Effects of Exercise on the Brain and Cognition

It is now an established fact that physical exercise causes neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a critical structure for learning and memory in mammals, including humans. This neurogenesis is associated with improved hippocampus-dependent learning in experimental animals. These studies will be reviewed, as well as very recent work showing that exercise alters hippocampal structure and improves spatial (hippocampus-dependent) learning in humans.