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Exercise primes learning for hours
Exercise doesn't make a person smarter. It raises arousal, and learning requires being alert, with adrenaline and cortisol elevated. After intense exercise the body is full of stimulatory molecules, and focus is better.
Studies by James McGaugh and Larry Cahill showed that spiking cortisol before, during, or after something makes it stick. Trauma works this way, and the memory is never forgotten.
Performance follows an inverted U. With too little alertness a person can't do what's needed, and with too much, the same. Learning is about climbing from not wanting to do it to the top of the U, and then about not getting too stressed.
How does exercise change brain chemistry?
Exercise raises a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which supports the growth and survival of neurons. In a 2007 study in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Lisa Ferris and colleagues found that a hard cycling session raised BDNF in the blood more than a moderate one. The level then fell back within about an hour. BDNF is active in the hippocampus, a region central to forming memories.
Where does the inverted U come from?
In 1908, psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson trained mice to tell apart two chambers, with electric shocks of different strengths as the motivation. Performance was best at a moderate shock. They also found that easy discrimination tasks tolerated stronger motivation than difficult ones. Later psychologists named the pattern the Yerkes-Dodson law.
How does arousal strengthen memory?
James McGaugh's lab at the University of California, Irvine found that stress hormones act on the basolateral amygdala, a region that then boosts memory storage in other parts of the brain. Adrenaline cannot cross into the brain easily, so it signals through the vagus nerve to the brainstem instead. Animals given stress hormones just after training remembered the task better days later. The effect depends on the amygdala being intact.
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