Researchers will now use a similar experimental setup to study the timing of exercise and its influence on learning and memory in more detail.
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New study suggests an intriguing strategy to boost memory for what you’ve just learned: hit the gym 4 hrs later.
“There is good evidence from animal data that the release of certain neurotransmitters-dopamine and norepinephrine-leads to a biochemical cascade leading to the production of so called plasticity related proteins”, says study author Guillén Fernández, director of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour at Radboud University Medical Center in an email to TIME.
In the new study, researchers tested the effects of a single session of physical exercise, after learning, on memory consolidation and long-term memory. Researchers found that the group who exercised immediately after learning didn’t show any better retention than those who avoided exercise.
The exercise consisted of 35 minutes of interval training on an exercise bike at a intensity. After a day’s gap, the participants returned to see how well they could remember the learning task they had engaged in.
Researchers from the Netherlands and Scotland found doing aerobic exercise four hours after committing something to memory improves how well it sticks – but exercising immediately afterwards or not exercising at all makes no difference.
“Our results suggest that appropriately timed physical exercise can improve long-term memory and highlight the potential of exercise as an intervention in educational and clinical settings”, said the research team in a statement.
In a unusual but interesting twist, exercising immediately afterwards doesn’t seem to show any benefit. Those who waited four hours before exercising scored an average of 87%, higher than those in the other two groups who scored an average of 80%.
For now, though, “the take-home message is there is a window of opportunity after learning that is a few hours long where these processes can be modulated”, Fernández says.
The 72 study participants learned 90 picture-location associations over a period of approximately 40 minutes before being randomly assigned to one of three groups.
Still, Fernández said in response to a question, that numerous participants in the study believed that this type of exercise was feasible in their daily routines.
The findings were reported in the Cell Press journal, Current Biology.
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They also underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measured brain activity during memory recall. One way to boost these compounds is through physical exercise.
