Running, it seems, can jog your memory

SCIENTISTS have proved that jogging makes you smarter.

A team of neuroscientists from Germany studied the mental abilities of joggers over a number of weeks and found both their concentration and their visual memory were improved by pounding the pavement.

Participants had to complete two 30-minute jogging sessions a week and take difficult tests afterwards.

Researchers found that while the joggers' memory for numbers showed little improvement, their ability to recall images and to complete visual tasks such as map work improved substantially.

To prove the point, researchers split the group of joggers halfway through the experiment and only one of the sub-groups continued jogging. Members of the team that stopped showed a marked decrease in the accuracy of their responses.

"What changed was the number of mistakes," said Ralf Reinhardt, one of the researchers at Ulm University. "The runners who had taken the six-week jogging course made fewer mistakes. They could complete the tests much more precisely than the non-runners could."

The team has yet to explain why joggers are smarter, but psychologist Sanna Stroth said the hippocampus region of the brain - responsible for a number of memory functions - was the key.

She said: "Activity is thought to increase the manufacture of new hippocampus cells and protect the existing ones. This could be why jogging is beneficial to the memory."