How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain. The most persuasive evidence comes from several new studies of lab animals living in busy, exciting cages.
It has long been known that so-called “enriched” environments — homes filled with toys and engaging, novel tasks — lead to improvements in the brainpower of lab animals. In most instances, such environmental enrichment also includes a running wheel, because mice and rats generally enjoy running. Until recently, there was little research done to tease out the particular effects of running versus those of playing with new toys or engaging the mind in other ways that don’t increase the heart rate. So, last year a team of researchers led by Justin S. Rhodes, a psychology professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, gathered four groups of mice and set them into four distinct living arrangements. John Searle: Our shared condition. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: The mysterious workings of the adolescent brain. Read Montague: What we're learning from 5,000 brains. Siddharthan Chandran: Can the damaged brain repair itself?
Carl Schoonover: How to look inside the brain. Neil Burgess: How your brain tells you where you are. Christopher deCharms: A look inside the brain in real time. Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds. Suzana Herculano-Houzel: What is so special about the human brain? Allan Jones: A map of the brain.