That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-Walking Outside

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

In today's Neuroscience Bite, we discuss the neuroscience behind why walking outside is better for your brain than walking inside or not at all. 

Hi, my name is Olaf Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Byte. A lot of people have messaged me and sort of said, well, what about your research and what do you do? So I've decided to use the next couple of bytes to talk about some of the research that's been done in my own lab. In fact, a recent study that was just published by my PhD student, Catherine, is, it's really cool. Basically, the idea was simple. You know, where my office is at the University of Victoria,

I look out and I see our gym and I see people on treadmills and, you know, stair climbers and stationary bikes. And what's really strange in my mind is we have this thing called the chip trail. It's a running trail that goes around campus. And in Victoria, contrary to popular rumor, we don't get snow very often, maybe one day a year. So it's a great place to go walking and running. And I was sitting there wondering, you know, why do people want to go indoors? And I was chatting with Kat about it, and we decided to test it out. And the idea was simple.

Is there a benefit to exercising outdoors over and above exercising indoors? So what we did was really simple. We gave people what we call a cognitive assessment. It's basically just a quick brain assessment. We get you to play a couple of games on an iPad and we measure your brain activity. And that allows us to get a couple of scores out that we can use as metrics of brain performance. And then we had people either go for a 15 minute walk outside or a 15 minuteminute walk inside. Now, we did all the stuff you're supposed to do as scientists. We controlled for sound with earplugs. We made sure

that the walk intensity was the same. We tried as best as we could to match the temperature. And really what we were hoping is just to look at the effect of the exact same amount of exercise at the same intensity outside versus inside. And then at the end, what we did is we gave them the same brain assessment. Now, this is the same people doing the same thing. Person A did walk outside and walk inside. Person B did inside and outside. And we did it a day apart to make sure there were no carryover effects.

And what did we find? to make sure there were no carryover effects. And what did we find? Well, we found that when people walk outside, it enhances their brain function more than when they walk inside. Now, it's well known that exercise enhances brain function. That's why I talk about it all the time when I talk about brain health and improving brain health and brain performance. But this, and we did see that, right? We did see that exercise is good for your brain, but there was this added boost when people walked outside. Now, we're still puzzling over why that is. It could be something as simple as fresh air versus stale air. It could be sunlight versus not sunlight. It could just be the fact that there's more people around, although we tried hard to control for that one. But no matter what,

the results that Cat published show that it's better to walk outside than inside. So there's the challenge. If you like to go for a walk on your lunch break or hit the gym, why not think about doing something outside every once in a while? Because at least as far as our data show, it's better for your brain. Anyway, I'll put some links up in the, we don't really have show notes, but I've got the blog for the podcast. If you haven't found it, where I occasionally post some things, I'll post a link to the original research article. And it was also covered by the Washington Post, so we got some press on it and press here locally as well. Anyway, there you go. It's better to walk outside than inside, at least in terms of increasing and enhancing brain function.

All right, don't forget the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. Follow me on Twitter, at thatneuroscienceguy, and DM me ideas for merch or for ideas. And of course, as ever, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. My name is Olive Craig Olson, and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon.