Exercise may make you a better learner. That’s the suggestion of research conducted and the University of Pisa and reported in the  New York Times. The paper reports that researchers asked 20 adults to watch a movie with one eye patched while relaxing in a chair, and later to watch a movie while exercising in 10-minute intervals on a stationary bike. Why the eye patch? Because, the Times reports, when one eye is patched, the visual cortex compensates for the limited input by increasing its activity level. When the researchers tested the imbalance in strength between the participants’ eyes after the movie, they found that the differences were greater after exercise, suggesting that exercise enabled the brain to adapt more quickly.
And now the bad news: when researchers at the University of California in San Francisco tested the mental acuity of 3,274 people whose TV watching habits had been logged for 25 years, they found a direct correlation between more TV and poor thinking. The New York Times reports that “the highest level of TV watching  more than three hours a day most days  was associated with poor performance on all three brain tests. Compared with those who watched TV the least, those who watched the most had between one-and-a-half and two times the odds of poor performance on the tests, even after adjusting for age, sex, race, educational level, body mass index, smoking, alcohol use, hypertension and diabetes. Those with the lowest levels of physical activity and the highest levels of TV watching were the most likely to have poor test results.”
TV good exercise bad