2023-09-01 04:00:07
Ten thousand steps and more. Moving is good for the brain. To analyze how it works, a team of Japanese researchers from the Institute of Health and Sports Sciences at the University of Tsukuba (Japan) looked at the size of the pupil, a marker of the state of cerebral awakening. In a study published on July 26 in the scientific journal NeuroImagethey showed that exercises, even of light intensity, have positive effects on the executive functions, necessary to get used to a new situation, which allow, among other things, to plan actions, evaluate ideas, etc.
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Specifically, half of the 24 healthy young adults performed very moderate-intensity exercise on a bicycle, similar to walking or yoga, for ten minutes. They took the so-called “Stroop” test before the exercise and six minutes and thirty seconds following. Used in neuropsychology, this tool consists of naming the color of words, some of which are color names – the word “yellow” can, for example, be written in green. And aims in particular to assess attention. Blink rate and pupil diameter were recorded before, during and following the activity. The researchers also used optical imaging tools to observe how participants’ brains responded to a specific cognitive task.
“Work has thus shown that the activity of the pupils can provide elements on the cerebral states related to wakefulness, attention, and the activity of the cortical network”underlines the study, saying that the pupil is a reflection of the mental state.
Pupil diameter, new biomarker
The same measurements were carried out on the other half of the participants who remained sedentary. The team’s conclusion: Pupils dilate during exercise, and the size of the dilatation is an indicator of improved prefrontal executive function. The more the pupils dilate during training, the more the cognitive function is improved at the time of the test carried out at the end of the exercise. According to them, the diameter of the pupil might represent a new biomarker used to assess the effects of exercise on brain function. This shows that even light physical activity improves the work of the prefrontal cortex and executive function. A downside, however, noted by the researchers: the small size of the sample and the few women, only three, requiring, according to them, more in-depth research.
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