News: Cardiovascular Fitness is Linked to Intelligence
Posted on December 9, 2009 by admin
The case for cardio exercise just keeps on getting stronger. First a University of Princeton team shows that exercise lets lab rats (Note: I mean actual laboratory rats here) produce neurons with improved stress response (i.e. they don’t respond), and now a group of Swedish neuroscientists is telling us that improved cardiovascular fitness actually makes young men smarter:
The study looks at more than 230.000 adolescent men at their time of enlistment into the Swedish army, and finds a very strong effect of cardiovascular fitness on multiple dimensions of intelligence. Newly recruits who performed best on a regular ergonomic cycle also performed strongest on a series of tests for global intelligence, verbal, visuospatial, logical and technical intelligence. As an even stronger test for this correlation, the researchers additionally assessed their subject’s physical education records at age 15 and then mapped changes in fitness to changes in intelligence. They found that – on average – those young men who moved in their percentile ranking for cardiovascular fitness also moved in their percentile ranking for intelligence. In other words: Changes in intelligence from age 15 to age 18 seem to track changes in fitness.
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