Posted July 25, 2011
Brain AND brawn? Turns out, that may be a natural thing. (You are NOT a freak of nature!) Or brain and balance.
A recent study shows participating in a sport may help fine-tune your brain. One MORE reason to get out there, people!
Here’s a condensed version of the top of a New York Times story that caught my eye:
Who can cross a busy road better, a varsity wrestler or a psychology major?
That question, which seems to beg for a punch line, actually provided the motivation for an unusual and rather beguiling experiment in which student athletes were pitted against regular collegians in a test of traffic-dodging skill.
The results were revelatory.
For the study, published in The Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recruited 36 male and female students, ages 18 to 22. Half were varsity athletes at the university, a Division I school, and they represented a wide variety of sports, including cross-country running, baseball, swimming, tennis, wrestling, soccer and gymnastics. Some possessed notable endurance; others, strength and power; and still others, precision and grace.
The rest of the volunteers were healthy young collegians but not athletes, from a variety of academic departments.
Students were called to a lab and shown an immersive video. They were instructed to walk toward a busy street and, once they’d arrived, gauge oncoming traffic, then cross. Each volunteer attempted 96 crossings.
The student athletes completed more successful crossings than the nonathletes, by a significant margin.
But what was surprising – and thought-provoking – was that their success was not a result of their being quicker or more athletic. They walked no faster than the other students. They didn’t dash or weave gracefully between cars.
What they did do was glance along the street a few more times than the nonathletes, each time gathering slightly more data and processing it more speedily and accurately than the other students.