Is Runners’ High For Real?

Readers who have not had time to pick up the latest issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex will be delighted to learn that the relatively inexpensive feeling of euphoria known as runners’ high is now officially real. New York Times’ health guru Gina Kolata writes about the research, reported in Cerebral Cortex and conducted at the University of Bonn. Researchers at the German school gave PET scans to the brains of athletes before and after a two-hour run, hoping to spot evidence that endorphins produced during the run were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood. And the answer is…YES. Dr. Henning Boecker, who led the study, told the Times that endorphins could be detected in the
limbic and prefrontal areas of the brain. Those are the areas, Boecker said, that are activated when people are involved in romantic
love affairs or, “when you hear music that gives you a chill
of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.”  When researchers also asked the runners to describe any post-run euphoria, they found that the greater the
euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.
Read more in the New York Times.