A healthy mind in a healthy body?
"Mens sana in corpore sano." Is there a healthy mind in a healthy body? The fact is that Juvenal formulated wishful thinking in his satires, since only the subordinate clause is ever quoted. Indeed, the full sentence "orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano" is "One must pray that a sound mind is in a sound body."
In fact, however, one can do more than pray. You can actually do something about it, and that is exercise. It is not only our body that benefits from exercise, but also our mind.
Let's see what science has to say about it.
Sport - more than just training for the muscles
If psychiatrist and Havard professor John Ratey has his way, the effects of exercise on the heart, lungs and muscles are only the side effects. The effects that exercise has on the brain are much more remarkable to him. The Californian Department of Education, for example, finds a correlation between physical fitness and school success. And further: Studies that have examined mentally fit people in old age have been able to identify three commonalities: Education, self-confidence (effectiveness) and exercise.
Where do we come from?
Humans have lived as hunter-gatherers for most of their lives. They had to move an average of 8 to 16 kilometres per day to find food. According to the scientific assumption, this movement and the problem-solving skills developed in hunting and necessary for survival have developed in parallel. Learning and movement belong together evolutionarily. Harari points out in his book "Sapiens" that the brain volumes in hunter-gatherer societies were larger than in agricultural societies and ours today.
What happens in our heads?
But what happens in our brains when we talk about movement putting our brains in the right state to learn or work?
What specifically triggers the positive influences on memory, concentration and behaviour?
First of all, we have to get to the bottom of the question of what learning actually is biologically. Learning, whether a movement or a vocabulary word, is a network of synapses that becomes stronger through repetition. If we practise something more often, this connection remains or becomes stronger; if we pause too long, it becomes weaker. Movement can help us to support this process.
Movement as fertiliser for the brain
We know that movement produces growth factors that play an important role in the networking and formation of new nerve cells. These are BDNF IGF1, VEGF and FGF2. During exercise, these factors flow through the blood-brain barrier into the brain and help to maintain, network and form new neurons. In this way, information can be better absorbed, processed, stored and put into context. In short: learning processes are thus facilitated and consolidated.
What do we get out of it?
The effects of this have also been measured. German scientists found that people who had exercised shortly before learned vocabulary 20 percent faster than those who had not exercised. However, the experiment also shows that exercise alone is not enough. You also have to learn. But that simply works better with exercise.
What should I train?
Of course, this brings up the question of which training plan optimally prepares us for the next stroke of genius. It has been proven that after just 30 minutes of running or walking at 70 to 80 percent of the maximum pulse, neurotransmitters and the growth factors mentioned above become active in our brain.
It is ideal if endurance training is supplemented by a coordinatively demanding sport. Demanding coordinative tasks help to form even more complex synaptic networks, which can then also be used for other areas of life. So a combination of endurance and coordination training is ideal for our brain.
Next week
Next week you will learn what happens in our brain during stress and how you can keep its negative consequences in check with exercise.
References
- Ratey, J. J. (2013). Spark. The revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain. Little, Brown & Company.
- Harari, Yuval N. author. (2015). Sapiens : a brief history of humankind. New York :Harper,