Big time thinkers, such as Aristotle and
Einstein, were said to have used walking as a venue for creative thought.
Such anecdotal accounts support the notion that exercise can facilitate subsequent
intellectual effort. On the other hand, some psychologists reasonably have
suspected that relaxation also might be an especially good precondition
for cognitive effort. And since relaxation is the opposite of total body
movement, it might be fruitful to compare a group who had relaxed prior to
engaging in intellectual effort with a group who had exercised. Is one approach
more advantageous than the other?
Fabien D. Legrand and his colleagues (2018)
addressed the topic head-on. Initially, 101 student subjects were asked how
energetic they felt. Next, they completed
two related tests. The first, called Trail Making A, required the students to sequentially
connect, as fast as they could, scrambled numbered dots, proceeding from number
1 to number 2, until reaching number 25. The second, called Trail Making B, also
required the same students to sequentially connect scrambled dots, as fast as
they could. However, for Trail Making B,
half the dots contained an alphabet letter, from A to L and half contained a
numeral, from 1 to 12. Under the Trail
Making B condition, students had to connect dot A to dot 1, dot B to dot 2, and
then to proceed throughout the array alternating letter to number until
finishing with L12.
After completing Trails A and B, half the
students jogged around campus for 15 minutes, and half participated in group relaxation. Approximately two minutes after the jog or
relaxation, all students reported again on their energy levels. They then all redid Trails A and B.
Not surprisingly, those who had jogged felt more
invigorated than did those who had relaxed. Moreover, the joggers performed significantly better
on their second completion of Trails A, although not on Trails B. By contrast, the relaxers experienced no
change in energy after relaxing, nor did their performance change on either
Trails A or B. The Legrand group suggested that it probably was the full body
exercise that accounted for the joggers’ improved Trails A performance.
I’m not surprised if you are not impressed by
the aforementioned study. You might have
concluded that it is another psychological
study showing the obvious. One noteworthy
feature of the Legrand work that might not have escaped you, however, is that
the more cognitively demanding Trails B task did not improve in the joggers
group. Perhaps full body exercise is not
all that it is cracked up to be.
If you do feel that way, consider the Hsu, et
al. (2018) study of the role of aerobic activity in cognitive performance. The
investigation involved elderly patients.
In phase one, half of the group had had moderate-intensity
aerobic training, and half did not. In
phase two, all patients rapidly were flashed a succession
of geometric figures, each pointed in a given direction. After the target figure faded away, in a
multiple-choice format, the patients had to select which of four figures
corresponded direction-wise to the previously flashed figure. Both before and after the test, all patients received
a functional MRI (fMRI). The investigators suggested that the figure flashing and
identification task involved both attention and cognitive processing in terms
of visual orientation.
The fMRI results disclosed
that those who had completed the aerobic training performed the visual
orientation task significantly better than those who had not had the
training. Moreover, the imaging also revealed
that the aerobic training group fMRI results (reduced
activation in the left lateral occipital cortex and right superior temporal
gyrus) were the very ones that previous research had found to be associated
with improved cognitive functioning.
If you believe the two studies just reported,
you reasonably can conclude that full body exercise might be just the thing to
both invigorate your cognitive effort and to facilitate your cognitive
processing.
References
Legrand, Fabien D., et al. Brief aerobic exercise
immediately enhances visual attentional control and perceptual speed. Testing
the mediating role of feelings of energy.
Acta Psychologica, November 2018, Volume 191.
Hsu , Chun Liang, et al. Aerobic exercise promotes executive functions
and impacts functional neural activity among older adults with vascular cognitive
impairment. British Journal of Sports
Medicine, February, 2018, Volume 52, Issue 3.
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