A new study reveals that exercise has nuanced effects on the brain, with different forms and intensities having different effects on cognition and mental health.
Exercise can improve mental and cognitive health, but not all forms and intensities of exercise affect the brain equally. It’s subtle. Specific intensities of exercise over long periods of time have been found to be associated with different aspects of memory and mental health.The findings were recently published in the journal scientific report Provides insight on how to optimize your exercise.
“Mental health and memory are central to almost everything we do in our daily lives,” says lead author Jeremy Manning. He is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. “Our research seeks to build a foundation for understanding how exercise of varying intensities affects different aspects of mental and cognitive health.
For this study, researchers enrolled 113 Fitbit users. They were given a series of memory tests, answered several mental health questions, and were asked to share their fitness data from the previous year. Scientists expected more active people to have better memory and mental health, but the results were more nuanced. While those who exercised at high intensity performed better on other memory tasks, those who were more active also reported higher stress levels. However, those who exercised regularly at low intensity had lower rates of depression and anxiety.
Previous research has typically focused on the effects of exercise on memory over relatively short timeframes, such as days or weeks. But the Dartmouth scientists wanted to analyze the effects on a much longer timescale. The data collected includes your average heart rate, daily steps taken, and the amount of time spent exercising in different “heart rate zones” defined by FitBit (resting, out of range, fat burning, cardio, or peak). time, and other information. Collected over a period of one year. Participants in this study were recruited online from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced workforce.
There were four types of memory tasks used in this study, designed to explore different aspects of participants’ performance over different timescales. Two sets of tasks focused on testing ‘episodic’ memory. This is the same kind of memory that is used to recall autobiographical events, such as what happened yesterday. Another set of tasks was developed to test ‘spatial’ memory, the same type of memory used to remember places such as where you parked your car. The final set of tasks was aimed at testing ‘associative’ memory (the ability to remember connections between concepts or other memories).
Participants who were more active than the previous year tended to have better memory overall. However, the specific areas of improvement varied depending on the type of activity people engaged in. The researchers found that participants who often exercised at moderate intensity tended to perform better on episodic memory tasks, and participants who exercised frequently at high intensity did better on spatial memory tasks. We found that sedentary participants who exercised very little typically performed poorly on spatial memory tasks.
The research team also identified a relationship between participants’ mental health and memory. Participants who self-reported anxiety or depression tended to perform better on spatial and associative memory tasks. Individuals with self-reported bipolar disorder tended to perform better on episodic memory tasks. Those who reported higher levels of stress tended to perform worse on associative memory tasks.
All data and code have been made freely available by the research team. github For those who want to explore the dataset or understand it better.
“When it comes to physical activity, memory, and mental health, there are very complex dynamics at work that can’t be summed up in one word, like ‘walking improves memory’ or ‘stress damages memory,'” says Manning. increase. “Instead, it seems that certain forms of physical activity and certain aspects of mental health affect each aspect of memory differently.”
With additional research, the researchers say their findings could have some exciting applications. To help with this, we can design specific exercise regimens that help improve cognitive performance and mental health.”
See: “Fitness Tracking Reveals Task-Specific Associations Between Memory, Mental Health, and Physical Activity,” Jeremy R. Manning, Gina M. Notaro, Esme Chen, Paxton C. Fitzpatrick, August 2022. 15th day, scientific report.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-17781-0
