by Kris Fronzak, News Editor
There has been much scrutiny recently regarding the correlation between human physical fitness and one’s social life. According to a study done with rats, the body’s capability to exercise may increase neurologically when the person is surrounded by others or generally being social.
This theory began at Princeton University some time ago. The researchers were trying to replicate an experiment in which the brains of mice who were given free access to running wheels were flooded with new brain cells and then performed better on rodent intelligence tests than those without wheels. However, when they tried to duplicate the study with rats, an animal closer to humans than mice in terms of physiology, the exercise left the rats generally unaffected.
Finding this conclusion odd, researches looked into the difference in housing between the rats and the mice. They noticed that the rats were kept in single-occupancy cages. Rats are rather social animal, which led researchers to wonder whether isolation could be undermining the physical benefits of exercise at a cellular level.
In order to test this theory, the Princeton scientists divided young male rats into groups of threes or singles. After a week, they gave half of each group access to running wheels. All of these rats ran, but only rats with cage mates experienced the explosion of new neurons and neural connections like the mice did. The rats who went under isolation were quite slow in the production of new neurons and the aforementioned neural connections.
In a follow-up survey by scientists at the University of Houston, the same experiment was done with female rats. The female rats who were housed alone experienced significantly less neurogenesis then the female rodents with roommates.
Even when they exercised for the same amount of time or ran the same distance, the neurological results were far different.
This is only one of a series of recent studies on exercise and social life. One such study published through the National Institutes of Health indicates that humans who are in monogamous relationships may be less fit. Researchers cross-correlated data about fitness habits and relationship status in almost 9,000 adults.
Tests over several years at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas, Texas found that women who remained single gained the most benefit from fitness while those who get married became less fit. Similarly, men who divorced became fitter, while men who remarried tended to let themselves go. It is speculated that this may be less of a neurological reaction to exercise and instead a case of single people being fearful of their level of attractive and married folks feeling secure enough to let themselves go. This study, however, examines the correlation between physical fitness and relationship status. The rat study, done at Princeton evaluated the neurological reception of physical fitness in correlation to relationships.