OFF THE WIRE
BY: Kizito Lubano
Source: standardmedia.co.ke
My friend who rides his motorcycle to work nearly every day says it’s
not only fun but very convenience in the major traffic. Turns out he
also may be turning into an evil genius with a dangerous amount of
mental processing power. This is after researchers found that
motorcycling makes you smarter.
Dr Ryutu Kawashima of the
University of Tokyo conducted experiments comparing riders who
currently rode motorcycles on a regular basis with ex-riders who once
rode regularly but had not taken a ride for 10 years or more. Kawashima
asked the participants to ride on courses in different conditions
while he recorded their brain activities. The eight courses included a
series of curves, poor road conditions, steep hills, hair-pin turns and
a variety of other challenges.
What did he find? After an
analysis of the data, Kawashima found that the current riders and
ex-riders used their brain in radically different ways. When the
current riders rode motorcycles, specific segments of their brains (the
right hemisphere of the pre-frontal lobe) was activated and riders
demonstrated a higher level of concentration.
His next
experiment was a test of how making a habit of riding a motorcycle
affects the brain. Trial subjects were otherwise healthy people who had
not ridden for 10 years or more. Over the course of a couple of
months, those riders used a motorcycle for their daily commute and in
other everyday situations while Dr Kawashima and his team studied how
their brains and mental health changed.
The upshot was that the
use of motorcycles in everyday life improved cognitive faculties,
particularly those that relate to memory and spatial reasoning
capacity. An added benefit? Participants revealed on questionnaires
they filled out at the end of the study that their stress levels had
been reduced and their mental state changed for the better.
So why motorcycles? Shouldn’t driving a car have the same effect as riding a motorcycle?
“A
car is a comfortable machine which does not activate our brains. It
only happens when going across a railway crossing or when a person
jumps in front of us,” he said.
