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Study Finds You Can Grow Brain Cells Through Exercise
phantomfive writes: Researchers have discovered that aerobic exercise may increase neurogenesis. Based on the results, rats that were put on a treadmill grew more brain cells than rats that didn't. Resistance training seemed to have no effect. This is significant, because the neuron reserve of the hippocampus can be increased, thus preconditions for learning for humans could be improved simply through aerobic exercise.
This is very interesting, but part of the article mentions that some rats were more predispositioned to benefit than others through genetics. If that applies to humans as well, that means this running will benefit only some of us with an increased hippocampus size. However, one should be getting aerobic exercise anyway, although many of us don't; the health benefits are well worth it.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
There is some evidence that exercise benefits people with Alzheimer's, but the how and why is not well understood.
RTFA: " learning temporally and/or spatially complex tasks. " It has nothing to do with simply exercising muscles.