Running can improve exam performance

A new research study at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria led by Harald Kindermann reveals that the solution to retaining memorized information could be no more than a quick jog.

Kindermann and his colleagues aimed to test the immediate effect of exercise on the retention of information.

Scientists have long claimed that exercise can improve learning and memory. In the 1990s, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. found that exercise increases more than just muscle mass. Mice that ran on running wheels produced significantly more cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain that controls long-term memory. The active mice also performed better on memory tests than their unexercised counterparts.

In another study, researchers split dozens of women ages 70 to 80 with mild cognitive impairment randomly into three groups. Each group participated in a different kind of exercise for six months. One group walked at a fast pace twice a week, one group lifted weights and the control group stretched instead of doing endurance exercises.

The researchers found that the women who exercised with walking or weight-lifting scored significantly better on all verbal and spatial memory tests administered than the women who only stretched, while the women who walked performed better on verbal memory tests than those who lifted weights.

In short, regular exercise, especially running, has been shown to physically enlarge the brain and augment learning and memorizing abilities over time.

Kindermann’s study differed from past approaches of observing long term benefits of exercise.

The research team found that students who exercise moderately after a study session are more successful at remembering what they learned compared to those who partake in a passive activity such as playing computer games. The researchers asked 60 men ages 16 to 29 to memorize a variety of different information, including map routes and foreign word pairs. Soon after, they were tested on the material.

The men were then split up into three groups. One group played a computer game, one went for a run, and the control group passively spent time outside. At the end of each activity, the researchers observed how well the people in each group could recall the information they were originally given and compared these results to the scores of the subjects in the other groups.

The results demonstrated that the runners retained information the best, remembering even more details after the run than they could before. The people in the control group performed slightly worse than they did before passively spending time outside. Notably, the memories of people who played the video game were significantly impaired.

Kindermann’s advice, therefore, is to perform some form of moderate exercise after studying.

However, determining causal relationships from experimentation is tricky. Although it seems clear that there is a correlation between exercise and memory retention, there are many complex hypotheses as scientists try to explain why this relationship exists.

One major reasoning has to do with the hormone cortisol, which is known to affect memory.

Kindermann and his team plan to extend this study in order to further investigate the underlying cause of their findings, as well as the effect of other post-study activities on memory.