Exercise Increases Brain Power and Eliminates Depression

LiveScience is reporting a breakthrough in the studies of both depression and of the brain. It appears that exercise can grow brain cells.

It has been known for years that people who are in a depressive state have shrunken hippocampus in their brains. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that handles learning and memory.

Since a person has a shrunken hippocampus, a depressed person has a higher chance of memory loss. A depressed state will also cause the person to have difficulty learning. There are even some learning disabilities that cause a person to have a smaller hippocampus then other people that do not have the same disability.

A study that has been printed in the International Journal of Neuropsychoparmacology has shown the surprising results from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The study follows the Swedish scientists as they studied depression in rats.

Basically, the group induced depression in some of the rats through medication. They found, as was expected, that the hippocampus shrunk in these rats. The rats showed all of the expected side effects to depression on top of this.

They exposed these depressed rats to rigorous exercise. They found that the exercise brought them out of the depressive state, and caused their hippocampuses to grow. This increased the amount of synapses in this area of the brain. By doing so, this would increase their mental capacity and their ability to learn.

They also found that the rats that were not given the depression medication also had an increase in the size of their hippocampus. Rats that continued with their regular amount of exercise did not have any increase or decrease in the size of their hippocampus.

There are more studies that have to be done on this issue. This may be the beginning of a new belief system in the scientific community as scientists start looking into both depression in humans, and more into the human mind.