Run away

There’s a piece in the Herald, from The Conversation (with attribution, and links intact, yay!), on the supposed brain benefits of running.  There’s an interesting evolutionary speculation that humans, specifically, might benefit from running because of our pre-history of long-distance running to hunt

The growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus and the enhancement of spatial memory that is brought on by endurance running is basically an evolutionary safety net for when you have outrun your knowledge, when you have run so far that you no longer know where you are and you need to learn, fast. It is a mechanism that makes information uptake easiest when historically you might have been tired, lost, and at your most vulnerable.

There’s also some actual evidence on brain cell growth

What the new research tells us is that it is not just any exercise that will create new brain cells for you. In the study by Finnish researchers, they discovered that only certain kinds of exercise are likely to result in the growth of new brain cells in adults.

As you will find if you follow the link (but not from reading the story), that research is in rats. Unless their ancestors, too, pursued their prey across miles of African savannah, it rather tends to undermine the evolutionary argument.