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That article had a ton of links, but I couldn't find any support for the real factual claim that walking increases spontaneous brain fluctuations. Would love to

That article had a ton of links, but I couldn't find any support for the real factual claim that walking increases spontaneous brain fluctuations. Would love to see that paper. For the most part, spontaneous brain fluctuations are studied in the context of fMRI. Since you can't walk in an fMRI, I'd like to know how they actually measured anything.

abandonliberty 5y ago
I think the article/salon is optimized for clickbait. It's hard to boil down the concept into a couple words. Dr. Huberman mentions 'Optic flow', likely the same concept: >When you move through space, whether walking, running, or driving, you’re in what’s called optic flow. Things are moving past your retina at varying speed, depending on how fast you’re moving, but your brain has knowledge of how fast you’re moving. It cancels out the movement in a way that says, okay, these objects aren’t moving past me. I’m moving past them. All of this boils down to a set of circuits in the brain and body that make it so that when we’re moving through space, it has this property of relaxing us and giving us a sensation that is somewhat rewarding. And so what this translates to is at least once a day, get out and move. Optic flow doesn’t have to be fast. It can be at slow speeds. Ideally, it’s variable speeds, but this, I believe, underlies the sensation, the both calming and invigorating and kind of replenishing feelings that we get from taking a bike ride or a long run or swimming, for that matter. https://findingmastery.net/andrew-huberman/ https://findingmastery.net/andrew-huberman/
superbaconman 5y ago
Every movement our bodies make will show up in the brain in some way or another. This study for example started breaking down brain signal "noise" and basically found that the brain and body are super tightly coupled. The feeling of the pants against your legs and the wind in your hair is gonna show up in a brain scan, so of course you're gonna see brain stimulation while walking. > When researchers studied the spontaneous activity of more than 10,000 neurons in the visual cortex of mice, they were surprised to find it to be rich with information about the animals’ seemingly irrelevant movements. https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-areas-encodes-body-movements-20191107/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-ar...

abandonliberty 5y ago

I think the article/salon is optimized for clickbait. It's hard to boil down the concept into a couple words. Dr. Huberman mentions 'Optic flow', likely the same concept: >When you move through space, whether walking, running, or driving, you’re in what’s called optic flow. Things are moving past your retina at varying speed, depending on how fast you’re moving, but your brain has knowledge of how fast you’re moving. It cancels out the movement in a way that says, okay, these objects aren’t moving past me. I’m moving past them. All of this boils down to a set of circuits in the brain and body that make it so that when we’re moving through space, it has this property of relaxing us and giving us a sensation that is somewhat rewarding. And so what this translates to is at least once a day, get out and move. Optic flow doesn’t have to be fast. It can be at slow speeds. Ideally, it’s variable speeds, but this, I believe, underlies the sensation, the both calming and invigorating and kind of replenishing feelings that we get from taking a bike ride or a long run or swimming, for that matter. https://findingmastery.net/andrew-huberman/ https://findingmastery.net/andrew-huberman/

superbaconman 5y ago

Every movement our bodies make will show up in the brain in some way or another. This study for example started breaking down brain signal "noise" and basically found that the brain and body are super tightly coupled. The feeling of the pants against your legs and the wind in your hair is gonna show up in a brain scan, so of course you're gonna see brain stimulation while walking. > When researchers studied the spontaneous activity of more than 10,000 neurons in the visual cortex of mice, they were surprised to find it to be rich with information about the animals’ seemingly irrelevant movements. https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-areas-encodes-body-movements-20191107/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-ar...