Don’t Be Stupid: Play Footbag

Earlier today, I was listening to radio interview with author John Medina where he was talking about the relationship between exercise and brain function. Quantifying brain fitness is a very complicated science, and there are many disputed theories out there. One measure that seems to have gained acceptance in the brain research community is called “executive function“.

Executive function covers a broad spectrum of cognitive and psychological activities. In a nutshell it is a measure of the brain’s ability to plan and organize, make decisions, troubleshoot, think abstractly, and even resist bad temptations and behaviors. Studies indicate that there is a direct relationship between executive function and intelligence.

Now, it makes sense that there is a notable relationship between physical fitness and brain fitness. What surprised me was just how much of a correlation there actually is…

John Medina purports:

If you take somebody who’s fat and sedentary and exercise them three times a week for as little as three months, you can get anywhere between an 80 and 120 percent increase in executive function.

There you have it, yet another reason to bust out the Hacky Sack (we recommend one that’s easy to control) and get a few kicks in. Interestingly, in the radio interview John also mentioned that this exercise specifically had to be aerobic in nature: While hitting the gym to pump some iron will have its effects, these don’t appear to be related to an increase in executive function.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Freedom News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.