Younger brains exercise Study finds that exercise helps keep the mind's abilities sharp

By David Steinkraus

Friday, February 20, 2004 12:00 AM CST

There is a kind of a fountain of youth for the brain.

It's called exercise.

In studying two groups of older adults, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that mild exercise over a period of six months improved the abilities of people on a test that measured concentration.

Jim Morrison, who is 75 and exercises six days a week at the YMCA in Racine, said he's always heard that exercise benefits the mind as well as the body.

"I like to believe it's helping. I like to think I'm probably more mentally alert then the average guy my age. I'm not going to take tests to prove it, and neither are they," he said and laughed.

Morrison has done the Lighthouse Run. On Thursday morning he was working on running a few miles on a treadmill overlooking foggy Lake Michigan.

It seems to him, Morrison said, that some of the very mentally acute older people he's known led vigorous lives, such as one former SC Johnson executive who was in the habit of talking daily walks.

More interesting still is what happened inside the brains of the people in the study. "What we found was that the improvements in the cortical function was in the same regions that younger adults used to perform the task," said Stan Colcombe, a post-doctoral fellow at the university and a co-author of the paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Study and results The paper was the result of two studies. The first, of older adults who were already very fit, was an exploration of the idea that fitness affects brain plasticity, Colcombe said. The second study was of 29 people ages 58 to 77, half of whom were assigned to an exercise class in which they walked 45 minutes a day, three times a week for three months.

All of the participants were tested on their ability to correctly and quickly discern the orientation of an arrow even when other arrows around it were pointing in other directions. In other words, the people had to block the distraction of the surrounding arrows.

There is some real life need for this ability to concentrate, Colcombe said. For example, if you're driving a car and the stoplight in front of you is red but the light down the block turns green, you have to be able to ignore the distant light and focus on the one controlling your driving.

The group of people who walked showed an 11 percent increase in their ability to concentrate. People who were in the stretching class had a 2 percent increase, which was not statistically different from their initial ability, the paper said.

Researchers also scanned the brains of participants with a magnetic resonance imager to find out how brain function had changed.

What it shows "One questions that this does not address is how long to these changes persist," said Rodney A. Swain, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In other words, if the people stop exercising, do their now-enhanced mental abilities diminish? "We're actually doing that experiment right now this semester," Swain said. His work, however, is not with humans but with animals.

It's the animal connection that makes the paper by the University of Illinois group so good, he said. It connects the findings of animal research to what happens in humans. Swain, who is part of a group of neuroscientists at UWM, worked with some of the UIUC researchers previously.

The next step in the research, Colcombe said, will be to try a longer test and to add not only more exercise but also more training. "Have we maxed out their improvements after six months?"

"We want to see how far we can push it," he said.

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