Playing Super Mario 64 for 30 minutes a day for two months physically grew the brains of the people who played it. A 2014 study in Molecular Psychiatry scanned participants before and after two months of daily play and found increases in grey matter in three regions involved in memory, planning, and fine motor control. The study was led by Simone Kuhn at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. She gave 23 adults a Nintendo DS and told them to play Super Mario 64 for at least 30 minutes a day for two months. A control group played nothing. MRI scans taken before and after showed that the Mario group had measurable increases in grey matter in the right hippocampus, the right prefrontal cortex, and the cerebellum, and the increases were not found in the control group. The hippocampus is where the brain stores spatial maps. Super Mario 64 is a game built entirely around navigating three-dimensional space, jumping between platforms, remembering which doors lead where, and building a mental model of a world that does not exist. The brain treats a virtual world the same way it treats a real one: it maps it, stores it, and grows to accommodate it. The prefrontal cortex handles planning and strategy, which the game demands constantly. The cerebellum handles timing and coordination, which every jump requires. The brain was not just entertained. It was being trained, and the tissue responded the same way muscle responds to a weight: it got bigger. Kuhn said the results suggest that video game training could be used as a therapy for conditions where these brain regions are reduced, including post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and age-related brain shrinkage. The prescription is a plumber in a red hat, 30 minutes a day. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2416…

The music you loved between the ages of 13 and 18 will stay with you for the rest of your life, and no music you hear after that will ever hit the same way. A 2017 study in Frontiers in Psychology mapped the listening patterns of every generation and found that preferences formed in adolescence are the strongest and most durable of any age. Carol Krumhansl at Cornell University analysed the listening habits and emotional responses of thousands of people across multiple generations and found a consistent pattern: the songs that produce the strongest emotional response are the ones you heard during your teenage years. Not childhood. Not your twenties. The narrow window between roughly 13 and 18. The researchers called it the reminiscence bump, a term borrowed from memory research. The brain during adolescence is undergoing rapid development in the regions that handle emotion and reward, and music that arrives during that window gets encoded with an intensity that later music cannot match. The same song heard at 15 and at 35 produces a stronger neurological response at 15, and the memory of that response is what makes the song feel like yours forever. This is why classic rock fans feel physically different when they hear the opening of their song than when they hear something new. The brain built a room for that music during a period of heightened sensitivity, and the room is still there, unchanged, decades later. The study also found that each generation has a bump centred on the hits of their teenage years, and the bump is remarkably consistent. The music industry has known this for decades: the audience you capture at 15 is the audience you keep for life. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2842…

Your body fights back when you exercise more. A 2016 study in Current Biology measured the total daily energy expenditure of 332 adults across five populations and found that people who exercised more did not burn more total calories. The body adjusted. Herman Pontzer at Duke University led the research. He used doubly labelled water, the gold standard for measuring how many calories a person burns in a day, and found that the relationship between activity and total calorie burn was not a straight line. Moderately active people burned about 200 more calories than sedentary people. But highly active people burned roughly the same as the moderately active group. The body had found ways to compensate. Pontzer called it the constrained model of energy expenditure. The idea is that the body has a budget. When you spend more energy on exercise, it spends less on other things: immune surveillance, reproductive hormones, stress responses, cellular maintenance. Total output stays roughly the same. The body is not a bank account. It is a thermostat. This does not mean exercise is useless for weight. It means exercise alone, without changing what you eat, produces very little weight loss in most people, and the research has shown this repeatedly in clinical trials. People who run for an hour eat a little more afterwards, fidget a little less, sit a little longer, and the deficit shrinks to almost nothing. Exercise changes almost every health marker in the body: blood pressure, blood sugar, mood, bone density, sleep, and life expectancy. It is one of the most powerful interventions in medicine. It is just not a weight loss tool, and pretending it is sets people up to fail. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2683…