Wk13: The Benefits Of Exercise For Central Nervous System Functions

System Functions and Social Support
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November 17, 2017
What are the benefits of exercise for central nervous functions, sleep, rest, and napping? What is meant by behavioral slowing? Is this slowing inevitable? What are some of the causes and consequences of behavioral slowing? Might behavioral slowing be adaptive? How does behavioral slowing impact our understanding of crystallized and fluid intelligence in the very old? How do people compensate for behavioral slowing? What type of activities and practices might affect behavioral slowing?
One of the most well-known fact in the field of health and psychology is that physical fitness indeed increases one’s mental activity and increases mental fitness. This fact has been proved through decades worth of careful and dedicated research on the “mind-body” connection that exists in human beings. However, while this might be an accepted fact, scholars these days are still being surprised with new discoveries, including how exercising affects the brain and how do these “benefits” happen to be. Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions about the brain is that it is a ‘muscle’ (Edlund, 2013). However, basic anatomy would show that despite containing a little bit of muscle, the brain is mostly composed of white and grey matters, which are responsible for the transmission of electrical impulses through a series of chemical reactions. From these series of transmissions, the electrical impulses become responsible for information transmission throughout the whole body (Godman, 2014). However, one of the more apparent differences here is that while muscle develops through physical exertion, the brain does not. And, being a well-known fact, this led to many people thinking that in order to improve one’s mental well-being, the best thing to do is to read books, engage in puzzles, and do things that would directly affect your brain. While this would certainly be beneficial, plenty of other factors (biological and psychological) could affect an individual’s perception and response to these methods, leading to what most scholars would call as “Behavioral slowing”. According to Newman and Newman (2017), Behavioral slowing, “is a gradual slowing in response to stimuli”, and is mostly seen in the increase of time for “motor responses, reaction time, problem-solving activities, memory skills, and information procesing”. In other words, this effects most of functions of the Central Nervous System (CNS), which includes both autonomic (breathing, sleeping, resting, etc.) and somatic nervous sytems. However, while behavioral slowing might affect one’s perception of information, studies have found that exercise provides a kind of solution to reduce the effects of behavioral slowing for aging individuals. In line with this, this article would try to expound on the topics of exercise and behavioral slowing. Also, the relationship between them would also be discussed in the suceeding chapters. Nonetheless, the author believes that through exercise, the brain becomes much more resilient by developing new pathways for information transmission that would aid the brain in processing information.
Exercise has a multitude of positive effects on both the automatic and voluntary functions of our brain. On one hand, studies have found out that physical exertion could boost our memories by producing more brain cells, during the process of Neurogenesis (Walton, 2017). This was a significant discovery, especially because for decades we believed that brain cells, unlike other kinds of cells in the body, are not capable of reproducing. This has also been a persistent issue during those times because while scholars have known that the shrinking of Hippocampus (center for learning and memory) as one age causes dementia, they have been conflicted with issues about how to reverse or at least reduce this amount of shrinking. Nonetheless, according to the recent studies, Aerobic exercise would definitely help in doing this (Martynoga, 2016).
However, even if it is proven that exercise could help reduce the amount of hippocampus’ shrinkage over time, this does not mean that it is not inevitable. Over time, a combination of different factors would eventually lead to behavioral slowing. While most of these factors are due to the faster rate of neuron degeneration that replenishment, other factors such as the accumulated effects of drugs that we take in, pollution, and health conditions would then lead to a degeneration of our mental well-being (MentalHealthDaily.com, n.d.). In line with this, it could be said behavioral slowing over time, is not an adaptive trait. This is because, behavioral slowing does not exactly add to the potential of achieving “reproductive sucess” especially for individuals who still don't have children, but are in the later phases of their lives. Aside from this, this knowledge about the cause of behavioral slowing also sheds light on how memory and learning processes happen in the very old (Newman & Newman, 2017). More particularly, this shows that while crystallized learning could possibly shrink because of the shrikange of the physical infrastructure responsible for memory and learning (Hippocampus), our ability to develop new ones (fluid intelligence) also shrinks because of the decrease of the responsiveness and perception towards new information.
All in all, what the statements above show is that while behavioral slowing is inevitable, aerobic exercises could help in slowing down its negative effects (Martynoga, 2016). More particularly, by...