Riding Outside Benefits Your Brain in a Big Way, Research Shows
Brain structure improves with time spent outdoors, regardless of sun exposure, activity, or other factors, research suggests.
The researchers believe fresh air could be behind the brain-building benefits, which is another reason to sneak in a weekday ride and to take your rides outside when you can.
As cyclists, we all enjoy the sun on our face and wind in our hair (albeit through our vents). Now, according to recent research published in The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, we can add an increase in grey matter to the benefits of a ride outside, because a spin in the fresh air literally remodels your brain.
That’s right, being outside actually increases the grey matter volume in the right dorsolateral–prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is a part of the brain associated with executive functions like working memory, planning, and selective attention.
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To examine the impact of time outdoors on the brain, the researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin recruited six healthy employees, ages 24 to 32, and tracked their time spent outdoors, amount of free time, physical activity, fluid intake, and caffeine intake over a six- to eight-month period while also performing MRI brain scans on them about twice a week. To factor in the effect of seasonal changes, the researchers also took the duration of sunshine into account.
The study was very small, but because they were all employees of the facility, they had a lot of brain scans—more than 280 MRIs over the study period.
The researchers found that, regardless of all the other factors, time outdoors—even small amounts—was linked to greater grey matter volume in the DLPFC part of the brain. The more time outdoors, the higher the grey matter. When all factors were taken into consideration, the level of brain structure change attributed to time outside was 3 percent, which is in line with structural improvements associated with known brain-building activities like physical exercise and cognitive training.
“Our results show that our brain structure and mood improve when we spend time outdoors. This most likely also affects concentration, working memory, and the psyche as a whole,” Simone Kühn, Ph.D., head of the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and lead author of the study, said in a press release.
What’s behind the brain-building impact of the outdoors is still unknown, but the researchers suspect that fresh air might be one of the key factors.
“We do not know yet what the mechanism could be,” Kühn told Bicycling. “A potential candidate is air quality. Air quality can be surprisingly bad indoors compared to outdoors, even in busy cities. There is also evidence that terpenes—the essential oil of trees—can have beneficial effects on the human immune system,” Kühn said.
Indeed, according to research on “forest bathing,” or spending time amidst trees, these terpenes are not only anti-inflammatory, but also neuroprotective, meaning they protect your brain from injury and promote regeneration.
Whatever the underlying cause, every time you ride to work, run an errand by bike, or take a spin in the fresh air, you’re doing something good for your fitness and wellbeing as well as your brain.
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