"Exercise Breaks Improve Learning"

Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health
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New research from a team of scientists at McMaster University suggests that brief exercise breaks during lectures can help university students focus their attention, retain information and improve overall learning.

…When tested, researchers found that the students who exercised paid more attention throughout the lecture, which translated into improved comprehension of the material both immediately afterwards and 48 hours later.

Sweat So You Don’t Forget: Exercise Breaks Improve Learning

Here’s the abstract:

We examined the impact of taking exercise breaks, non-exercise breaks, or no breaks on learning among first year Introductory Psychology students. Three 5-minute breaks were equally distributed throughout a 50-minute computer-based video lecture. The exercise breaks group performed a series of callisthenic exercises; the non-exercise breaks group played a computer game; the no breaks group watched the lecture without breaks. Mind-wandering questions measured attention during the lecture. Exercise breaks promoted attention throughout the lecture compared to no breaks and non-exercise breaks, and resulted in superior learning when assessed on immediate and delayed tests. The exercise breaks group also endorsed higher ratings for narrator clarity and perceived understanding than the other two groups. This is the first study to show that exercise breaks promote attention during lecture and improve learning in university students.

Sweat So You Don’t Forget: Exercise Breaks During a University Lecture Increase On-Task Attention and Learning

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Even very much reduced “exercise” - such as chewing gum - can help:

Here are some selected quotes from the treatise:

people who chewed throughout tests of both long-term and short-term memory produced significantly better scores than people who did not.

gum-chewing did not boost memory-linked reaction times, used as a measure of attention.

One third of the 75 adults tested chewed gum during the 20-minute battery of memory and attention tests. One third mimicked chewing movements, and the remainder did not chew.

The gum-chewers’ scores were 24 per cent higher than the controls’ on tests of immediate word recall, and 36 per cent higher on tests of delayed word recall. They were also more accurate on tests of spatial working memory.

The previous quote shows that “mimicking” chewing is not sufficient - it must be actual chewing. I suppose this is equivalent to saying that lifting a dumbbell exercises your biceps, but mimicking that movement does not. Sounds fair enough.

chewing increased heart rate. Anything that improves delivery of things like oxygen in the brain, such as an increased heart rate, is a potential cognitive enhancer </e