Exercise your memory muscle

Everyone knows that exercise is good for you and that exercising on a regular basis offers many health, psychological, and even spiritual benefits. Some of those benefits can take a while to appear so it can be hard to get motivated if you are not already an exerciser. A new study then is good news because it suggests a very short term benefit of exercise for your memory.

The study involved people aged between 50 and 85 viewing pleasant images of nature and animals. Some of the subjects had memory problems while others did not. The subjects then did exercise on a stationary bike for six minutes at 70 per cent of their maximum capacity.

An hour after they had exercised the subjects were given a surprise test to see if they could recall the images they had seen earlier. Compared to people who did not ride the bike there was a significant improvement in memory for both people without memory problems and people with memory problems.

So there is a very immediate memory enhancement effect after exercise. This is probably due to the release during exerciser of a neurotransmitter called noradrenalin which has a role in memory control. Previous work has shown that blocking noradrenalin also restricts memory.

If you want to give your memory a boost this Christmas some moderate level exercise will do it for you. On the other hand you may want to forget the Christmas overindulgence and your embarrassing Christmas party behaviour, in which case it might be best to leave your exercise until Boxing Day. Have a memory Christmas!