Posted: Feb 15, 2011 3:26 am
RPizzle wrote: In the full text article you linked2, I found it fascinating that elderly adults who received training were able to best a cohort of college students, albeit ones who were untrained.
Agree. That's fascinating.
It also seems that exercise confers cognitive benefits at any age. In the study on obese children, the fact that there was a quantitative relationship between exercise and "brain gains" is remarkable:
The children were then exposed to a routine of 20 minutes or 40 minutes of vigorous exercise daily. The more the children exercised the more their scores on the achievement tests increased. The fMRI revealed more activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain of those children who exercised more. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for higher cognition skills like math and for behavioral control. The same results have been seen in adults.
At least for some executive functions, the neural networks involved seem to prevail across age groups:
Similar network activated by young and old adults during the acquisition of a motor sequence.
I would be interested to learn more about neuroplasticity, and the methods used to create cognitive improvement.
This might interest you: Learning-dependent plasticity with and without training in the human brain.
...as well as several articles of the journal Neural Plasticity.
Best
