Notes and researches.
The mind is not air-gapped from the body. Cognition ultimately occurs within the living, breathing body we all inhabit that itself evolved in a primarily physical-interaction-driven environment. The influence of the body on the mind is something I'm especially interested in as a means to improve my own cognition. The most successful athletes tend to be intellectually active, and the most brilliant intellectuals tend to be physically active*. This section explores this relationship in a mostly one-way nature.
It is exercise alone that supports the spirits, and keeps the mind in vigor.
Cicero
The crux of this whole section comes down to the well-documented effects of exercise on memory*. It seems there's a specific form of 'exercise' which fires up the brain along ancient, evolutionary lines and especially stimulates the hippocampus (see this). This special form of exercise must satisfy two criteria:
Hiking in a forest is perhaps the perfect example of such exercise. Hiking raises bloodflow to the brain for long stretches of time, of course, but more critically it calls up on the hiker to constantly solve little problems with the back of the mind. These problems are almost trivial motor-skill affairs, concerned with the angle at which to place one's foot against an odd root or computing the exact pressure exerted when jumping across a small stream. This sort of 'interactive' exercise can be held in contrast to, say, running on a treadmill where the same mechanical motions play out moment after identical moment.
For reasons that can only really be guessed at, interactive exercise brings the hippocampus and associated machinery online in a surprisingly intense way. In the short term, this improves the mind's ability to both remember new information and (more importantly) actually learn new information as well*. Chronic indulgence in such physical exercise seems to also provoke a sort of mental exercise as well. The 'fitness' one's mind eventually obtains as a result provides a whole gamut of mental benefits:
and other fundamentals of cognition*.
Sadly, this simply is not true of all exercise. The more interactive and 'challenging' (in the ways noted above) an exercise is, the better the effects. One study had Group A wander around a forest for an hour while Group B went around a rectangular track in a circle. Group A did much better immediately afterwards on creativity exams*. It appears that much of the exercise a person can do in a gym really just doesn't call upon the brain in the same ways that outdoor anaerobic exercise will. City streets probably do provide some of complexities of nature, but as Levitin says, lacks:
The hidden and ancient power of landscapes to be soothing and stimulating at once.
This form of exercise merits some additional study. It's a sort of alternate that can be used when the constraint of either time or environment prevents a person from exercising deeply*. In brief, HIIT is done with: