{"id":2657,"date":"2020-12-14T03:10:25","date_gmt":"2020-12-14T03:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/?p=2657"},"modified":"2020-12-14T03:10:25","modified_gmt":"2020-12-14T03:10:25","slug":"its-a-superpower-how-walking-makes-us-healthier-happier-and-brainier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/14\/its-a-superpower-how-walking-makes-us-healthier-happier-and-brainier\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s a Superpower\u2019: How Walking Makes Us Healthier, Happier and Brainier"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Guardian<\/a> Amy Fleming<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neuroscientist Shane O\u2019Mara believes that plenty of regular walking unlocks the cognitive powers of the brain like nothing else. He explains why you should exchange your gym kit for a pair of comfy shoes and get strolling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"GettyImages-918789438.jpg\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo by boonchai wedmakawand \/ Getty Images<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taking a stroll with Shane O\u2019Mara is a risky endeavour. The neuroscientist is so passionate about walking, and our collective right to go for walks, that he is determined not to let the slightest unfortunate aspect of urban design break his stride. So much so, that he has a habit of darting across busy roads as the lights change. \u201cOne of life\u2019s great horrors as you\u2019re walking is waiting for permission to cross the street,\u201d he tells me, when we are forced to stop for traffic \u2013 a rude interruption when, as he says, \u201cthe experience of synchrony when walking together is one of life\u2019s great pleasures\u201d. He knows this not only through personal experience, but from cold, hard data \u2013 walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are wandering the streets of Dublin discussing O\u2019Mara\u2019s book, In Praise of Walking<\/a>, a backstage tour of what happens in our brains while we perambulate. Our jaunt begins at the grand old gates of his workplace, Trinity College, and takes in the Irish famine memorial at St Stephen\u2019s Green, the Georgian mile, the birthplace of Francis Bacon, the site of Facebook\u2019s new European mega-HQ and the salubrious seaside dwellings of Sandymount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Mara, 53, is in his element striding through urban landscapes \u2013 from epic hikes across London\u2019s sprawl to more sedate ambles in Oxford, where he received his DPhil \u2013 and waxing lyrical about science, nature, architecture and literature. He favours what he calls a \u201cmotor-centric\u201d view of the brain \u2013 that it evolved to support movement and, therefore, if we stop moving about, it won\u2019t work as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is neatly illustrated by the life cycle of the humble sea squirt which, in its adult form, is a marine invertebrate found clinging to rocks or boat hulls. It has no brain because it has eaten it. During its larval stage, it had a backbone, a single eye and a basic brain to enable it to swim about hunting like \u201ca small, water-dwelling, vertebrate cyclops\u201d, as O\u2019Mara puts it. The larval sea squirt knew when it was hungry and how to move about, and it could tell up from down. But, when it fused on to a rock to start its new vegetative existence, it consumed its redundant eye, brain and spinal cord. Certain species of jellyfish, conversely, start out as brainless polyps on rocks, only developing complicated nerves that might be considered semi-brains as they become swimmers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sitting at a desk all day, it\u2019s easy to start feeling like a brainless polyp, whereas walking and talking, as we are this morning, while admiring the Great Sugar Loaf mountain rising beyond the city and a Huguenot cemetery formed in 1693, our minds are fizzing. \u201cOur sensory systems work at their best when they\u2019re moving about the world,\u201d says O\u2019Mara. He cites a 2018 study that tracked participants\u2019 activity levels and personality traits over 20 years, and found that those who moved the least showed malign personality changes, scoring lower in the positive traits: openness, extraversion and agreeableness. There is substantial data showing that walkers have lower rates of depression, too. And we know, says O\u2019Mara, \u201cfrom the scientific literature, that getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful. My notion \u2013 and we need to test this \u2013 is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Mara\u2019s enthusiasm for walking ties in with both of his main interests as a professor of experimental brain research: stress, depression and anxiety; and learning, memory and cognition. \u201cIt turns out that the brain systems that support learning, memory and cognition are the same ones that are very badly affected by stress and depression,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd by a quirk of evolution, these brain systems also support functions such as cognitive mapping,\u201d by which he means our internal GPS system. But these aren\u2019t the only overlaps between movement and mental and cognitive health that neuroscience has identified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I witnessed the brain-healing effects of walking when my partner was recovering from an acute brain injury. His mind was often unsettled, but during our evening strolls through east London, things started to make more sense and conversation flowed easily. O\u2019Mara nods knowingly. \u201cYou\u2019re walking rhythmically together,\u201d he says, \u201cand there are all sorts of rhythms happening in the brain as a result of engaging in that kind of activity, and they\u2019re absent when you\u2019re sitting. One of the great overlooked superpowers we have is that, when we get up and walk, our senses are sharpened. Rhythms that would previously be quiet suddenly come to life, and the way our brain interacts with our body changes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the scant data available on walking and brain injury, says O\u2019Mara, \u201cit is reasonable to surmise that supervised walking may help with acquired brain injury, depending on the nature, type and extent of injury \u2013 perhaps by promoting blood flow, and perhaps also through the effect of entraining various electrical rhythms in the brain. And perhaps by engaging in systematic dual tasking, such as talking and walking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One such rhythm, he says, is that of theta brainwaves. Theta is a pulse or frequency (seven to eight hertz, to be precise) which, says O\u2019Mara, \u201cyou can detect all over the brain during the course of movement, and it has all sorts of wonderful effects in terms of assisting learning and memory, and those kinds of things\u201d. Theta cranks up when we move around because it is needed for spatial learning, and O\u2019Mara suspects that walking is the best movement for such learning. \u201cThe timescales that walking affords us are the ones we evolved with,\u201d he writes, \u201cand in which information pickup from the environment most easily occurs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Essential brain-nourishing molecules are produced by aerobically demanding activity, too. You\u2019ll get raised levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which, writes O\u2019Mara, \u201ccould be thought of as a kind of a molecular fertiliser produced within the brain because it supports structural remodelling and growth of synapses after learning \u2026 BDNF increases resilience to ageing, and damage caused by trauma or infection.\u201d Then there\u2019s vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which helps to grow the network of blood vessels carrying oxygen and nutrients to brain cells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people, I point out, don\u2019t think walking counts as proper exercise. \u201cThis is a terrible mistake,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat we need to be is much more generally active over the course of the day than we are.\u201d And often, an hour at the gym doesn\u2019t cut it. \u201cWhat you see if you get people to wear activity monitors is that because they engage in an hour of really intense activity, they engage in much less activity afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But you don\u2019t get the endorphin high from walking, I say. \u201cThe same hit you get from running is what you\u2019d get from taking morphine? We simply don\u2019t know that\u2019s true,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople who study this area don\u2019t go on about endorphins and there may be a reason for that.\u201d Not that he is opposed to vigorous exercise, but walking is much more accessible and easily woven into everyday life: \u201cYou don\u2019t need to bring anything other than comfy shoes and a rain jacket. You don\u2019t have to engage in lots of preparation; stretching, warm-up, warm-down \u2026\u201d O\u2019Mara gets off his commuter train a stop early so that he can clock up more steps on his pedometer. To get the maximum health benefits, he recommends that \u201cspeed should be consistently high over a reasonable distance \u2013 say consistently over 5km\/h, sustained for at least 30 minutes, at least four or five times a week.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twice during our circuitous route, he asks me to point to where I think our starting point of Trinity College is, and my estimates are pretty close. \u201cThat just shows you how good your GPS is,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have never been here before, but you have a very good sense of where you need to go.\u201d This is reassuring, I say, because, of course, Google Maps is enfeebling our innate abilities to find our way. \u201cThat\u2019s absolute garbage,\u201d says O\u2019Mara. \u201cWe really have to get a grip. If you hire a car and drive around a country you\u2019ve never been in, taking a route into a city you\u2019ve never driven into before, the first time, you rely very heavily on the GPS. The second time, not quite so much and, by the third or fourth time, you don\u2019t need the GPS at all, because you\u2019ve learned the route. I actually think GPS is great for helping us disambiguate where we are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it\u2019s mere speculation that relying on satnavs is killing our sense of direction? \u201cYeah it is. There is no data of any quality showing that, over the long term, reliance on GPS is a bad thing. Honestly, the brain is much more robust.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Mara describes our inbuilt GPS, or cognitive mapping system, as a silent sense. \u201cIt is constructed largely without our awareness, and we only notice it if it fails us.\u201d While the sensitive vestibular system of the inner ear governs balance, for mental mapping (which can work even when our eyes don\u2019t), we have what are known as place cells in our hippocampi. If you stay in one place, the cell for that position keeps firing, but if you move, that cell will stop firing and a cell marking your new position will start firing and so on. In rat experiments, the system worked less well when the rodents were wheeled around as opposed to walking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s clever, but not infallible. \u201cWe get fooled when we walk a long way in a single direction,\u201d says O\u2019Mara. We need to keep looking around us and recalibrating with visual cues. \u201cIf you\u2019re feeding your place cells by coming from a single direction, what they know about the environment is that single direction and you want them to have input from all directions, so look around occasionally and your place cells will reset from the whole sensorium around you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While all this is going on in the background, our social brains are working to predict which direction others will take, to avoid collision. In order to walk and navigate, the brain flickers between regions, just as our waking minds are often, says O\u2019Mara, \u201cflickering between big-picture states \u2013 thinking about what we have to do tomorrow, plans for next year, engaging in what is called \u2018mental time travel\u2019 \u2013 and task-focused work. And you need to flicker between these states in order to do creative work.\u201d That\u2019s how important associations get made, and this flickering seems to be bolstered by walking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s part of the reason, O\u2019Mara suspects, that the prolific writer and thinker Bertrand Russell said that walking was integral to his work. Likewise, the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who pondered a single problem on his daily walks for seven years, eventually inventing a number system called quaternions, without whichwe couldn\u2019t make electric toothbrushes<\/a> or mobile phones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Mara\u2019s ultimate ode to urban walking is TS Eliot\u2019s 1915 poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which he describes as \u201ca journey on foot, and a journey through states of mind\u201d. Wordsworth composed poetry as he wandered, while Aristotle delivered lectures on foot in the grounds of his school in Athens. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche memorably said that \u201conly thoughts reached by walking have value\u201d, a notion that Charles Dickens \u2013 who was as prolific a walker as he was a writer \u2013 would no doubt have seconded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, while my mind has been flickering through the streets of Dublin, says O\u2019Mara, \u201cyou haven\u2019t died or fallen over, and you\u2019re continuing to breathe. Your heart is booming away. You\u2019re putting one foot in front of the other, and we\u2019re engaging in this conversation, information exchange.\u201d Plus, I\u2019m checking out the area, admiring fanlights and looking for clues of neighbourhood life. \u201cAll of this is going on all the time. Robots can\u2019t do this. Getting a robot to cross the road is really hard.\u201d Whereas for our brains, \u201cevolution has been solving this problem, billions of times an hour, for the past 400m years\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Guardian Amy Fleming Neuroscientist Shane O\u2019Mara believes that plenty of regular walking unlocks the cognitive powers of the brain like nothing else. He explains why you should exchange your gym kit for a pair of comfy shoes and get strolling. Photo by boonchai wedmakawand \/ Getty Images. Taking a stroll with Shane O\u2019Mara is<\/p>\n

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