Exercise works wonders throughout the human body, including the brain.
Research suggests an array of neurological benefits, such as reducing the brain’s biological age, enhancing learning and memory, and protecting against dementia.
Now, a new study offers one of the clearest glimpses yet into a suspected mechanism: after a single 20-minute session of light-to-moderate cycling, people showed changes in memory-linked brain activity.
A hippocampal sharp wave-ripple begins with highly synchronized patterns of neuronal activity in the hippocampus, a brain region with important roles in memory. These signals then travel elsewhere in the brain, affecting much of the cortex as well as some subcortical areas.
Much of what we know about these ripples comes from animal and human studies that used implants to measure brain…