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The gap between reading and the gym.
Three of your questions kept coming back. So I dug into the trials behind each one. Some of what I found cuts against the label copy.
I spend more than $20,000 a year on the research feeds that hedge funds read. Most of what lands is junk… so my job is to bin it and keep the trials that hold up.
Here is what held up.
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// The Mailbag
Does the gym help what I read stick?
Ann sent that one in. Dutch scientists had 72 adults learn 90 picture and place pairs. One group rode a bike right after the class. A second group rode four hours later. The third group did not ride at all. Two days on… the four hour group came out ahead. Brain scans backed the result in the hippocampus.
I gave it a run with a book chapter and a long walk. My recall on the second day was sharper.
ADULTS: 72 · DELAY: 4 hours · TEST: 48 hours on
→ Source: Current Biology, 2016
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// The Mailbag
Are cocoa flavanol pills worth the spend?
Marek asked, and the answer has two halves. COSMOS tested cocoa extract in 21,442 older adults. Cocoa did not beat the dummy pill on the main brain score. But the plain multivitamin arm did. A pooled look at 5,000 of those adults linked the daily pill to better recall. Scientists put the gain at about two years of brain aging.
That split is the part the ads leave out.
TRIAL: 21,442 · POOLED: 5,000 · GAIN: about 2 years
→ Source: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2024
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// The Mailbag
Brain training app, or the crossword?
Diane wants the head to head. Columbia and Duke ran 107 adults for 78 weeks. All of them had mild cognitive impairment. Half worked web crosswords. The rest played brain training games. Crossword scores came out ahead at 12 weeks and at 78 weeks. Brain scans favored the crossword group as well.
ADULTS: 107 · RUN: 78 weeks · AVG AGE: 71
→ Source: NEJM Evidence, 2022
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// Reader Picks
PEN BEATS KEYBOARD
Most of you who wrote in still take notes by hand. The lab data leans your way.
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// Reader Spotlight
THE PEN AND PAD SWAP
Tomasz runs a book club in Gdansk. For a year he typed his notes on a laptop. Then he swapped to a pad and a pen… and his group asks him for the recaps.
A Norway lab put 256 sensors on 36 students. They wrote words by hand, then typed the same words. Hand writing lit up far more links across the brain. Wide links like those help the brain lock in new facts.
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Pick one thing: the notes that matter most to you. |
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Write by hand: a pen and a pad beat the keys here. |
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Keep it short: one page, in your own words. |
The gear costs less than a cup of good coffee.
STUDENTS: 36 · SENSORS: 256 · TASK: write, then type
→ Source: Frontiers in Psychology, 2024
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So the mailbag came down to three cheap picks. None of them costs much.
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