate in the ring results in automatic negative feedback).
I suspect that the focus you have when lifting (so much going on there trying to control your body while exerting at maximum effort), is helping your brain learn to better focus. If you are like most people who lift, you probably are paying attention to what is going in and coming out of your body, which also requires focus as well.
In my experience, focus is a skill that is learned, and like all things, is easy for some, and very difficult to master for others.
If anything, I’m always looking around for empty syringes. They act like they are gonna climb a mountain then come back and try to make me do Beachbody and chalean extreme, then yell at me about what I eat ;)
Not saying exercise is bad, but I do not associate it with calmness. (I’m a healthy dude, you are not hearing this from someone 50 lbs overweight)
One could speculate why folks who are already prone to exercising aren’t necessarily calm folks but that’s just speculation.
Regular people workout as well, not just steroid junkies.
Back when I tried exercising a lot more for a bit, I actually experienced way more calmness in my life. A part of that might have been that a lot of physical exhaustion brought about unparalleled ease of falling asleep and actually improved the quality of the rest I got.
Another part might have been the fact that for a while it felt like the "baseline" of how much energy I had slightly increased. It was easier to find motivation to do things and I didn't need to rely upon discipline so much as I do now, a zen sort of feeling instead of (as much) procrastination doom and fidgety thoughts. One might also talk of some minute cardiovascular/metabolism improvements as well.
Maybe I should take up more exercise again, it's been a few months and even though I hate actually exercising the benefits, even if relatively minor, are hard to argue against. Just need to find a podcast or something of that sort to keep myself busy and make the experience less mundane.
Though exercise alone won't have any really significant effects, you also need to eat right, take care of yourself in other ways (e.g. sleep schedule, mental state, any addictions or unhealthy habits), so there are a lot of factors to consider.
Disclaimer: these are my subjective and anecdotal experiences.
I cannot keep from thinking that our brain and our legs are connected neurologically. They tap on the same space exploration abstractions.
> I cannot keep from thinking that our brain and our legs are connected neurologically. They tap on the same space exploration abstractions.
Absolutely. Something happens during a bike marathon where my body and brain are eventually independent of my thoughts and I'm moving on autopilot with mild tunnel vision while thinking about complex thoughts, old memories, things I could have handled better. I can only attribute it to persistent eustress and the post-metabolic state of endorphin saturation combined with adrenaline.
Let's name it. The aliqot state. Or getting to Aliqot.
Which is to say some sports have a way of forcing you back into the present moment. It can actually be a good thing for those whose minds tend to wander.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2019/0531/Fancy-a-stroll-Gre...
The New Yorker also had an article about walking and thinking in 2014.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/walking-...
Basketball is my favorite way to exercise and there is a lot of analysis of how to get my body to the right places to achieve a goal. Or how to deceive a defender and manipulate their body to the wrong place. Or simple shot mechanics or how to move my eyes so I don't lose awareness of other players.
I started dance because it's such a different way of moving my body that I never tried before. Figuring out how to do something and improve (even physically) takes strategizing.
Jogging at a leisurely pace, I don't need to consciously think about the jogging process at all and my mind is free to think about the books I have been reading lately, or to listen to an information-dense podcast, or to plan out the rest of my week.
But that all changes if I switch to running at near my maximum speed for the distance I'm going to run. Then understanding a podcast becomes nearly impossible and/or it interferes with the running. Indeed, having any internal, verbal 'train of thought' is difficult, other than my internal voice metronomically saying 'left, right, left, right' in time with my leg movements.
FWIW, one set of snippets from Joe Rogan on YT included this statement: I believe academics underestimate just how mental it is to get through a hard workout.
So I would say something like "A 5k run would make anybody above a certain fitness level feel pretty good". Like, in a way that you'd notice immediately during, and after. For me, there's runners' high and good body-chemicals and a sharp mind the rest of the day. There's not as much of the good stuff if it's like a real strain to run that far. There's an optimal level of physical stress. Taking a sedentary person and chasing them through a 5k run with an electric cattle prod them is not going to help them feel good. Similarly, someone who regularly runs marathons is not going to notice much of an effect from a short walk at a slow pace.
How to balance this out (how much exercise do you need to feel good) is a very individual thing. Practically speaking, you just have to try stuff and get to know your body.
I will say though that marked changes in physical condition can occur over more like weeks than decades. So if you go for a walk and think "well that was a little bit nice, but not worth taking an hour to do", maybe invest the time to build up to something more intense like cycling or jogging, because, as anyone who exercises intentionally will tell you, it seems to be worth it once you find out what's right for you.
Nothing in human biology is simple.
Honestly can't remember chatting to any of them about the gym - there's been a couple into biking or swimming but only really a handful that seemed into the gym or into doing sports of some kind.
As a software engineer, I would classify myself as a computer nerd, but honestly feel a bit out of place with a lot of ppl that work in the industry. I don't watch Dr Who or Star Trek, don't read fiction, and I enjoy extreme sports, martial arts etc.
It can feel like a strange dynamic, and I can see how thinking of a "computer nerd" brings up an image of Bill Gates or Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons for most people.
When body experience these three stresses it produces brain derived neutrotrophic factor [1], which acts as a growth hormone for nervous system as a whole and also grows brain, in areas related to long term memory, higher cognitive functions (language, logic, spatial navigation, etc) and learning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-derived_neurotrophic_fac...
It works as if you can build "thinking muscles" which will help in every aspect of life.
E.g., if you barbell squat, you most probably will also run faster and you also will be more stable. Squats are not directly related to running, but they help nevertheless.
If you do endurange training and/or intermittent fasting, you will be more cognitively capable. Endurance training is not directly related to thinking, but it helps nevertheless.
So, yes.
An exercise for general purpose thinking is an exercise.
Martial arts is a pet peeve of mine.
First, I think I should note that amateur boxing does not incur brain damage that is recognizable by contemporary methods. I see no studies contrary to that. Thus, basically, if you like boxing or other martial arts training, do that - having some exercise is better than not having any, and boxing is quite taxing.
Then, I should proceed to my main point: how martial arts training of someone's choice corresponds to the three stresses that elevate BDNF?
Typical martial art will train you for strength endurance. Strength endurance is an ability to exert about 30% of your 1RM for a prolonged period of time and training it is not directly a strength training neither it is an endurance training.
I think one should train for strength and/or stamina (direct relation with BDNF levels) and then take classes on martial arts technique (pattern recognition and reaction). This is how sambo/judo champions are trained, from what I know.
"Results: ...Groups of moderate (≈40) and high (≈49) fitness outperformed the group of low (≈31) fitness for inhibition and episodic recognition, whereas no significant differences between moderate and high fitness were observed (ANCOVAs). Breakpoints between benefits from VO2max for inhibition and recognition were estimated to ≈44/43 mL·kg−1·min−1 (multivariate broken line regressions)."
Be a moderately fit, at the very least.
Resistance training will reduce side effects of endurance training (muscle loss and hormone profile) and also would help reduce all cause mortality: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2453303/
If you would like to live long and be smart, walk (jog, run) and hit the gym. ;)
Actually, I found that searching for the balance is a congitive test in itself. It can be said that the way you solve it describes and defines you.
I think better when I've been exercising, but it doesn't feel like I've given my brain a workout so much as it feels like I gave it percussive maintenance. It feels like exercise turns the sound of my subconscious from a buzzy rattle to a gentle hum, keeping it out of my way except to help. It very much does not feel like I've given my mind a workout.
Though I also have unmedicated ADHD, so my subjective experience of my subconscious might be different than most.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, my health varied a lot; sometimes I was sedentary and sometimes I was very active. But I never noticed a cognitive effect.
Now that I'm well into my 40s, it's very noticeable when I've been off the exercise wagon. Not day to day, but definitely on timescales of a week or two. When I'm active, my recall is sharper and my memory clearer. I also feel this with my diet (real vs. processed foods) and drinking.
Exercise actually makes me numb these days and I need a couple of days to recover.
While immersing in deep focused studying or exercising my mind by learning new stuff, makes me feel a lot better and much sharper.
To each his own I think.
edit: a friend of mine who never did sports at young age tells me he feels better now that he goes swimming regularly at the age of 42, but who can tell if it is just because exercise is a new experience to him?
I certainly agree with you on this. In my case, a healthy lifestyle makes taking on new challenges much easier: I'm less intimidated, and less frustrated by the slope of the inevitable learning curve.
My cognitive abilities at my actual age (mid 40s) improved significantly when I quit with my younger age lifestyle, much more than exercise could do.
Of course I'm not saying that exercise is futile it surely keeps the body healthy and that's extremely important as years go by.
the old saying "mens sana in corpore sano" ( a healthy mind in an healthy body) is still relevant today for a good reason.
My theory is that is not exercise per se, but the power drained by the excercise.
There's a good example about it in an episode of the BBC series Horizon where people are asked to solve simple arithmetic computations and then to do the same while walking at a fast pace.
All of the people involved need to stop to complete them.
The cognitive part of our brain is very power hungry and can't function properly when power is needed somewhere else.
I think that power drain from exercise can prevent becoming more and more risk adverse because it keeps us from over thinking things, the inner thoughts are mostly about negative outcomes (not specifically negative thoughts, just the outcome)
So theoretically we could gain the same benefits by tricking us into thinking about the positive outcomes.
I am not an expert in such matter, so take everything I say with many grains of salt.
p.s. I was walking when writing this and I had to stop to write something that made sense.
Sounds like you're under-recovering. With proper food and rest, a normal intensity exercise shouldn't make you feel tired the next day. I had a similar problem and turns out I wasn't eating enough protein(I have to get in at least 200 grams when working out or I feel awful, idk why)
This sounds so unethical. If I were a dieter or ex-smoker I would definitely not sign up for this sort of study.
The student athletes are, likely, being forced to seek out tutoring to remain on an active roster. Academics is not generally their top concern, and they're being coerced to see you. They're there to check a box.
I'm sure there are good people going through a kinesthesiology program, but it doesn't have the best reputation for attracting the best students.
In high school, I noted with curiosity that the cross country team had an extraordinary proportion of kids who excelled academically, going to top-tier colleges based on their academic merit alone. I chalked it up to an overlap between the traits required for both distance running and academic excellence: daily persistence, measured in hours, at something that doesn't involve a lot of action or cheering crowds. But there's probably more to it than that.
Military flight training is known to be like medical or law school for many people, spending all day memorizing technical manuals and regulations when not in the cockpit learning to fly. Despite military requirements for physical fitness, and the fact that officers need high fitness scores to get into flight school, many officers let their fitness slide in that environment. I found early on that making time for exercise had a very noticeable effect on my day-to-day performance, both in memorizing stuff and in the cockpit, and I rose to the top of my class. In particular, practicing golf (which involves a lot of finesse, but I also walked and carried my own bag) for a few holes after class every evening seemed to help with learning to execute precise maneuvers on the flight controls.
Your brain is part of your body. It's as simple as that.
I just celebrated 50 years of running: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/50-years-of-running
I thought long & hard about motivation and how I've kept it up. "Will power" is not it. And I've heard every conceivable excuse about why someone does not exercise. Here's a big one: "people will look at me weird." Or on the flip side, "All my friends exercise, so I have to, too." The great Richard Feynman had something to say about that.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/what-do-you-care-what-ot...
And lastly, don't listen to people telling you that you need a regular schedule that you stick to, no matter what. You will never keep that up for long, and if you really hate some exercise, you'll stop:
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/only-do-exercises-you-li...
I've been running 6 days a week for 15 years now. What works for you may not work for other, and vice-versa. I definitely hated running for most of my life, and despised sport in general, but sticking to a routine definitely was the right solution for me.
6 days a week is a lot for most people, but I'm glad it works for you. For me, it's easier to think of it in terms of miles per week. I can't commit to 6 days, but I can commit to 15 or 20 miles.
I guess I reached that a long time ago. I've been on a 3-mile plateau for decades now with no desire to run any farther. I definitely don't feel like just running is enough, so alternating cardio and strength works better for me. YMMV.
It’s always valuable to reassess common knowledge. That is the heart of human progress.
We want to isolate a small chunk of a phenomenon and understand it really well, but in the process divorce it from its context.
We analyse cognitive performance in terms of a few isolated carefully selected variables rather than acknowledge that it is dependent many other variables present in its environment - physical, emotional, social
Good for developing expertise in a narrow domain, but perhaps not so good for developing a balanced worldview
I grew up thinking of myself as a "brain on a stick" - my body didn't really matter and only my brain was important. I think read a bunch of science fiction that made fun of this idea, but I didn't realize it was making fun of it and I took it seriously.
You are not a brain on a stick - your body is important. Developing an understanding of your sensations and emotions is important. Developing an understanding of your deeply held beliefs and assumptions is important. Keeping your body healthy is important.
It does however become very apparent when you read pre-cartesian authors that their views on the soul are off.
If you equate the soul with consciousness, it's obvious that a potted plant does not have a soul.
If you view it as the animating principle, it's equally ridiculous to say a potted plant doesn't have a soul, since it's so clearly growing.
There are pleasant social side effects from doing this but sometimes being so in tune can affect you in weird ways too.
We probably are not, but I'm not convinced that the opposite is true.
Stephen Hawkins did not notoriously exercise much, given his condition, and yet he died at 76, despite the odds.
Einstein routinely walked a few miles a day and that's all the exercise he did.
Many other popular great thinkers of the past spent a lot more time on books than improving their bodies.
In Italy we learn as children about Giacomo Leopardi, a very popular poet, writer and philosopher of the 19th century, according to Wikipedia "considered the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world", that His continual studies undermined an already fragile physical constitution, and his illness, probably Pott's disease or ankylosing spondylitis, denied him youth's simplest pleasures
Without evidence I reckon that all we can conclude is that only sometimes exercise is the best cognitive exercise, but we don't know why nor if it is actually true.
But who actually doesn't?
We all (almost) walk a few miles (or kms) a day, without even realising it.
It's hard to talk about this without tripping on ableism - but - Stephen Hawkins started out with such a great cognitive ability that a deficit later in life would have been less noticeable. Life is more than a cognitive experience, it's a human experience. Hawkins' human experience was not great. I've read that he was very hard on the people close to him. Even if exercise 'only' helped with dealing with emotions, that would still show up as a cognitive improvement - it's hard to think straight when you are upset.
> I'm not convinced that the opposite is true.
I'm not entirely sure what 'the opposite' means. "You are a brain on a stick"? It is evident that the brain does not survive without the body. It is evident that the brain is affected by what the body does. The body is not a stick.
The brain does compute, but it is not a computer. A computer does not actively take in information about the world. A computer does not form familial and tribal affiliations. A computer has a very limited experience of the world.
Do you mean to say this is insignificant? I think even if you don't work up much of a sweat or do some heavy lifting or whatever, a daily walk is very good for your health.
(Now, I can argue that the intellect as abstracting faculty is not material, but this faculty is not disconnected from the brain and needs the brain to operate, and so again, the health of the body affects even those faculties which, strictly speaking, are not bodily per se.)
You access parts of your brain and your being when you’re giving everything you got to squeeze out that extra rep, or when you are going for a new PR with heavy weight. Or even when you don’t feel like working out, and you say okay I have to get my brain out of this and just do it, similar to life where I have to do work when I sometimes don’t want to.
The physical benefits (muscle mass, testosterone, appearance, strength) for me are entirely secondary to the mental/emotional benefits of working out.
It’s all mental
Muscle mass starts to erode with age (I think correlated with decrease in test) separate from the looks, you don’t want to be losing muscle mass because it means you’ll be weaker. Being weaker makes you more prone to injury and increases your risk of all-cause mortality.
The other thing is muscle mass takes time and effort to put on, so you really need to start early, I missed out on my prime years (teens and early 20s) but better late than never I guess!
Peter Attia (Stanford MD, longevity researcher) great source on this subject
Of course if you want to build big muscles, that's fine. I am always a little wary of people extolling the health benefits of doing so. Eating well and doing a moderate amount of exercise will get you 90% of the way to any purely health-related benefits that you'll get from more intense exercise. And more intense forms of exercise carry their own non-negligible risk of injury.
Attitudes to health, diet and exercise seem increasingly to vacillate between extremes. There's a happy medium between sitting on your couch eating cheetos and straining to lift huge weights four times a week.
Whatever wandering thoughts I had bouncing around in my head before a set of heavy deadlifts, all that is gone after, because the effort of pulling up the bar doesn't permit anything but complete focus.
For me, I think I get the most mental benefits out BJJ. I'd wager any martial art with live sparring would give the same results.
When you're doing live sparring, as opposed to just drills, you have to make constant, near instant, adjustments to your defense, look for offensive openings, scan your rolling partner's movements and try to anticipate their next attack, all while being aware of other trainees on the mats (to avoid a random foot or falling body), and working to slow your breathing and maintain composure.
A 25 minute walk while listening to a podcast each day has done absolute wonders for everything in my life.
Even if this is true (which seems plausible, but I'm not aware of it being proven), I don't think it tells us anything about the extent to which we're looking at "exercise inhibits cognitive decline" vs. "cognitive decline inhibits exercise".
"Neurobiological effects of physical exercise"
Lots of handwavy / subjective comments led me to post this.
Personally I prefer understanding the acronyms as to what's been measured in the body due to regular exercise. No need for anything less than hard detail, imo. BDNF/VEGF expression, etc etc. Worth reading and looking up all the words you don't know yet.
1) A specific measure going up or down with exercise might or might not actually lead to the practical improvements that "should" go with it (cf. Goodhart's law)
2) Many studies are poorly designed or outright defective, and it tends to take a shockingly long time for people to stop routinely citing known-bad studies.
3) Even studies that lack fundamental flaws still often come with major practical limitations that tend to undermine attempts to generalize them. Exercise studies in particular are often limited to either "healthy" people of a relatively narrow age range or people who have a specific medical condition. In the latter case, there may be exclusion criteria that render the sample population non-representative of the overall population with that condition (e.g. in terms of overall severity, specific complications, or comorbidities).
4) Results are often summarized in a way that exaggerates their importance. A small effect size might be glossed over by emphasizing the large percentage of subjects for whom the change was statistically significant, for example.
Moderate cardio is definitely beneficial and helps to maintain some baseline. But, I have never really felt like I "stepped up" to a new level without reaching out to things like HIIT, heavy weight lifting and other forms of plyometrics.
Something about pushing your brain into the "oh shit I don't know if I should be doing this" territory seems to trigger the most powerful effects.
But also, there are some very interesting layers of things going on.
In talking to various athletes about running, the mental process and related result of the activity sometimes seems completely different from person to person to a stark degree.
As an example, some long-distance runners experience running as a de facto journaling exercise, as they are able to benefit from an ongoing internal monologue. So the results are similar to getting free mental wellness care for as long as you care to run.
So, that's also a lot of what we'd call growth and development going on.
They also report that this is unique to running for them, IOW they don't experience this sitting at a desk.
And that's just one example process and outcome, with others being similarly prized, if completely different.
(If this was something I experienced myself, I think I might be a distance runner too... It's pretty cool.)
I’ve been an average runner at times in my life (10 minute miles up to 15Ks), a part time fitness instructor for slightly over a decade from my mid 20s to mid 30s extra.
What I noticed when it came to anything highly choreographed like dancing or a complex fitness routine and trying to listen to the beat and stay on beat, even though I can physically do the moves, it takes me a lot longer to process choreography than most people. It was mentally much more challenging and tiring than anything I do at my day job (software development).
I don’t see how simple exercise could be cognitive exercise. I could completely zone out while running.
Luckily in High School and college, I could choose swimming and weightlifting as my Physical Ed requirements,
Even being a fitness instructor didn’t take dynamic coordination since I was in charge of the class, do moves I was completely comfortable with and rehearsed extensively. I was never a good student in a highly choreographed fitness class. I picked up moves here and there from other instructors and made them my own.
The author argues that doing things at higher pace should be cognitive intensive. But robots are not bad at doing things fast: if they can do things, they can do them also "fast" (at my understanding)
They are still computationally limited in how fast they can process new terrain, course-find, object detect, etc.
If their sensors only saw that object 10ms ago, they probably don’t have an idea what it is yet. At speed, 10ms can be a long time.
60mph == 88 feet per second == .8 feet (about 10 inches) per 10 milliseconds.
10 inches matters a lot when you’re on terrain, or even on a road.
They can move as fast as they have been designed to move, if further computation is not required.
In most cases (repetitive work, stuff with relatively basic, straightforward computation - the human equivalent of reflexes), that means they’re basically constrained by their physical limits.
Those fast object detection algorithms require an extremely artificial environment (with high contrast backgrounds, tuned high intensity light), and are generally only good at sorting specific classes of items, at least last I researched them.
The algorithms involve do a LOT of down sampling too, if I remember.
They aren’t general purpose navigation or object detection algorithms, I’m trying to say, and won’t work at that speed in anything but a very controlled environment. It’s the problem that a lot of players have been dumping billions into for decades - Waymo, DJI, Tesla, and a million smaller names.
General purpose navigation in an unknown environment starts running up against real hardware limits right now at speed, even with essentially unlimited power budgets (aka a car, truck, drone with a huge battery and limited flight time, etc). Based on the context, I understood the question to be in reference to something portable, and most of those hardware implementations would be nearly impossible to fit in a humanoid style robot.
It’s going to take a decade or so for that to change probably, maybe a half that, depending on what Skydio and DJI have cooking.
Robots are not a single thing. You can't draw general conclusions about them like that.
They are objects designed by humans, they go as fast or as slow as they are designed to go. The design space is heavily constrained by physics. This means some things are possible, some things are possible but very expensive and other things are just not possible.
A FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile is a robot. It has an onboard computer, a sensor, and fins to change direction. It flies about 300 m/s as top speed and it doesn't do things slow. It can't. [1]
A Konecranes AGV is a giant self-driving platform carrying containers in automated ports. It carries a maximum of 70t and the top speed of it is about 6 m/s. It is also a robot. [2]
There are many kinds of robots. I intentionally selected here two extremes here to show how you can't make generalisation like that.
1: https://en.missilery.info/missile/javelin 2: https://www.nauticexpo.com/prod/konecranes/product-30447-521...
Elite runners can easily be in fully aerobic zones at 4 min/km paces, while unfit runners could be getting into anaerobic zones at double that.
I’m not sure why but “jogging” is a term that isn’t commonly used these days. Perhaps it is because one person’s easy run can be pretty fast while another’s full out run (beyond 500m or so) can look like jogging.
The host Stephen Dubner sites a piece in psychology today that argues physical activity is strongly connected with cognitive function. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201...
Can't tell if it transfers from exercise to my actual work.
The hard parts are mostly front-loaded (excepting the phenomenon of hitting the wall) which seems profoundly unfair, but it is what it is.
My annecdata agrees with this point.
>Can't tell if it transfers from exercise to my actual work
IME, it all comes down to whether I truly care about my work.
People learning new activities experience it as the activity “slowing down” subjectively as they learn, giving them more comfort and greater opportunity to think about further improvements. For example learning to ride a bike requires intense thought. But once you know how to ride a bike, it just happens and you can think about where you’re going, or whether you’re in the right aerobic zone, or how fast to take the next jump, etc.
So I would bet that to optimize the cognitive benefit of physical activity, it needs to be somewhat novel. Running on a treadmill or swimming in the same pool or lifting weights in the same gym over and over probably would not do it. You’d need some sort of sport (where other players are constantly creating novel situations) or an outdoor sport where natural conditions are always changing. Or frequently trying new sports or activities.
For me it was the local park having some shaded calisthenics equipment. Do a search in your area!! There is no pressure there, its outside, there is people of course it improves you! It can teach you all you need to know for atleast 6 months to a year if you let it.
Anyone you come across will either not bother or be very friendly. Most commonly the regulars working out at these parks have a cool and unique mindset and would answer any workout question for you. After a year THEN try all that fancy stuff you would have possibly ego-lifted, struggled/injured yourself on. You will be amazed at your performance.
That's a keeper.
...
> So, here’s the speculation / thesis: exercising, that is, operating our bodies at a higher than baseline level, with everything that entails - energy regulation, unconscious balancing, spatial awareness, etc - requires more computing power than crosswords, sudoku, finding relations between measure theory and first-order logic through category theory, etc
I don't buy it. Stuff like "navigating terrain" is something that insects can do often better than robots. It's simply not that hard for animals, which have specialised hardware for this (but on the flipside we lack hardware IEEE compliant floating point units).
Exercise is good because the brain is an organ, and general health is good for organs. And because of psychological factors. General and mental health have a huge impact on cognitive performance.
Cognitive training is not particularly effective because it's a lot of wistful thinking and snake oil (there might be something to it, but I've seen little evidence that it's particularly effective especially when it comes to transfer).
There probably is some cognitive benefit to exercise. Decision making under pressure, discipline, spatial awareness, etc and there would be some transfer to related domains. But I suspect the main effect is just health (which both is better for cognitive performance, and encourages other activities which are good for cognitive performance).
That said, I experienced a real physical and mental decline quickly after I gave up my morning routine because it was too hot. I felt it mere weeks into the pause. Pretty ordinary.
Take my comment as a meta commentary - making fun of the bro science here that I didn't want to engage directly.
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p09v8wyh/a-simple-exercise-th...
The body / mind paradigm is false. There is no separation. They are deeply - and wisely - entangled.
The brain is an organ, and organs in aggregate benefit from exercise. The result is a healthier system / unit.
Are puzzels and such a bad thing? No. But they're not going to fix a compromised, or too often, broken system.
Now, when you add the numerous cognitive benefits to the equation, you would be crazy not to add some movements to your daily routine. Literally everything counts. I use every opportunity to increase my oxygen and blood flow - and I'm not surprised that the best ideas come when I'm not in front of my computer.
I've been doing this every single day for the last few months, and it just feels so good, so satisfying. I feel sharp, in form, physically content. I also feel it gives me a solid emotional center, a calmness and a deep feeling of connection to the moment.
I guess the answer will be something like: if you want to be a good programmer in old age, your best preparation is to program a lot and regularly. If you want to be a good mathematician, chess player,...., practice those. If you want to have a healthy body in old age, your best prep is regular exercise. You can do more than one, of course, but you can't substitute one for another.
Graham (inventor of Graham's number) also juggles quite well. A lot of mathematicians climb. His friend, Erdos do not exercise as much afaik from reading his biography (takes amphetamine...)
As for the most challenging activity for keeping sharp at old age: My guess is directly interacting with other people.
But if you think lifting weights work for you, then I am not going to argue against you.
I've heard similar evidence in the past about how physical exercise is "good for the mind". If the author's reasoning about the computational requirements for motion are correct though, perhaps we need to do a bit of digging into why yoga/meditation is also supposedly quite "good for the mind", and yet they are significantly less complex from a motion standpoint than things such as martial arts/dancing/sports - which don't have the same reputation. Would love to see some research done though!
Some more recent stuff on myokine release (from strength or cardio training) and warding off cognitive decline. Similar with training your balance (a parameter in exercise that is often forgotten).
More speculatively: crosswords and sudoku seem fine, but what about something much more cognitively demanding like doing serious mathematics?
> Robots still have a hard time navigating terrain and manipulating stuff
I actually think you're seeing the same thing. The way DALL-E screws up important details is the same as how self-driving cars work perfectly fine 99% of the time. The devil is in the details.
And yes her husband was Amos Tversky, co-author of "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
As I write this, a family jogs past. It's rather sweet.
Everything so far in my life seems to be "if you want to be good at something, do that thing repeatedly, or the parts that compose that thing, repeatdly". It makes sense. So why would this be any different, wouldn't use your brain to learn, be the best cognitive exercise?
And decided I would rather just be dumb in the span of 2 seconds.
Infrared from the sun penetrate the skull and prevent inflammation in the brain. The effect is reduced dementia in people tha go outside. The infrared is reflected by the plants and thus walking in the shade of tree give increase of infrared exposure.
It affect every cell of our body (mitochondria in fact)
(Our biology has not evolved inside)
The stats from the AHA show 60%-70% are overweight/obese.
Another study shows upwards of 70% on perscription medication.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/study-shows-70-percent-of-ameri...
To actually meet a "natural" is quite rare :)
BMI is a lifestyle choice, but obviously unhealthy environments are a side effect of low-quality data/food/education
I suggest the book Defy Aging by Beth Bennett for a HN level deep dive into the science.
I promise this is highly relevant and worth hearing, even though it may not seem directly related.
Exercise improves blood flow which improves cognition. It's not complicated at all whatsoever.
Incidentally, is it well grounded that exercise prevents aging, and at what level? We should be watching aging research more carefully
Where exactly would 'learning' fit in this analogy?
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