Exercise May Enhance the Effects of Brain Training - The New York Times - 0 views
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Exercise broadly improves our memories and thinking skills, according to a wealth of science. The evidence supporting similar benefits from so-called brain training has been much iffier, however, with most people performing better only on the specific types of games or tasks practiced in the program.
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Most of us are blissfully unaware of the complexity of our brain’s memory systems. Memories come in many different types, including detailed recollections of faces and objects and how they differ from similar faces and objects, as well as separate memories about where and when we last saw those things. These remembrances are created and stored throughout the hippocampus, our brain’s primary memory center.
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In general, the young people who had exercised, whether they also brain trained or not, were then more physically fit than those in the control group. They also, for the most part, performed better on memory tests. And those improvements spanned different types of memory, including the ability to rapidly differentiate among pictures of objects that looked similar, a skill not practiced in the brain-training group.
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