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Benefits of exercising the mindDate: 15.01.2007
Posted by: Anabolic Info Team United States
I lifted weights as a teen. I wasn't all that athletic, but my uncle, a fitness buff, bought me some barbells. I enjoyed the feeling of muscles "burning" with the repetitions and the sets I performed with different movements to develop specific muscle groups.
I found that, for example, if I exercised my arm biceps by doing curls, I would reach a point where I could feel a mildly painful, burning sensation in the muscle just before becoming too tired to continue.
I quickly learned that if I came back to that same exercise and increased the weight a bit at a time, my arm muscle would become stronger and, when I flexed it, bigger, too.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the same sort of thing happens when I exercised my mind, particularly through study or having participated in an energetic discussion, as I often experienced during college seminars.
When classes comprised no more than a dozen or so students, and nearly all came prepared to talk about the week's reading, as I left the class each week, I began to notice what can only be described metaphorically as that same burning and growing sensation that I used to experience as a body builder.
As a result of these discussions my mind - stimulated with new ideas and possibilities - was spinning with the connections and understandings that I had realized and I felt energized and more fully aware of just about everything in and around me.
I haven't thought much about my old bodybuilding period until recently when I made the connection between muscles burning and growing and brain connections expanding as I came across some research that compares such learning and knowledge experiences with the brain's reaction to opium-like substances.
Two Southern California researchers followed a hunch. They knew that the part of the human brain that responds to drugs like opium (known as opioid-type receptors) tend to increase in density in the brain areas that control visual activity, including image recognition and image processing. What might that mean for learning?
In an article published last year in the journal American Scientist, University of Southern California psychologist Irving Biederman and then-graduate student Edward Vessel found that comprehension "triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural, opium-
like substances."
We all know that struggling to understand a new or complex idea or argument may be difficult and even tedious, but Biederman states, "Once you get it, you just feel fabulous."
From their research, he and Vessel found that viewing strongly preferred images at first generated greater pleasure responses, but that the effect diminishes over time, they speculate, as neurons become available to react to newer experiences.
Noting the value of this somewhat pleasure-driven aspect of our perceiving and thinking apparatus, Biederman commented, "The system is essentially designed to maximize the rate at which you acquire new but interpretable information."
For the moment, Biederman's theory has only been studied in the visual system, but it is likely, he says, that it also applies to the other senses.
It's useful to know that our processes of visual perception and learning can be in some ways moderated by the pleasure of novelty and that pleasure itself is biologically keyed into some aspects of learning. I wonder how these finding might be employed by educators and parents - and students themselves - in our development of educational programs that not only stress what kinds of knowledge must be learned but also, how that learning experience might best be achieved?
That would be good to know!
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