• Question: can exercising your brain make you feel better and will you lose weight?

    Asked by Sorcha Leonard to Sam on 14 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Sam Smith

      Sam Smith answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Hmm tricky one. To answer this, it’s important that we deal with ’cause and effect’ – lots of studies show links between two things, but it’s very difficult to show that one caused the other. Sometimes events happen at the same time and appear to be linked, but may not be. So with that in mind…

      There is some evidence to show that it might be the other way round! Children with a lower birth weight may be clever later on in childhood. Similarly, people who are cleverer (also known as having a high IQ, intelligence, or smarty pants) are less likely to be overweight. Trying to establish what causes what though is very difficult. To answer your questions properly, we would have to get a group of people to exercise their brains and another group not to exercise their brains. See whether those who did the brain training felt better, and then see whether they lose more weight.

      To my knowledge no one has done this, so we don’t really know! It would make a great study though.

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