△ In recent years, with the increase of the enthusiasm of the masses to participate in ice and snow sports, Tianjin Jizhou International Ski Resort, located in the eastern part of the Yanshan Mountains, has attracted more and more ski enthusiasts with good conditions. In addition to beginner, intermediate and advanced pistes, the slopes have a dedicated piste for teenagers and children. The cute babies often fell and rolled over during the training, and then got up again and again to continue, enjoying the fun brought by ice and snow sports. The picture shows a child practicing skiing under the guidance of an instructor. Xinhua News Agency
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Brain biological markers that exercise affect the quality of the will were discovered
Reporter: I know that you have long been focused on research on human motor behavior and brain health. Your recent research, published in a Swiss publication Brain Science, shows that ice and snow sports can significantly alter the cortex thickness of the brain regions associated with will quality? What kind of research did you conduct?
Wei Gaoxia: The study recruited 16 athletes who had an average professional training period of more than 8 years and were trained by the mainland national short track speed skating team as a panel of experts, and 18 healthy participants with gender and age matching as a control group, and all 34 participants were subjected to magnetic resonance imaging and will quality behavior tests.
The results showed that these athlete expert groups were significantly better than the control group in terms of total will quality scores and self-awareness, independence, decisiveness and tenacity. Large-scale brain structure analysis showed that the thickness of the cortex in the left anterior wedge, the left sub-parietal lobule, and the right superior frontal lobe of the athlete expert group was significantly greater than that of the control group. In addition, the independence fraction of will quality correlated significantly with the thickness of the left sub-parietal lobular cortex.
Reporter: Sounds very professional, what kind of valuable information does this discovery provide to ordinary readers?
Wei Gaoxia: This finding suggests that exercise may be able to build and strengthen the quality of the human will by reshaping part of the brain tissue. This study provides meaningful reference and inspiration for exploring the neural mechanisms related to will quality, and also provides new ideas for clinical research related to will quality.
Reporter: Why did you choose ice and snow sports in particular?
Wei Gaoxia: First of all, ice and snow sports are a kind of skill sports based on ice and snow fields and certain equipment in a cold environment, which focuses on the power of human will quality intervention. For this remarkable feature of ice and snow sports, experts at home and abroad have long revealed: for example, some experts pointed out that individuals engaged in ice and snow projects must overcome the fear of cold temperatures and first practice, the fear of losing the balance of gravity and falling during rapid sliding, and the difficulties of their own resistance, etc. In the learning process, they must use equipment to learn skills such as balance and flexible movements in repeated practice, and constantly overcome objective difficulties and subjective difficulties to achieve skill progress, and put in strong will to work hard to complete ice project actions. As a result, children who participate in snow sports show significant toughness traits. Secondly, Chinese and foreign experts are aware that fast speed, starting, fast braking, sharp rotation, jumping and other rapid transformation process is easy to cause sports damage, requiring individuals to have enough confidence and courage; third, the difficulty is high, is a set of speed, strength, flexibility, courage in one of the sports project, need to receive professional system of continuous training to master the balance of gravity under different speed postures and core strength, sensitivity quality, coordination ability and special technical actions. These processes may play an important role in cultivating clarity of an individual's goals and persistence in them. Therefore, ice and snow sports can be seen as a natural scene to enhance the consciousness and tenacity of the quality of will.
Reporter: Can these conclusions found in short track speed skaters be generalized to other sports?
Wei Gaoxia: Any sports that can challenge the physical fitness and technology of the human body, and the movement system or sports projects that individuals can learn and master these skills through high-intensity scientific training, should be able to achieve the purpose of tempering the quality of personal will. Another of our follow-up studies of children's ice and snow projects involving short track speed skating, figure skating and ice hockey came to a similar conclusion. After 12 weeks of ice sports training, the total score of will quality and the scores of tenacity and self-consciousness after training in the experimental group were significantly higher than before training, suggesting that ice and snow training can significantly improve the children's will quality. This conclusion not only helps to understand the characteristics of children's psychological development, but also has important enlightenment significance for the reform of children's and adolescent education and teaching.
Reporter: The athletes selected here have many years of training background, is short-term exercise valuable for the reshaping of relevant areas of the human brain?
Wei Gaoxia: Short-term exercise can also have an impact on brain remodeling. Current brain imaging technology allows us to detect millisecond-level changes in brain function activity, such as our team's use of magnetic resonance imaging technology to perform half-hour aerobic exercise intervention for college students, and the results show that even 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise can change the functional activity patterns of brain areas associated with working memory, and these activity patterns have certain individual differences. These findings from our team have been published online.
Reporter: I have a question, how can you conclude that sports is a factor and not other factors that directly affect the quality of the child's will?
Wei Gaoxia: The question you raised is an important part of what we must consider when designing experiments. In addition to the reasonable matching of the age, sex, education and other factors of the study subjects when recruiting researchers, we also usually use random grouping in experimental studies to control the influence of possible factors.
Reporter: Can activating the brain area that affects the quality of the will and the improvement of the quality of the will directly draw an equal sign?
Wei Gaoxia: At present, brain science research technology cannot help us directly draw an equal sign. Most brain science research evidence can only provide correlations between things and things. The conclusions of a study of brain structure in short-track speed skaters suggest that the thicker the left sub-parietal lobular cortex, the higher the independence score of individual will quality. This conclusion may provide an important basis for the selection and training of athletes in the future. Given the limited sample size of the study, the sample size should be expanded for repeated validation in the future.
Reporter: We noticed that the industry says that this is a new idea for the study of the quality of will? Haven't there been any previous studies?
Wei Gaoxia: Previously, the corresponding research on the quality of will in the modern psychological system has not yet been seen in the exploration of the neural mechanisms of the brain. For example, in many previous related studies, the focus on the change of individual psychological characteristics is mostly in the form of self-reporting, and our team is concerned about whether there is a special organization in the brain that affects the behavior related to the quality of people's will.
△ On December 8, 2021, students of a middle school in Shangyi County, Zhangjiakou City, Hebei Province, learned basic skiing moves at the ski resort. Photo by Wu Diansen, Xinhua News Agency
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The study of the reshaping of the human brain by exercise is of far-reaching significance
Reporter: Why do you pay attention to the brain structure of athletes? What exactly is the name of your profession?
Wei Gaoxia: Interest is the biggest driving force for exploring the unknown world. I am working on the research direction of motor cognitive neuroscience, which is a highly intersecting discipline of psychology, sports science, brain science and cognitive science. The major subject areas belong to sports psychology, mainly referring to competitive sports psychology, in addition, there are exercise psychology and sports psychology, which are collectively referred to as sports psychology in China. One of the main topics explored is the psychological benefits of individuals engaged in specialized sports training or physical exercise, or receiving physical education activities. For example, how exercise promotes memory, how exercise reduces depression, including how exercise behavior mentioned in this interview shapes the quality of individual will.
In 2009, when I was interviewed by Beijing Science and Technology News, I once said: the limbs are developed, and the mind is not necessarily simple. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was believed that the mature brain could no longer change, including synapses and the growth of nerve cells before adulthood. But with the development of science and technology, people have found that the brain changes throughout a person's life, even the brain of the elderly, can change. And exercise is an important variable in reshaping the brain.
Reporter: Did you come to this conclusion after many years of research?
Wei Gaoxia: Yes, our team will cooperate with some outstanding sports teams in China to find brain science evidence for various psychological abilities of professional athletes from the perspective of brain science research, and at the same time help coaches use these research results for psychological training and find excellent and suitable seedlings. For example, our team first conducted an exploration of the structural characteristics of the athlete's brain in China. In 2006, in collaboration with the diving team, we used MRI technology to find that the gray matter density of the sports-related areas in the athlete population, the bilateral thalamus and the left pre-movement area was significantly higher than that of the average person. Moreover, with the increase of exercise years, the gray matter density in the left pre-exercise area also shows a significant increase trend. We speculate that this finding may explain the neural mechanism of why athletes have a high degree of motor control and excellent sports performance.
Reporter: Does the change in brain region structure mean that their IQ is also higher?
Wei Gaoxia: It is not correct to directly equate changes in brain structure with intelligence, and the high density of gray matter is only a description of the objective phenomenon of brain changes, strictly speaking, it cannot be inferred that the IQ of athletes is better than that of ordinary people. But another study of brain function activity found that divers have higher kinesthetic appearances than ordinary people, and we observed that this excellent kinesthetic appearance ability stems from the activation of the brain's paracampal reflux function. These findings did not directly measure IQ, but only assessed certain aspects of the athlete's mental abilities and found that these mental abilities correspond to the biological markers of the brain. Different sports shape different mental abilities, such as better action perception or decision-making ability of ball sports athletes, and stronger action memory of figure skaters. Of course, these mental abilities are not equivalent to IQ.
Reporter: What role can the research on the reshaping of the human brain by similar sports activities play a role in the mainland's education cause and the daily family education of the people?
Wei Gaoxia: The inspiration and impact it has produced is enormous. For example, in the "Healthy China Action Organization Implementation and Assessment Plan" issued by the State Council in 2019, it requires primary and secondary school students to have no less than one hour of physical activity in schools every day, as well as the "double reduction policy" that was strongly implemented last year. However, public awareness of the role of physical education in schools is insufficient. Exercise not only promotes physical health, but also has many beneficial effects on our cognitive function, emotional health, and will quality, which are closely related to brain development and physical and mental health. For example, in recent years, there has been an increase in the number of depressed people in the adolescent population. The increasing proportion of "glass heart" and "crisp child" reflects the weak quality of the will of children and adolescents in today's society and the lack of frustration education. This finding can remind us that physical exercise can make children happy and improve the quality of children's will.
Recently, our team also conducted a brain imaging study with 30 minutes of aerobic exercise. The study found that even if there are only 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, it has been able to increase the strength of the functional connection between the prefrontal lobe (which is in charge of regulating and planning behaviors) and the amygdala (responsible for mood), and the increased intensity can directly predict the extent of negative mood improvement. Imagine if you were a parent of a child and knew that exercise brought so many benefits, wouldn't you still act?
Based on the relevant research results, we are currently working with universities to carry out the treatment and intervention of children with autism. In addition, we intend to launch a comprehensive intervention program for bullying in schools. As basic research researchers, what we most want to do is to be able to help children, see them have a smile on their faces, no haze in their hearts, and grow up happily and healthily.
Source: People's Political Consultative Conference Daily (2022.02.23, 11th edition)
Reporter: He Chunlan
Layout Editor: He Chunlan
New Media Editor: Xue Jing
Review: Jiajia Zhou