The study entailed 54 undergraduate students watching a traumatic film depicting the aftermath of a highway car crash (Keyan, 2017). Two days later participants were asked to do one of the following which included: a) 20-25 min of increment cycling with a memory reactivation induction (reactivation/exercise), b) 20-25 min of mild cycling (reactivation/no exercise), c) 20-25 min of incremental cycling but with no memory reactivation ( no reactivation /exercise). Saliva samples were then taken from each individual, both before and after the activity and memory recall occurred . A questionnaire related to declarative and intrusive memory was completed, two days after the memory reactivation.
The results showed that the participants that participated in the reactivation/exercise demonstrated that they could recall much more details in comparison to the other participants. These same participants also proved to show and increase amount of cortisol, which was expected in terms of memory recall. Which proved that exercise does help with memory recall and reactivation in terms of traumatic events.
This could potentially help with other types of memory retrieval, which could potentially lead to understanding if exercise does in fact help with memory recall. Or if it's the idea of doing an activity such as a cross word puzzle, in order to help with memory retrieval?
The
Keyan, Dharani, and Richard A. Bryant. “Acute Physical Exercise in Humans Enhances Reconsolidation of Emotional Memories.” Psychoneuroendocrinology, vol. 86, Dec. 2017, pp. 144–151. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2017.09.019.
I briefly read about this idea when I was in high school and I took it to heart. Since then, during finals weeks I typically study hard throughout the day (or when I can), and at the end of the day (or between sessions), I go and just run. In my head, it helped me to destress for a bit, but I also convinced myself that I was integrating what I had studied into my memory. After reading your post and looking into some research on my own, I found some suggestions that exercised-enhanced memory may actually be an improved ability to retain memories (decrease lost memory), rather than to build a stronger ability to remember. According to Hötting et Al., young adults who were subjected various levels of exercise (relaxation vs moderate vs intense), and found that subjects did not have an increased amount of info (number of foreign language vocab words), but rather forgot less of the words they worked on (Hötting, K., Schickert, N., Kaiser, J., Röder, B., & Schmidt-Kassow, M. (2016). The Effects of Acute Physical Exercise on Memory, Peripheral BDNF, and Cortisol in Young Adults. Neural plasticity, 2016, 6860573.). I had not really though about the specifics of how exercise helped my memory, but I definitely think it is important to understand and know the foundation of how this works to properly integrate it into my life. I now know that my running after studying was helping me to not forget as much information that I had studied. In terms of the relevance of this information to the world, do you think that it would be a worthwhile investment to teach this method of exercise enhanced studying in academic settings if more conclusive evidence supports it? Have you integrated it yourself?
ReplyDeleteI was reading a bit more and I'm realizing that this COULD have been placebo effect for me, based on the findings of this study "Most, S. B., Kennedy, B. L., & Petras, E. A. (2017). Evidence for improved memory from 5 minutes of immediate, post-encoding exercise among women. Cognitive research: principles and implications, 2(1), 33."
According to Most et Al. in their experiment #1, female participants who performed exercise after studying name-to-face associations performed significantly better then female participants who didn't exercise post learning, BUT there was no statistically significant between males in the exercise and non-exercise groups (p=0.77). While I was thinking of a comment to write on your post, I found this and was surprised at this finding and wondered what could cause this difference. Based on what you read and wrote about, can you think of any reason why memory encoding post-exercise might have a greater effect in females than in males from a physiological or evolutionary stand point?