How Exercise Can Help You Recall Words

Gee, I don't know about this; I can't remember where I put my exercise bike.

This reminds me of Donald Trump, who thinks being presidential is something you do instead of something you are. Exercise is like religion. It's no good if you don't practice it. It's not what you do, but what you are.

oh good grief. Another exciting report from a single study on fewer than 30 individuals. If I become more physically fit, will I stop falling for these headlines of little import?

Shared this interesting info with my husband who has done work on recognition of words based on letter structure and word familiarity. He had questions: sample size appears too small to wash out social differences with rarely used words. What control saw to it that the 28 seniors were socially similar? Fitness is a slippery concept, too -- with 60 being a lot different than 80. People continuing to be intellectually active would surely do better, or would they? Is physical fitness the only thing that counts. If the results are really interesting, more research is needed to validate the phenomenon.

Am 73 and found my verbal recall lacked dependability. An hour's vigorous daily walk certainly helps but not as much as halving my daily consumption of carbohydrates (steel-cut oats at breakfast and long-grain brown rice at lunch.) Interestingly this has the concurrent benefit of noticeably improving my sight so, while still not being able to read newspapers without reading glasses, I can now easily read licenses plates and road signs without them. This sight improvement was further enhanced by the addition of a sprinkling of clove powder to Greek yoghurt once every four days.

OK, if I could just remember the location of the gym?

Hey couch potatoes if you don't want to do this, just google related words. I have done it countless times. After the recent Margot Kidder death, I could not remember the name of the woman who played Lois Lane in the 1950s TV series. Goggle came to the rescue with the name and I had my ice cream sundae too. Who ways you can't have your cake and eat it too.

It amazes me that we need to continue to extol the virtues of exercise, as if the benefits to our bodies aren’t already obvious. Perhaps more articles about what a lack of exercise results in? Something akin to the gruesome pictures of cancer that some countries place on cigarette cartons?

Fascinating, but correlational as the reporter pointed out. I was dismayed by the nature of the study and the future research mentioned, however. We really don't need to subject people to intense exercise until exhaustion (that could have dire consequences for some subjects) nor do we need to hook up electrodes or run people through MRIs, or do brain scans, for what will be circumstantial, limited evidence. Enough with such research. University IRBs need to stop approving such studies. They may sound hi-tech (brain scans) and have superficially compelling rationales (exploring the relationship between physical health and linguistic competencies and memory), but they really do not advance our knowledge much at all and are a waste of valuable instruments and pose unjustified threats to subjects. Being active, eating well, and having a healthy life style will have benefits — we don't need a bunch of correlational, pseudo-scientific, easily refuted and differentially interpretable studies to know that!

I too have excellent word retrieval after working out on that whatchamacallit thingie.

I would be so happy if the New York Times focused reporting on scientific studies with larger sample sizes, multiple lines of evidence for hypothesis testing (where possible), and strong statistics. Reporters might need some scientific training to evaluate these features. This study might be a perfectly acceptable contribution—I have not read it—but were it not on such a trendy topic, its contribution would not be so exaggerated by the press. It’s observational with a small sample size and minimal insight into mechanism. I’d been boycotting the Health section for a while because I was so frustrated by the quality of the reporting, and I’ve worried that the net contribution of slapdash headlines about everything published is this impression (which my non-scientist mother has) that science is “cyclical” and almost every finding will eventually be overturned. That’s not the case at all. Learning to evaluate evidence carefully is central to the process.

One study is only one study. Why was this published at this stage in the research?

Wait, what’s that word? . . . Oh, yeah! Mnemonic.

“Decanter” is not an obscure word. Maybe the writer should get on a bike.

Om, oh whats that word that best describes me.. o yea, couch potato.

I wish I liked exercise better, it's such a chore.

The article doesn't make clear how much time elapsed between the exercise and the word test. Were the less fit subjects simply exhausted?

I often find that just opening the Google site to search for a word causes me to remember the word.

I wish I could forget the words "I need to exercise."

Being out of shape indicates lack of regular physical exercise, which may be caused by something else like laziness or depression. These (and other) cognitive issues can cause a wide range of issues including making you less likely to memorize words and perfering not to do physical exercise. Fitness just seems to be a confounder.

An amateur long-distance speed skater and road biker in my 60’s, I subscribe to the belief that exercise has many benefits. There are the physical, like weight control and a healthy cardiovascular system. Then there are social, such as the camaraderie from shared activity during and after events in which we participate. I can only assume there are other mental health benefits as well. While I may choose to believe the title of the article, that “Exercise Can Help You Recall Words,” a study of 28 people is not convincing evidence. Just as a recent Times article purported to claim that standing at a desk makes you smarter, studies based on small population sizes hardly qualify as serious scientific discoveries to support the claims in the articles’ titles. This is junk science at best, better suited for tabloid headlines than in “the paper of record.” Journalists need more than one source of information before rushing to share such news.

Good to know; does exercise help you remember where you put your lunch, etc.? I hope so.

This makes intuitive sense. Make your heart function more efficiently by regular exercise and your brain functions more effectively, including recall. I am 69 and confirm this with anecdotal evidence. Another big factor for me is getting a good night's sleep and , when possible, avoiding medications that cause brain fog.

Yet another reason that regular exercise may ward off annoyances of aging, along with depression, pain and more.

I am a fifty-four-year old student commuting to my university and working three days a week. In order to utilize every moment, I took to carrying a piece of paper with words and definitions on my five to eight mile runs. Over time I have found this to be the most successful form of retaining the material and have come to rely on this method of study.

Seems to me that the " Silver Sneakers " exercise program for the over-55 crowd should be included in Medicare and Military TriCare .

The study seems to have been very limited in size. But in terms of hypothesizing whether exercise is good for memory, there are several things to explore. 1. Better circulation means better circulation in the brain too, leading to healthier neurons. 2. Exercising, whether aerobically or with weights, leads to steady breathing or at least measured breathing, which is known to be a mindfulness inducing phenomenon. So when you are focusing on your breath during those reps or pedaling or rowing or striding actions, you are putting your muscles on autopilot and your brain is getting its waves in sync, which is very beneficial to organizing one's thoughts and even helping with more insightful thoughts. 3. Similarly, one is exhausted after exercise, which also leads to shutting down the restless part of the mind, leading to better focus and sprightliness of the mind. A really good experiment would be to compare the cognitive skills of different groups of people, one doing exercises, other doing meditation or MBSR, one control batch, one only Yoga and another doing prayer. Prayer is interesting because it actually involves conscious recitation of words, but is very much akin to meditation or mindfulness and does not involve any muscular exertions. (Note, I am not particularly religious, so prayer in my case would be a meditation of sorts.)

Recreation frequently involves activity. Note it is a break that allows one to cognitively re-create. Ideas in the shower, on a walk, during some stretching or resistance training. I personally go to the gym to relax whether it is the power walking, resistance or stretching, it all puts my mind, particularly with the endogenous endorphins, in a mode to think creatively and clearly. Creativity takes known facts and rearranges them, whether it is a symphony, a piece of writing, or a scientific hypothesis. Even a responsive humorous one-liner in a social setting is an act of cognitive creativity. Words and sentences get pulled from the cortex in unique ways. Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation published 54 years ago addressed some of these issues. I'll never forget that enlightening read when I was a college kid. He died 35 years ago but his words from my perspective still carry insights of import today.

Cognitive ability is itself a measure of fitness and it is no surprise that it and physical fitness correlate -- indeed it would be very strange if they did not. Enhancing cognition is associated with increasing activity levels and vice versa; going for a walk is a good companion to thought; varying thinking and physical routines has been long known to improve physical and mental fitness. Physical decline and mental decline are highly correlated. But none of this suggests exercising boosts cognitive performance. That has not been shown. Refusing to think, address new challenges, and get off the couch, however, will engender decline -- both mental and physical fitness will tank. So trying to stay active, both mentally and physically, is sound advice. The rest remains speculation.

I was told in a seminar on writing one's first novel that one needs to exercise during the process in order to stay mentally acute because novels are generally written sitting down and that can stifle the brain.

It's no surprise that older people in better shape perform better. They generally do on just about every test. And it's surprise that younger people recall words faster. The problem with this study is how tiny the subject sample is, and the fact that the older subjects weren't tracked over time. This would seem to be a good example of using older twins, with one sedentary and one in good shape. That would help iron out genetic differences.

What I've found is that I often have mental lapses while I'm exercising as blood is diverted from the brain to the muscles. From this I deduce that mental sharpness has a lot to do with maintaining good circulation in the brain.

I’ve experienced similar; when my daughter was quite young, she was diagnosed with expressive language disorder. She went to therapy for a long time which helped in the long run, but what we saw immediately was if she would swing herself on her swing set, or jump on her mini trampoline, she could then express herself much more fluently right after. To that, my son had no delays, but has always been high energy—his brain works much faster than his mouth. He to this day will pace when talking, when quizzing himself on a subject, and is fluent when doing so. When he was little, not understanding why he needed to pace, we would make him stand still when talking or studying, and he would become so frustrated. Personally, walks always help me organize my thoughts—taking a walk to clear the head. None of my examples are tied to specifically fitness—and purely anecdotal—but there is something to be said for the connection between motion and speech.