Exercise builds the brain. Yet more strong theorizing summarized in this NY Times column:
Anyone whose resolve to exercise in 2013 is a bit shaky might want to consider an emerging scientific view of human evolution. It suggests that we are clever today in part because a million years ago, we could outrun and outwalk most other mammals over long distances. Our brains were shaped and sharpened by movement, the idea goes, and we continue to require regular physical activity in order for our brains to function optimally.
The column talks about a paper in Nature on “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” and the idea is that the human species succeeded because, although we couldn’t run the fastest, we could keep running after prey until they dropped dead from exhaustion.
I have been extremely skeptical of this idea until I saw an article in Outside magazine in which they got a group of endurance marathoners in New Mexico to actually do this with a pronghorn antelope, a very fast animal.
Tomorrow, I will look at another possible reason humans may have evolved endurance running, a reason cited in the Nature paper but not mentioned often in the press.
via Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain – NYTimes.com.