 We're here at Northeastern University's Science and Engineering Center where researchers in the psychology department are studying the effects of short bursts of exercise on kids' ability to learn and do math. And let me tell you, the results are big. Let's go meet the researchers. It's nice to see you. I'm Jim, nice to meet you. Yeah. I've got a lot of steps here. We do. It's one of the features of the building. Okay. I feel like I'm going to get in shape here. Yeah. I'm going to need it. My name is Chuck Hillman. I'm a professor of psychology and a professor of physical therapy movement and rehabilitation sciences. I'm also the associate director for the Center of Cognitive and Brain Health at Northeastern University. Cognition is a very broad term and it really encompasses anything from sensation to perception to thinking. So the types of interventions that we're interested in, we believe have some ability to influence the health of the brain and related cognitive processes. Physical activity is really a big one for us. But right now we're looking at what are the effects of a single dose of exercise? If we give a child a 20-minute dose of walking at about 60, 65 percent of their maximum capacity. And there we're looking at what does a 20-minute dose of walking do for temporary period of time, for transient period of time, for brain function, cognition, and academic achievement. And so we have kids either walk or rest or perform other types of stress conditions for 20-minute periods and then we look at their immediate response for about an hour afterwards. And our prior data have shown that in that case we actually see benefits to aspects of brain function that underlie attention and working memory. We see improvements in executive control, particularly for inhibition, so kids are better able to inhibit, stimulate the environment, and focus their attention selectively to important aspects of the environment. And then we see improvements in both reading and mathematics in that hour period using standardized achievement tests. And then we know that the effect dissipates thereafter. I think what's important about our work is that we're very public health focused. One of the things that I think we're mindful of is what are the public health implications of our work? How can we use our work, our findings in order to inform, say, schools or parents or administrators? And our work is important because we're able to take our basic findings and our mechanistic research and then translate it to everyday problems that occur. And so, for instance, our work with school children I think is important because state senators have actually used our work and our findings in two different states to create mandatory minimum number of physical education minutes. And so the hope here, and maybe it's a distant hope at this point, is that such policies will become federal here in the United States at some point. I find it very interesting that we ask children to do things that we can't do ourselves, right? And so, in a traditional school setting we have kids sit in a chair all day long at their desk and they're criticized for chewing gum, for moving too much, for being fidgety. And if you look at how we work as a workforce, we sit at our desk, we take breaks, we go get a cup of coffee, we go to the water cooler, we get tired, we check out CNN or ESPN for a minute and then we go back to our work. We take all these micro breaks throughout the day but that's just not how we instruct kids. There aren't many groups that have married cognitive neuroscience and kinesiology. We're interested in how health can really be benefited by some of these lifestyle factors and I think that's just a very cool thing that we have control over our own health. If I were to make recommendations for parents, the most general of recommendations I could have would be that families, parents for their children and for themselves, just be building as much physical activity into your life as possible. Take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator. Park your car a little further away. When you have the opportunity to have dinner and then go on a nice day, go for a walk after dinner, do that and as a parent you should be modeling good physical activity behaviors for your child because one of the most important factors for kids in developing their own physical activity behaviors are their parents and what their parents do. I still have very fond memories of growing up on Mission Hill and watching my father put on ankle weights and run up and down the hill. I don't know when I realize this is my life but I would much rather run up and down stairs and do stadium runs than I would run on flat ground and I'm sure that has something to do at some point in my life of watching my father run up and down Mission Hill. We tend to gravitate towards the things that our parents do for better or for worse and so as a parent probably the best advice I have is to be a good model for your kids and demonstrate physical activity. So my name is Lauren Rain. I'm a postdoc here in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University and I work in the Center for Cognitive and Brain Help in the interdisciplinary science and engineering complex here on campus. So what I'm primarily focused on is childhood brain help and right now we're looking at the effects of an acute or short bout of exercise and cognition and brain function after exercise. So basically kids come into the lab and they walk on the treadmill for 20 minutes or they read for 20 minutes and we measure their heart rate and how they're feeling kind of throughout that duration and after they finish that intervention we put them in an EEG cap which measures the electrical activity of the brain and once the cap is settled we have them perform some computer tasks and these computer tasks are designed to measure inhibition or a child's ability to ignore distraction and stay focused on in this case a centrally presented stimuli and once they're done with that we have them perform an academic achievement test which basically measures their abilities in reading and math and then they're done for the day. So we think that exercise is important and good for brain function and academics for a variety of reasons. We know that in schools academic achievement testing is important and teachers and administrators are held to very high standards in terms of marks that they have to meet. In terms of the research we do we've shown that kids who are more physically active and more physically fit actually perform better on these standardized achievement tests. So although it's hard for teachers and administrators to want to make the time for it I would strongly encourage them to include things such as recess and PE for kids. I'm lucky in that I love almost all parts of my job. I like working with the kids, I like interacting with the parents, I like the feedback that they give, I like how honest and frank the kids are with me about what they're doing and I also like kind of mentoring and overseeing graduate students and kind of using what I've learned in the last 10 years to help them develop their own studies and their own ideas in terms of how and what type of research we can do in kids to you know maybe optimize their brain function. Kids are still in a developmental phase so their whole lives can be shaped. We have the ability to potentially make a lifelong impact on kids health so if we can promote better physical activity behaviors in childhood these are behaviors that they can carry with them for the next 80 years of their life. We have a long time to see the benefits of what we do when we work with kids. That's what I find particularly interesting about our research is that we can change or modify kids behaviors to be healthier for the rest of their life. Well it looks like one of the keys for doing well in grade school is for kids to get a lot of short bursts of physical activity throughout the day. Help some focus better, help some learn math better and it makes the day more fun too. See you next time.