Physical performance and intelligence

mens sana in corpore sano

Juvenal already said (shortened quote). The translation to “In a healthy body lives also a healthy mind” was shamefully misused by the National Socialists. There are many highly intelligent people who are anything but physically fit! The time when people were judged – on their intelligence or their physical performance – should be over once and for all.

Nevertheless, it is pleasant and advantageous for you to be physically fit and mentally up to the tasks at hand.

Mental fitness can be increased by practicing; in the case of physical fitness, we call practicing training. In both processes, the activity of different areas of the brain is increased and new connections are created.

The study cited in the Sport & Exercise chapter prompted the US Department of Health and Human Services to issue a statement on the relationship between exercise and sport and various brain functions in December 2018.

Translated from: Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. Page 40: Table 2-3: The Benefts of Physical Activity for Brain Health. 12.12.18

The effects of exercise on the various functions of the brain shown in the table above are described as strong, or at least moderate.

Of course, it is fascinating to investigate whether physical performance, which results from training muscle functions, also has an influence on mental performance. Interesting study results are available from Sweden.

Årberg and colleagues have published the results of a huge study. Between 1950 and 1976, more than 1.2 million Swedes underwent an intelligence test and an ergometry test to determine their physical fitness for military service. This showed that higher physical fitness is associated with higher global, logical, verbal, visual-spatial and technical intelligence.

In contrast, no sustained correlation was found between muscle strength and global intelligence.

It will be interesting to see how these highly interesting connections come about.

 

The term statins is used in this publication – as is usually the case in psychology. In medicine, results are often given in the form of standard deviation or percentiles. This does not change the unambiguousness of the results!