Lift Up Your Hearts!

Television has long been called the "idiot box," but here is more evidence that being a couch potato harms the brain as well as the body.  Unfortunately, in this case reading is just as bad as watching TV.

The Swedish experiment was actually about depression.  Previous studies have shown that the hippocamus region of the human brain shrinks in depressed people.  In this study, exercise was shown to have a significant anti-depressant effect in rats, and promoted dramatic neuron growth in the hippocampus.  (If you, like me, wonder how on earth they can tell if a rat is depressed, read the article.)

As usual, the study raises more questions.  How does this apply to humans?  Is the effect noticable in both young and old?  Is it physical activity, per se, that makes the difference, or are some types of exercise more valuable than others?

Most intriguing of all:  The study was about depression, but the hippocampus is also involved in learning and memory.  What effect, then, does exercise (or lack thereof) have on our general intellectual abilities?  Since the days when most people earned their daily bread through physical labor, have our sedentary lives taken away a significant portion of the intellectual growth gained by increased access to books and schooling?

When I mentioned this article to Porter, his first question was, if this is so, why the generalization of the "dumb jock"?  Perhaps the kind of exercise really does matter.  Maybe running, being a natural human motion, builds brain cells better than say, tennis.  Maybe the average intellectual ability among athletes is brought down significantly by those sports that involve massive blows to the head.

The sedentary lives of most American children are harming their brains as well as their bodies.  Blame television, video games, long hours in school/day care, urban apartment and suburban homes with small lots, or crime rates and parental fears that keep children close to home—any and all of the above.  Our kids need to get moving!  Until there is more data, I would favor the more natural forms of movement such as crawling and creeping for babies, and walking and running for older kids, and swimming for everyone (except that I worry about the high chlorine level in public pools), and only add organized sports on top of a good program of the above.  But that's a personal preference; I imagine that for most children any exercise will help.

Moreover, we adults need to get moving, too!  If we're worried about our children's intellectual development, they have equal right to worry out their parents' intellectual decline.  If exercise now will help keep our minds sharp as we age, we owe it to our kids as well as ourselves to get off the couch (or out of the computer chair).

I'm extrapolating here, of course.  This particular study was just about depression.  But I'm all for non-pharmaceutical solutions, and in this case running was as effective as anti-depressant medication.  We'll be happier, and we might become smarter.  What are we waiting for?