JOG YOUR BRAIN [ back to What's New ]
Neuroscientist Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, has demonstrated in juvenile mice that jogging improves recent memory and new learning by greatly increasing the number of cells in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, and priming those cells for more efficient firing in response to stimuli. Mice that ran a treadmill intermittently over a 5 week period performed much better in navigating a water maze than sedentary mice that did not exercise, and on autopsy the runners had more robust brain growth and development in the specific area for associative memory (learning by experience) than the couch potatoes - as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So go out and take a jog. It may jog your brain.