Exercise boosts memory.....!

London, February 27: Exercise can not only buy you a fit body but also a better memory. A new study has revealed that physically fit people tend to have a bigger hippocampus, which is responsible for the formation and storage of new memories as well as for spatial navigation.

Researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh have found that fitness increases hippocampus size, which in turn improves spatial memory, making it easier to record information about one's environment and its spatial orientation and consequently ensuring the convenience of navigation around a familiar city.

Previous studies have depicted that the volume of hippocampus can be increased by exercising its spatial skills and its memorizing abilities. Cabbies in London are known to have a larger hippocampus than other citizens, and experienced cabbies have it bigger than the new ones. Constantly making use of the memory-making skills of hippocampus can also help it grow; study of German medical students revealed that their hippocampus got larger, while studying for finals.

Studies in the past have shown that exercise increases hippocampus size and spatial memory in rodents, but scientists have demonstrated for the first time that exercise can affect hippocampus size and memory in humans.

In the new study, researchers measured the cardiorespiratory fitness of 165 adults (including 109 females) between 59 and 81 years of age. After measuring their hippocampus, the volunteers were given a test of spatial memory. Later, their aerobic fitness was measured by VO2 max.

The scientists found a “triple association” – physical fitness was associated with a larger hippocampus, which in turn was related with better spatial memory.

Hippocampus is a brain structure inside the medial temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex, which known to shrink with age, causing small but significant cognitive decline. However, the rate of its deterioration is different among individuals.

“The higher fit people have a bigger hippocampus, and the people that have more tissue in the hippocampus have a better spatial memory,” said University of Illinois professor Art Kramer, who led the study along with Pittsburgh psychology professor Kirk Erickson.

“Basically, if you stay fit, you retain key regions of your brain involved in learning and memory,” said Erickson.

Take Regular Walk & Eat apples, bananas and oranges to boost memory

Regular walk in a park can help improve memory
Saturday, 20 December , 2008, 01:14
Washington: A simple walk in the park a day can help improve your memory and attentiveness, according to a new study.

The new study led by Marc G Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan from the University of Michigan have found that spending time in nature may be more beneficial for mental processes than being in urban environments.

For the study, the researchers conducted two experiments to test how interactions with nature and urban environments would affect attention and memory processes.

First, a group of volunteers completed a task designed to challenge memory and attention. The volunteers then took a walk in either a park or in downtown Ann Arbor. After the walk, volunteers returned to the lab and were retested on the task.

Mystery behind forgetfulness revealed

In the second experiment, after volunteers completed the task, instead of going out for a walk, they simply viewed either nature photographs or photographs of urban environments and then repeated the task.

The results showed that performance on the memory and attention task greatly improved following the walk in the park, but did not improve for volunteers who walked downtown

Moreover, the group who viewed the nature photographs performed much better on the retest than the group who looked at city scenes.

The authors suggest that urban environments provide a relatively complex and often confusing pattern of stimulation, which requires effort to sort out and interpret.

Eat apples, bananas and oranges to boost memory

Natural environments, by contrast, offer a more coherent (and often more aesthetic) pattern of stimulation that, far from requiring effort, are often experienced as restful.

The study appears in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.