Can Exercise Make You Smarter?
This is Gretchen Reynolds, writing in the New York Times:
Allow a laboratory mouse to run as much as it likes and its brainpower improves. Force it to run harder than it otherwise might and its thinking improves even more.
In work by scientists at the University of Illinois, elderly people were assigned a six-month program of either stretching exercises or brisk walking. The stretchers increased their flexibility but did not improve on tests of cognition. The brisk walkers did.
It’s a rat race. No pun intended.
Don’t let the Obama administration see this research: They’ll propose a tax on stretching in order to subsidize walking – and you’d better walk properly!
(Why not? After all, the House health-care take-over bill, H.R. 3200, directs the Secretary to determine “quality indicators” to determine how much to pay physicians for a counselling session every five years on their Advance Planning Directives. If the government can monitor the quality of that consultation, it can surely monitor the quality of your walking.)
But just to be sure, we’d better have a regulation that every senior who walks for exercise be accompanied by a “certified walking advisor” who is a member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and paid by Medicare. Can someone please ensure that there’s an amendment proposed in the Baucus bill directing the Secretary to allocate a Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code for this?
But God forbid that a private insurer charge a lower premium to those who lose weight through regular walking! That would be “discrimination.”
The whole bill is discriminatory from start to finish and controls pretty much every aspect of our lives, and it won’t get better as time goes on. I truly believe the regulations will increase, and the money spent for care (along with the care offered) will go down. It is all about control anyway!
Exercise can make you more alert. It won’t increase your IQ, but it does increase blood flow to the brain, which in turn will make it easier to partake in learning activities. I’ve found some great cardio exercises on Holosfitness.com that can help keep me alert and responsive.