Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Whenever I travel for busy brain based leadership conferences … exercise takes a back seat and so I run stairs rather than ride elevators to my hotel room. Four or five times up and down may not be as much fun as a good golf round … but amazingly … these two exercise routines work in similar ways. Both regrow brain.  How so?

Today Brandon Keim – over at Wired Science reminds us of literature on neurogenesis - the regenerative powers of the brain -  through exercise.

Scientists denied for decades the ability of a human brain to grow …

After conducting maze tests, the neuroscientist Fred H. Gage and his colleagues examined brain samples from the mice. Conventional wisdom had long held that animal (and human) brains weren’t malleable: after a brief window early in life, the brain could no longer grow or renew itself. The supply of neurons — the brain cells that enable us to think — was believed to be fixed almost from birth. As the cells died through aging, mental function declined. The damage couldn’t be staved off or repaired.

Then Gage’s mice ran on wheels and produced two to three times more neurons than mice without exercise. Recent studies affirmed and added to this fact, in that the increased blood flow to the brain – from exercise, helps to grow fresh neurons.

So what would it take at work to try it out today? Lead me to the stairs whenever I can’t get away to the links…. You?