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Vigorous Exercise and Your Brain
publication date: Oct 23, 2011
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author/source: Arthur De Vany
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Three 20 minute sessions of vigorous exercise is the recommendation in this excellent review from Dr. Ahlskog of the Mayo Clinic of the role of exercise in maintaining a healthy, well-functioning brain. Now, where have I heard this before? Oh, it is what I have been saying for years. On top of the high intensity exercise of this sort that I do, I like to play at complex tasks or games. With no purpose but to enjoy the pleasure of play and movement. There is a slight problem with his distinction between aerobic and resistance exercise though. He rightly points out that resistance exercise is little studied and that it is hard to get mice to do bench presses. I never do bench presses anyway so that is a slight stereotyping of resistance exercise. And, even that is too narrow when you consider sprinting as possibly the best form of vigorous exercise. Additionally, vigorous exercise IS aerobic, as Dr. McGuff shows clearly in his marvelous book, Body by Science. All energy production comes from the mitochondria using oxygen to produce ATP. In vigorous exercise you just do a lot of it after the exercise in the so-called excess post-exercise respiration (breathing). Another thing about play is that it is fractal, as are my vigorous exercise sessions too. Brent and Aaron, in the previous post, talk of the advantages of fractal variation. I have been talking for years about the value of fractal variation. You can to back to Dr. Ben-Jacob's talk and see the bacteria generating beautiful fractals. Their fractals are generated by power law variations in paths and step lengths. In his video you can even see the power law distribution of bacterial intelligence. Which reminds me, how on earth did intelligence research get hung up on the Normal distribution, the bell-curve? Because the curve was there. Human intelligence simply cannot follow the bell curve. Is so, then we are not as smart as bacteria.
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