Youthing Blog Playing in dirt has benefits
Written by Rick Maltin
Being dirty may have some benefits for Brain Power
I've always known this but it seems there is some scientific evidence to support my speculations. My things about our bodies have evolved over time. This news report supports this theory and gives some insight into the complexity of health.
A new study finds that naturally occurring bacteria in soil could enhance learning. And as a side benefit, it appears to be a natural anti-anxiety drug, but without the side-effects. This supports the fact that over time our complete bodies (our cells and all the other life connected to us) evolved and took advantage of this situation for brain power and brain food.
"In studies presented Monday at the 110th general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego, mice exposed to Mycobacterium navigated a maze twice as fast, and with less anxiety, as control mice.
In a second experiment the bacteria were removed from the diet of the experimental mice and they were retested. While the mice ran the maze slower than they did when they were ingesting the bacteria, on average they were still faster than the controls."
"The learning that occurred was profound," said Dorothy Matthews of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, who conducted the research with her colleague Susan Jenks.
Matthews said it's interesting to speculate that creating learning environments in schools that include time outside where M. vaccae is present may decrease anxiety and improve the ability to learn new tasks.
She said she wouldn't recommend that people go out and deliberately try to ingest the organism.
"When we think about our history as human beings on the planet, for most of our history we were hunter-gatherers, moving around in the soil, following the tracks of animals. And recently we became agricultural as the climate allowed us to do so, but we were still interacting in a very strong way with nature, It's only been a 100 years or so that we moved into cities become disassociated with nature," she said.
"My advice to people who want to see if they could have this affect is to turn your TV off, shut the computer down, go for a walk in the woods, put a garden in, interact with nature in a real way," she said.
Nor would I think that this may be brain supplements or perhaps a better way to reduce stress.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/hide comment form
