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For an hour a day, five days a week, mice in Hiroshi Maejima’s physiology lab at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, hit the treadmill. The researcher’s goal in having the animals follow the exercise routine isn’t to measure their muscle mass or endurance. He wants to know how exercise affects their brains.
Researchers have long recognized that exercise sharpens certain cognitive skills. Indeed, Maejima and his colleagues have found that regular physical activity improves mice’s ability to distinguish new objects from ones they’ve seen before. Over the past 20 years, researchers have begun to get at the root of these benefits, with studies pointing to increases in the volume of the hippocampus, development of new neurons, and infiltration of blood vessels into the brain. Now, Maejima and others are starting to home in on the epigenetic mechanisms that drive the neurological changes brought on by physical ...
