Doing just six to ten minutes of daily exercise may be enough to boost memory and other high-level brain functions, a new study suggests.
Researchers writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health discovered that short bursts of moderate to vigorous physical activity helped improve working memory, planning and organisational skills.
Moderate activity was defined as brisk walking, slow jogging or climbing stairs, while vigorous activity included running, cycling, swimming and doing high-intensity training.
The researchers also found that swapping just eight minutes of moderate to vigorous activity for sitting was tied to a small but significant drop in cognitive performance of between 1% and 2%.
‘Compared with other behaviours, greater MVPA [moderate to vigorous physical activity] was associated with higher cognitive scores,’ the study concluded. ‘Loss of MVPA time, given its smaller relative amount, appears most deleterious.’
The new results suggest that the more time people spend exercising, the greater their cognitive gains, although the benefits seem to level off after 45 minutes.
The conclusion is backed up by other research. For example, a review published in Translational Sports Medicine found that two minutes of aerobic activity at moderate to high intensity was enough to help boost concentration, attention and memory functions for up to two hours.
Studies have also shown longer-term benefits of regular activity. Work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that when adults walked briskly for 40 minutes three times a week, it increased the size of the hippocampus – the region of the brain responsible for memory – by just over 2%, offsetting age-related decline.
