Movie on Amazon Prime tests the brain benefits of exercise

Amazon Prime recently released the documentary “Ming games – Experiment” Telling the story of slightly different athletes – mental players and the potential of physical exercise to improve their performance.

The one hour and 13 minute documentary tells the story of four competitive mental players from around the world who participate in an experiment with physical exercises to see if their performance can be improved. However, the focus was not on physical performance but on mental performance, i.e. cognitive ability, which includes reasoning, problem solving, concentration and memory. The relationship between exercise and the brain was tested.

The total number of survey respondents was 77 from 21 countries. However, the protagonists were only four people: chess, e-sports, mahjong (board game) and memory competition athletes who showed disappointing results in their methods at the beginning of the journey.

A British memory master, blessed in his field, said before training: “I don’t think there is a connection between the physical shape of the body and a well-kept mind”, for him “the whole physical thing is very separate from the physical.” development of the brain “. The Japanese mahjong expert believes that the more he exercises, the more he will focus and concentrate on the game.

Until the exercise program was recommended by the team of one of the world’s greatest researchers in mental health: Brendon Stubbs of King’s College London, with more than 700 published scientific papers, is in the selected 1% of the most cited researchers. Alan Brendon Stubbs. world right now. In addition, the sports equipment brand Asics sponsored.

Have the athletes been able to improve mental performance from exercise?

I’m not the one who will spoil and spoil the enjoyment of watching a good documentary. Here’s the suggestion and here’s some science on the subject, because there’s also a nice discussion in science about exercises and cognition. Now stay inside.

In 4 days, two articles that attracted the attention of the scientific community and the media showed the essence of science, namely scientific progress.

First, a review published in Nature Human Behavior by a team of researchers from the University of Granada, Spain, in Spain, brought together 109 intervention studies that tested the effectiveness of exercise on cognition with a total of 11,266 participants. And while most individual trials found a positive effect, recalculation of results found only “negligible” evidence of cognitive benefits.

This was so striking that the authors suggested that organizations like WHO should avoid citing brain health as a reason to exercise until better evidence is available, as the agency’s main documents contain this information.

But perhaps they did not trust that new evidence would emerge so quickly. A group of researchers from Canada, Switzerland, and the United States published an innovative study just 4 days later in the journal Scientific Reports. This is the largest study of physical activity and cognitive function by number of participants – more than 350,000. But the biggest news comes from the quality of the statistics.

They performed Mendelian randomization, which uses genetic variations to characterize and classify people. This randomization, which consists of drawing lots to make something random, actually happens at birth. Some people are born with certain genetic variants that make them exercise more throughout their lives.

These genetic variants have no known effect on cognitive function, so if people carrying these variants score better on cognitive tests, this indicates that higher levels of exercise make a difference. The researchers tracked physical activity directly with accelerometers.

This study claims: exercise can improve cognition.

They found possible causal effects with higher levels of moderate to vigorous physical activity leading to increased cognitive functioning. On the other hand, the reverse was not confirmed as cognition had no effect on physical activity.

Interestingly, the effects of moderate exercise were about 50% stronger than vigorous exercise, suggesting that you don’t have to force yourself to fatigue to reap the benefits. Popular on the social networks “I’m dead but I’m fine”.

with people genetic predisposition to exercise typically applied and scored better on judgment tests. And even without the genes thought to be better for exercise, exercise had benefits for the brain.

What mechanisms explain this?

Physical activity can increase neuroplasticity, angiogenesis, synaptogenesis, and neurogenesis through upregulation of growth factors such as BNDF, a protein that acts as a brain fertilizer. In addition, repetitive activation of brain functions necessary for physical activity such as planning, inhibition, and reasoning may contribute to the improvement of cognition. Physical activity is body and brain health.