So it’s the night before an exam and you’ve been studying all week for this behavioral neuroscience test. Luckily, it’s on your favorite chapter, the chapter on memory and you’ve been reviewing all of your notes and quizzing yourself for the past few hours now. Do you keep studying or do you go to bed or do you find something else to do? At this point you aren’t sure if cramming would even help or even if you could remember anything that you’ve been trying to study. Even your notes say so. You know that studying and learning new information takes time and that consolidation of the new memories needs to occur before they can become part of your long term memory. You decide to take a break and that it might not be such a bad idea to run off your anxiety at the gym for a bit before going to bed.
Surprisingly, that is the best thing one can do to promote memory consolidation and activate the neural pathways that are associated with better memory. In a journal article published in Current Biology, researchers brought in people for a memory study that consisted of three groups that either exercised immediately after, a few hours after, or not at all after partaking in a forty minute long picture-location memory task. The subjects returned to the lab two days after the task to see how well they retained the information they had learned and to get their brains scanned. What the researchers discovered was that people who exercised a few hours after the learning task had the best percentage of recall and out performed the groups that did not exercise and the group that exercised immediately after the learning task. Those that exercised a few hours after their memory task not only did better than the other two groups, but showed clearer activation in their brains in the areas that are associated with memory retrieval.
Other studies have shown that increased levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine start the process which promotes the creation of plasticity related proteins, which in turn are associated with higher levels of cognitive function and memory. Physical activity and exercise promotes the release of dopamine and norepinephrine, which serve as the foundation of memory formation. Thus, it can be concluded that in conjunction with studying, exercise in healthy doses has the ability to help speed up the process of memory consolidation. So next time you are studying for an exam, it might not be such a bad idea to run from your problems. It might just actually help you do better on your exam than not.
Works cited:
Bridge, Donna J., and Ken A. Palmer. "Neural Correlates of Reactivation and Retrieval-Induced Distortion." Journal of Neuroscience. N.p., Aug. 2012. Web. 18 Oct. 2016.
http://time.com/4369529/exercising-after-a-task-improves-memory/?iid=sr-link1
Picture:
http://www.expertrain.com/blog/fitness/best-running-buddies.htm
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