[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/well/move/for-your-brains...
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/which-type-of-exer...
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/can-running-make-y...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/well/move/jogging-the-bra...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/well/move/running-as-the-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/well/move/moving-when-you...
Obviously, that is my experience. Ymmv
Point is, I ended up getting into bouldering. If you want to send a bouldering problem, you have to spend a while actually planning out your movements, because if you waste time trying to figure out your next move in the middle of all but the easiest problems, you'll run out of energy before completing the problem. Like lifting, you need rest time between climbs, but you can spend that time planning out your next attempt. Only downside is that indoor bouldering walls tend to be crowded most of the time, and outdoor bouldering can require a bit of a drive depending on where you live.
Still, I find it a lot more stimulating than lifting; I actually look forward to bouldering, while lifting still felt like a chore even after 8 months of doing it.
edit: I should add that I've only been bouldering regularly for about 2 months, and mostly at an indoor gym.
You are clearly very unimaginative when it comes to exercise. I find the gym pretty bloody boring. But whitewater kayaking, mountain biking, rock climbing easily beat sitting in front of a computer. If those are too much go for a hike in the mountains and take in some scenery. Or learn to surf.
Or cycle to work. I get an hours solid exercise every day doing that and save myself time and money as a result.
I regularly spend 2-4hrs on a road bike and I've never found it boring and I have a low boredom threshold generally (outside of programming).
It's just a case of finding your niche.
"Thrill Of The Fight", "Holopoint", "GORN" or similar games are a lot of fun and are at least a moderate workout. I've literally just finished a half-hour session of GORN, I'm fairly sweaty, and I wasn't bored once.
(I also recommend similar things in IRL with Actual People, but I'm aware that those tend to be both more intimidating and harder to fit into a pre-set schedule.)
Now I run outside for sometimes five times as long as I was running back then, without podcasts or TV shows, and I never get bored. I do run slower, though. Try going slower next time! And going outside in a straight line or long loop. I get very bored/frustrated if I have to do laps to make my distance. Of course YMMV too.
Apart from the gym, I play soccer three times a week and it is nothing by fun. Switching volleyball session during the winter.
One of the best things I did both for my health and productivity was exercising + sports.
Is my posture correct? Are my feet hitting the ground well? Is this a good pace? And lots and lots of self talk about not shirking the next effort (30s hard running, hill run etc etc).
I do my best thinking while running, and make use of it to solve problems, write articles, etc.
Lifting weights, however, remains painful and boring :-( and I think that is because it requires mental focus. Running does not, you can just drift off into something that interests you.
You can also get your exercise from exciting activities like sports or Dance Dance Revolution (but your experience may vary!).
Plus there's the whole creativity thing when the mind is at rest.
Yep. So listen to podcasts during. Seminars About Long Term Thinking and In Our Time being my favorites.
Boring, because you frequently have to do something in addition to exercising to make the time spent exercising interesting. See the myriad of sibling comments.
Painful, because my exercise as a youth (competitive swimming) badly damaged most of my major joints, making anything but the lightest of impact workouts painful (which leads, sadly, back to point 1).
Pros
My attention got better, I was less easily distracted.
My executive function was better, I made better choices in life.(less junk food, fewer beers)
My thoughts slipped less often, I had those "what was I just talking about" moments less and less frequently.
Cons
Sometimes I felt overly focused for social situations. Like the feeling you get when you've been studying for 4 hours, and then try to the shoot the shit with someone, and you end up being too rigid/serious and instead of playful/fun.
* for context, he's got a lot on his site about n-back:
The article claims the failure of previous brain-training studies came from choosing the wrong techniques, but the evidence on dual n-back specifically has been conflicted for quite a while; this isn't the first study on it.
What's interesting here is that a lot of the best results on dual n-back in the past have concluded that it's mostly promising to fight cognitive decline or boost recovery. Previous work on boosting memory in young, mentally-healthy people has come up with basically nothing.
I'm hoping that this is the better and more-powerful study, and that n-back does boost general working memory. But the cynic in me is wondering if the chosen working-memory metric was simply more vulnerable to training effects from n-back than from complex span.
It didn't seem like a great distinction to me, but maybe it eliminates control issues when comparing two studies of different techniques vs comparing two different techniques in one study.
Eventually, someone decides it's time to start popping backward through the stack. They respond with the same word that they were just passed and the group tries to remember the right words to continue popping back down the stack, one person and word at a time. This gets harder "near the bottom" of the stack because it's been longer since those words were spoken.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4820261/
This meta analysis says there's a small affect
https://www.google.com.pe/amp/s/m.mic.com/articles/amp/89363...
(i do play drums, synth, and guitar.)
Drumming, in a band context, is all about remembering certain drum patters, combinating them mentally so they fit the music as well as possible, and then playing them with perfect timing...
... all of this in real time, and as an endless while(song is not over) loop!!
>And who's gonna tell you if you got it right or wrong?
You don't want to make the bassist, the singer, the guitar player, and the keyboard player all get angry at you at the same time for making the group sound bad!
Lately, I've felt my memory has been a little off. I feel like I'm not remembering things I would normally easily remember.
Like the other day, I was trying to remember what they speak in Iran (Farsi) or who the head coach of the Boston Celtics or what was the name of the Scorsese movie with Wahlberg/Damon/Nicholson. These are all subjects I'm very familiar with so it bothered me that I couldn't remember the answers immediately.
http://brainscale.net/dual-n-back
Also, if you feel like working off of someone else's source:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/brainworkshop/files/brainwo...
Though it seems relatively simple to design.
His 2004 TED Talk[2] on neuroplasticity is IMHO well worth watching.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Merzenich
[2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_b...
I get that they got increased brain activity in areas associated with learning and memory, but I'd like to see subjects also improve when directly tested.
Nowadays, I could study for a couple of hours before going for a short break. I know that some of you don't think that's good enough but for someone who used to struggle with procrastination and being "easily distracted", I am happy with the result.
I doubt the subtle differences between different dual-n-back matter.
Charisma doesn't come from the liver. (believe that was Yudkowsky)
But it is good to hear that it worked well for you
Also you can see/ go more places on a bike.
But IQ isn't working memory, attention, or executive function. And the findings on Dual-N-Back and working memory are less ambiguous and more positive.
Also there have been some more interesting studies done on Dual-N-Back in terms of changing Type 1 dopamine receptor density, as well as volume changes in certain parts of the pre-frontal cortex. So it really does seem like it's doing something even if that doesn't translate into an IQ change.
Huh, I guess this is what I was missing. I had the impression that even on working memory in particular, dual-n-back had mostly failed on a practical level - it just created training effects that broke the validity of certain tests.
If that's not the case, I'm suddenly much more interested.
In this way, everyone does have their own stack and if their hearing and memory are perfect, everyone has the same stack contents. In practice, memory corruption causes the players' stacks to disagree more at the bottom as time goes on, but agree reasonably well toward the top. If a word is misheard, some players might even disagree about the current value at the top of the stack.
Since they used the word "pass" maybe the OP does mean it's private, in which case it's a pretty different game than what I'm guessing at here. In my version, during the second half of the game, the current speaker could designate any player to be the next to pop and announce their top of the stack.
If the passing of words is private, then players need to remember who they interacted with at various points in the first half so they can try to form those same pairings again in reverse. And I guess the signal for the mid-game reversal point would require whispering the word they just got, back into the ear of the same player who just gave it to them.
Edit: Ohhh, I neglected the fact that they "circle up" in the OP. That solves the problem of getting the pairings right. You know exactly who you interacted with if you're all in the same spots in the circle and only interact with your neighbors. Okay, the word passing must be private. Which makes sense if you're hanging out behind the curtain at a theater and you need to be quiet. I wonder if the game that I've imagined would be any good.
That said, it is a bit suspect that it's always the same reporter writing about this topic. I'll have to dig into this some more, thanks!
Weight training, running, Crossfit, yoga, martial arts - I've heard enthusiasts of all of these forms of exercise claim that it's absolute best form of exercise that makes all other unnecessary.
Aside from any journalistic biases, I assume that the author really, really likes running.
Not shockingly, people good at setting somewhat mundane objectives and iterating on them are good at both intelligence and exercise. They probably feed each other. :)
Fair enough :)
Edit: To clarify, even accepting that (some narrow definition of) intelligence (associated with math) is anti-correlated with social skills, that wouldn't imply that someone who is already "good at parties" should worsen their social skills by improving their intelligence.
Edit2: I agree that my earlier comment was poorly worded, and that, if you knew nothing else you should expect "conventionally smart" people to have less social skills. But that wouldn't seem to be relevant here, for the above reasons. And charismatic people are intelligent, in a sense.
Those aren't routine activities, unless you are fortunately situated.
Cycling is fine, as long as you live in a place that supports it well enough (so a Deep South city with no bike trails might not be a good idea).
This can be a gateway drug, and cause you to change your whole lifestyle and move to a place with such activities in abundance.
Also again, my point was that getting good at exercising is getting good at a relatively quiet mindset that many people deprive themselves of. So, I believe there to be a feedback loop between the two ideas.
Same here, which is a bit surprising whenever I think about it. Especially since I never listen to music/podcasts/anything, it's always the same place [0], and it's an out-and-back route only. But I hate driving, which seems like a relatively similar activity... no idea.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_%26_Old_Dominion_Ra...
My preferred workout is climb with audiobook, descend with silence, rinse and repeat.
I'm not convinced that it's the actual running that's predominantly responsible for the neurogenisis (although we know that exercise causes an uptick in HGH so it's plausible). It may just be that much time with nothing else to do but think. Essentially it's walking meditation.
They talk about how complex movement in creatures typically correlates with the size of the brain.
Anecdotally, I’ve been doing the Cambridge Brain Sciences[1] tests every so often over the past few months to see how various things affect my score (mainly because I wanted to see which nootropics were most effective) and the best scores always occurred on days where I got exercise and the worst scores were in days where I didn’t and also got little sleep.
My absolute best scores (99.5 percentile, although the next days scores were much, much lower and my average has been about 50-60ish) were on a day when I got approx 1.5 hours of brisk walking (throughout the day, not all at once), 8+ hours sleep the night before and I had been taking nootropics. I imagine diet also plays a part, but I’ve not yet experimented. I’m also not sure f sleep or exercise affects me most positive, but together they certainly make a huge difference.
Nothing conclusive, for sure, but it does make me think that exercise/movement may play a big part.
Highly recommended book BTW, IMHO a must for anyone who learns as it explains scientific brain research in layman's terms. It explains how we humans are ruled by our brains. When you understand your brains better, you can make better use of them. In conjunction with Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister, a golden couple.
I stopped riding with the cycling club because it became too much of a social obligation, I like doing 60-70 miles on my own, stopping for a coffee somewhere and just watching world go by.
I don't even record my routes anymore, just distance and speed.
I loathe endurance exercises - I regularly combine a book -and- music to get me through the treadmill.
However, I love meditating and archery (which I do traditional style, which is honestly a form of meditation itself.)
And don't get me wrong, I bike quite often. I find for myself, I basically have to obligate myself to some distance. If I have a bus pass, I'm not doing that 400 ft climb home. If I don't have somewhere to go, I'll just read a book instead. And I claim that I do enjoy biking.
I'm guessing what bothers you the most is the idea of doing the same thing over and over again, which is a fair criticism. Generally I listen to a podcast. In the beginning, I used to go with a friend so it didn't become too boring.
You can change your exercises every 2-3 months otherwise your muscle will hit a saturation point or start facing fatigue due to same type of work out
Bouldering routes are only a couple of moves so the focus tends to be on raw power; climbing routes are longer and require more time planning and developing an optimal/working strategy, which can be more engaging and interesting.
No you don't. You don't have to. You can have 90 seconds between sets if you want. Just stay consistent, gym session after gym session. Who has time for a 5 minute rest between sets? If you're doing warm-up sets you'll be in the gym for hours!
2. It's generally considered impolite to give advice on how to climb something, unless the person asks.
3. Most bouldering/climbing gyms have small workout areas in addition to the walls, and memberships that aren't a lot more expensive than a regular gym.
But I totally agree, more "practical" excercise like bouldering is much more fun.
That is a lot of rest time. Try to keep it between 30-45 secs
This http://borgefagerli.com/myo-reps-in-english/ works very well for me, great results and very short workouts.