How To Improve Personal Intelligence with Exercise

All kinds of advertising and web stuff out there says that this exercise will do that to your intelligence—or that AI tool will do this for your brain. Tough to identify expertise from fads when they’re being thrown at you from every angle on a regular basis. But here’s the well-researched big stuff that pulls everything together and includes brain stuff for everyone.

Research published just this year reveals the positive impact of aerobic exercising on brain smarts for middle-aged and elderly. It takes just 150 minutes per week when working out at moderate intensity levels. That’s not much of a surprise. We’ve known this was true for younger adult cohorts, but we lacked the sampling of middle-aged and older adults. The growth relationship between the physical and the mental was spelled out years ago—and no one questions that conclusion. But now we know that conclusion applies to both middle-aged and the elderly. Why did it take so long to get the research for the last two groups? It’s easy to get a sample for younger people while they’re in an education program. In contrast, getting a consistent sample from adults not in an education program is more difficult. Adults outside education systems start the research program, drop out for numerous reasons, making it difficult to develop a long term consistent sample. But this time the researchers were successful. Here’s their conclusion.

This randomized clinical trial demonstrates the efficacy (the desired result) of aerobic exercise for cognition in adults age 20–67. The effect of aerobic exercise on executive function was more pronounced as age increased, suggesting that it may mitigate age-related declines. Increased cortical thickness suggests that aerobic exercise contributes to brain health in individuals as young as age 20. (Thomas, Tanzi and Westover: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-17

What was most intriguing to me were the measurable improvements among middle and elderly adults in all three specific areas for which positive impact of aerobic exercising was already known in younger adults: fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence and total cognitive performance.