Mental and Physical Exercise
July 3, 2009Every day I go running with hundreds of others around the lakes near my home. Well, when I started I wasn’t really running. Mostly, I would throw myself at the pavement for about an hour and run as much of that hour as I could. Eventually, I made it to my current best: 4 straight miles at 6 mph. But I twisted my ankle and spent two weeks not running. Low and behold, when I put my running shoes back on I couldn’t run more than a mile at a time. Major setback! Is this a surprise to you? I doubt it, we all understand running uses muscles and lose their strength quickly.
So what about another similar story about thinking? A good friend and I study together during the school year. She and I would study for 16 hours each day– we were marathon thinkers. Then summer arrives. We both have studying to complete over the summer, but she just admitted to me that she has trouble concentrating for more than a half hour at a time. Major setback! Does this story surprise you? Until a couple days ago I never connected these ideas as the same process.
The idea that your brain needs exercise is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention. The exercise magazines tell you that if you do physical exercise, your brain works better. One famous example of this is Falat1ly, a world famous professional gamer. He runs a couple miles every day to help him play video games. Clearly both systems work the same way, as both are muscles in our bodies. They are clearly connected, by virtue of the hundreds of studies which suggest you should go for a short run if you are having trouble concentrating. What I would love to see is some scientific study that says:
your physical activity is improved when you do mental activity.
Since long before Professor Harold Hill taught his students to play in the band without having actual instruments in the Broadway musical 76 Trombones, people have wondered about the efficacy and importance of mental processes on physical activities. All this interest stems from the mind-body fallacy. Western science tends to treat the mind and the body as two very independent entities somehow inhabiting the same space. This mind-body dichotomy is closely related to the soul-body separation so central to most western religions. Without this idea of mind-body separation, questions about the effects of thinking on physical performance and exercising on mental performance seem silly. After all if the mind and body are just two names for the same thing, these questions are mute.
Regardless, there have been many scientific studies on how athletes train their minds to win and how their physical performance improves as a result of mental activity. Much of these studies center around visualization where athletes rehearse in their minds, e.g http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/40/the_power_of_intention/.