Moment 165: This Exercise Enhances Mood, Memory & Concentration: David Raichlen

In this moment, leading professor of evolutionary biology, David Raichlen discusses how to boost the brain benefits that come from exercise. Most people know that exercise can improve cognitive function, but don’t realise that different sort of exercise, like cardio or strength training, can provide different types of neurological benefits. David says that whilst all exercise is beneficial to the brain, research shows that the best sort of physical activity is a combination of physical and cognitive challenges. This helps the brain function as it copies how humans evolved to find food and survive. So this could mean that the next time you go for a run, choose the great outdoors over the treadmill and try different routes you haven’t taken before. Listen to the full episode here - Apple- https://g2ul0.app.link/J39pwN9c3Jb Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link/HDB7itjd3Jb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos David: https://www.raichlen.arizona.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  Is all activity the same? So if I'm doing strength training, is that as beneficial for my brain as potentially going for a run outdoors?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And you know, we, there is not a ton of very clear work that's compared directly different types of activity in ways where I could tell you for sure, this is the best one, right? There are data that suggest that resistance training is beneficial to the brain. There's more work on endurance activity. And I actually think that's probably because it's easier to do rodent work on endurance activity than resistance. And so trying to translate across those models is a little bit easier. Both forms of exercise have benefits. They may be through different pathways. There may be different biological mechanisms that are underlying those benefits. I've kind of seen some cool work coming out lately that has tried to look at,

• 0:56Speaker 01

  for example, different types of endurance exercise. So there's a great study that came out. Are you familiar with orienteering? It's a sport where you're given like a map and a compass, and you have to find your way across a route as fast as possible. So it kind of mixes endurance activity with spatial navigation and moving around your environment and figuring out where you are.

• 1:19Steven Bartlett?

  Typically done outside, right?

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, always done outside. Typically done on natural like trails and things, but people do do it in cities as well.

• 1:26Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so like, and this is over miles and kilometers?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, this would be like a trail run kind of, or something like that. And there's a great study that just came out looking at, it was a randomized controlled trial. So they actually randomized people into either an orienteering group or a hiking group or a control group. And over a couple of months, they found that the orienteering group actually had better performance on cognitive tests, like memory tests and executive function tests, than even the hiking group. Both of those groups did better than the control group, but there was actually this extra boost for the people who were in the orienteering group. So we're starting to see that maybe some different activities could potentially enhance the effects of exercise on the brain.

• 2:11Steven Bartlett?

  What's the conclusion there? What does that study hint at in terms of, because hiking, you're out in nature, you're navigating your way up a hill or something. Orienteering, it's almost like solving a puzzle, right? Because you've got a map and a compass.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it fits into an evolutionary model, at least in my mind, where the purpose of being physically active is to move around a habitat to find things, find food, find water, find firewood. And so, physical activity in this sort of ecologically relevant world is a combination of cognitive challenges and physical challenges. So I think that when you combine them in the way that perhaps orienteering does, or maybe some other sports, you might actually get a bigger boost for your buck, a bigger bang for your buck, in terms of the brain benefits. And that, I think, is rooted in our evolutionary history.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Like I said, I think that being active in an evolutionary sense always comes with sort of a cognitive challenge. Nobody's ever just going out for a workout. There's no reason to. If you're not, if you don't need to find something, you're going to relax and rest because you're an energy minimizer, right? Don't spend that energy if you don't have to.

• 3:25Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any animal studies that show how, doing challenging exercise, so cognitively challenging exercise, so exercise that involves problem solving, improves our neuroplasticity or increases the amount of brain cells we have across our brain?

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, there have been. And a great impetus for our work was some of the work done in rodent studies by a professor named Gerd Kemperman. And he and his group did some work in mouse models where they combined access to running wheels with a very enriched cage environment. So they looked at, they did a very careful study where they looked at some mice who were Just living in their cage, you know, normally a control group. They looked at mice that were given access to a running wheel. They looked at mice that were given access to this enriched environment that's cognitively challenging and things to play on. And then they looked at a combined group where they combined the running wheel with the enriched environment.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  And they found this effect where the combined environment doubled the growth and survival of new neurons compared to either wheel running alone or cage enrichment alone. So you got this really cool additive effect. Where you where you really enhance the effects of either one of those behaviors by combining them.

• 4:43Steven Bartlett?

  If we can pull that conclusion over to human life. If we can, if one assumes that the same effect will be seen in humans. What does that then tell us we should be doing? If we, if our objective is to live long, happy, healthy lives with fantastic brains, what should we then be doing exercise wise?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Well, I think number one is just getting active, right? So I think, you know, to me, the number one recommendation is, you know, to be physically active. And especially for people who aren't that active right now. The best thing they can do is get out and start walking. But if we want to enhance the effects of physical activity on the brain and build on this animal work. We're starting to see some good evidence that if you do something similar, if you combine physical activity with cognitive challenges. You can boost the effects of physical activity on on the brain, on especially cognitive performance. And so, you know, most of the work has been in controlled environments.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  So we've done a study where we built a game that you can play while you're on an exercise machine. So you combine exercise with challenging activities, right? And we've shown that you can actually get a bigger benefit for cognition when you do that than when you just exercise or you just play a game. And so we can, you know, take that and perhaps translate that into the real world and think about ways that you can. Make your exercise more cognitively challenging. So can you go out and challenge yourself spatially? Take new routes, right? Oftentimes, especially runners or walkers, they just do the same route every time or the same. They have two or three routes that they do every time, depending on how long they want to go.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  But maybe we should be challenging ourselves a little more, right? Maybe we should take new routes where you get a little lost and then have to find your way back, right?

• 6:32Steven Bartlett?

  I'm someone that runs on the treadmill, but Jack over there, he runs outdoors. So you're telling me sort of top line that Jack is serving his brain more than I am when I'm just on that same treadmill every day in my hotel room while I'm out here in New York, whereas he's running around Central Park?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  It's possible. So I think there's a couple of things. You know, running on a treadmill may end up being a little more like running on a running wheel for a mouse without the extra enrichment. And yeah, running outside may provide some of those better benefits. We also know that running outside actually has a lot more benefits than just maybe cognition, but also seems to boost mood a little bit more than running or exercising in more impoverished environments.

• 7:16Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yes, so there's like, there's a research movement called the Green Exercise Movement that is focused on the impact of exercising in green spaces versus more urban environments or indoors on exercise equipment. And I don't want to scare anybody.

• 7:35Steven Bartlett?

  No, no, no.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Like I said, exercise is great. If you, if running on a treadmill works for someone's lifestyle, it is fantastic exercise.

• 7:42Steven Bartlett?

  But you know what I mean? I could go outside. So the only reason I'm not is because I don't know the difference.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:49Steven Bartlett?

  So, you know, it's for someone like me, of course, I could have gone outside this morning instead of just being on the treadmill. But I've, I thought they were the same.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:57Steven Bartlett?

  So you're telling me that there is potentially some upside, according to research, in me getting outside and running in both mood and neuroplasticity makes me go, okay, tomorrow I'll make a different decision.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think that, I mean, to me, that's the really surprising outcome of a lot of this research is that moving outside and especially moving in green spaces. So moving in. Parks or near parks or moving on trails, things like that seems to have bigger benefits, especially for mood. We don't know yet about the cognitive benefits. That's our hypothesis. But certainly, some of the research out there suggests that for mood and feelings of well-being, moving your body in a green space provides a little bit extra benefit than moving in, like I said, in city streets or indoors.