Train For Your Brain

Posted By elissa on Jul 11, 2010 | 1 comment

This is a topic that I’ve covered before on the blog, but it’s also one that bears repeating – as there are so many reasons to exercise that have nada to do with fat loss or physique enhancement.  The evidence just keeps pouring in that exercise – particularly vigorous aerobic exercise – is good for your brain.

But how does it work? The NY Times discusses some of the recent work being done in animal models, in an effort to tease out the mechanism(s).

Your brain, you will be pleased to learn, is packed with adult stem cells, which, given the right impetus, divide and differentiate into either additional stem cells or baby neurons. As we age, these stem cells tend to become less responsive. They don’t divide as readily and can slump into a kind of cellular sleep. It’s BMP that acts as the soporific, says Dr. Jack Kessler, the chairman of neurology at Northwestern and senior author of many of the recent studies. The more active BMP and its various signals are in your brain, the more inactive your stem cells become and the less neurogenesis you undergo. Your brain grows slower, less nimble, older.

But exercise countermands some of the numbing effects of BMP, Dr. Kessler says. In work at his lab, mice given access to running wheels had about 50 percent less BMP-related brain activity within a week. They also showed a notable increase in Noggin, a beautifully named brain protein that acts as a BMP antagonist. The more Noggin in your brain, the less BMP activity exists and the more stem cell divisions and neurogenesis you experience. Mice at Northwestern whose brains were infused directly with large doses of Noggin became, Dr. Kessler says, “little mouse geniuses, if there is such a thing.” They aced the mazes and other tests.

This is some pretty cool stuff, if you ask me.

It’s funny… years ago, when I started working out seriously again, I was motivated primarily by my mother, who (at the time) was sliding into dementia.  I ran through my memories of her at a similar age to mine, and then went through a checklist of what I ought to be doing differently to (hopefully) spare me from a similar fate.   In the end, the one thing that really stood out, was that I’d slacked off from my workout routine over the course of several interstate moves with little kids in tow… so I set about changing that – with a vengeance. It was strictly intuitive on my part, but it’s nice to see my intuition confirmed.