Yet another reason to encourage children to exercise: Middle school students perform better on mental tasks if they are physically fit, according to a new study from the University of Illinois. The children who were in good physical shape had enlarged hippocampi. The hippocampus is an area of the brain associated with better spatial reasoning and cognition.
- Professor Art Kramer and his colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging devices (MRIs) to watch brain images of 49 children ages nine and ten years old.
- The researchers focused on the size of the hippocampus, and found that those of physically fit children were 12% larger.
- This group of children performed better on tests that measured their ability to remember and to integrate information.
Dr. Kramer said that these findings suggest that interventions to increase children's physical activity could have an important effect on their brain development.
"If you get lousy genes from your parents, you really cannot fix that, and it's not easy to do something about your economic status," he said. "But here's something we can do something about."
The study appears in the journal Brain Research.
Labels: brain_activity, exercise, physical_activity
Posted By: CRC Health
