Brain News You Can Use

Here is a subset of an article from the New York Times.  They do have a pay wall.  If you have not used up your 10 free articles per month, you can click on the LINK and go read the entire article.
The article examined what kind of exercise is best for your brain, by measuring increases in neurogenesis, which is the creation of new brain cells in an already mature brain.

• Those rats that had jogged on wheels showed robust levels of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue teemed with new neurons, far more than in the brains of the sedentary animals. The greater the distance that a runner had covered during the experiment, the more new cells its brain now contained.

• There were far fewer new neurons in the brains of the animals that had completed high-intensity interval training. They showed somewhat higher amounts than in the sedentary animals but far less than in the distance runners.

• And the weight-training rats, although they were much stronger at the end of the experiment than they had been at the start, showed no discernible augmentation of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue looked just like that of the animals that had not exercised at all. 

While acknowledging that rats are not people, the researchers concluded that “sustained aerobic exercise might be most beneficial for brain health also in humans.”  So there you go, get out there and be aerobic for as long as you can.