Why treadmills soothe our minds and joysticks sharpen wits

For decades, public-health campaigns have urged us to step away from the screen and get moving. Exercise, we are told, will make us fitter, happier, and perhaps even smarter. Video games, by contrast, have been blamed for everything from poor attention spans to obesity and moral decline.

Today this advice seems simplistic in the wake of a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE, which I co-authored with Professor Adrian Owen, and his team at Western University in Canada: we found exercise improves mood but not cognition; gaming improves cognition but not mood.

The international study, as well as being peer reviewed, expands on early results presented this time last year to the Manchester Science Festival to suggest why exercise seems to lift the spirits but, unexpectedly, gaming appears to sharpen the mind.

‘The data show associations, that suggest distinct roles for movement and gameplay in mental and cognitive health. Together they may form the mental equivalent of a more balanced diet,’ commented Professor Owen.

Online experiment

With Sydni Paleczny, Conor Wild and Alex Xue, Professor Owen and I worked with the festival team to recruit more than 2,600 volunteers for an online experiment, trimming the final sample to 923 adults once duplicates and incomplete entries were excluded.

Each volunteer completed two mental-health questionnaires and a battery of 12 online tests, adapted from the Creyos online testing platform developed by Professor Owen to measure memory, reasoning, language, processing speed and more and previously used, for example, to study cognition.

Participants also self-reported their gaming habits and weekly exercise, which was tallied against the World Health Organisation’s advice of 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity a week. Gaming time was split into three camps: non-gamers, infrequent players (under three hours a week) and frequent players (three hours or more).

The results show that people who exercised more showed no detectable edge in cognition—but they did score better on measures of mental health, with fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression. Conor Wild remarked: ‘People who met the physical activity guidelines were 12% less likely to report any symptoms of depression and 9% less likely to report any symptoms of anxiety, as compared to those who did not meet the physical activity guidelines.’

Gamers, by contrast, showed no advantage in mood, but performed significantly better on tests of memory, reasoning, and mental speed: ‘Frequent players performed cognitively on average like someone 13.7 years younger; infrequent gamers like someone 5.2 years younger,’ he added

Mood and movement

That exercise might buoy the mood is plausible. Movement triggers a biochemical symphony that antidepressant drugs only partially imitate. Endorphins—the body’s natural pain killing opioids- can generate the mild euphoria sometimes dubbed the ‘runner’s high’.

Exercise boosts serotonin and dopamine, chemical messengers (neurotransmitters) that stabilise mood and motivation, and moderates cortisol, the stress hormone that surges when life feels overwhelming. Activity also raises levels of BDNF, a protein that helps neurons grow and forge new connections, which may explain why physically active people often sleep better and think more clearly.

Such effects can be profound even if the participants in this study were not exactly couch bound. Most already met or exceeded the WHO’s guidelines, suggesting that the emotional pay-off of exercise may plateau once a certain level of activity is reached. Nonetheless, those who were most active were around 10 percentage points more likely to report no depressive symptoms at all. That is an impressive return for something that requires no prescription other than a decent pair of walking shoes.

Consoles and cognition

Video games, meanwhile, occupy a more ambivalent place in public imagination. They are seen as both addictive distraction and cognitive training. Decades of laboratory research suggest that gamers develop faster reaction times, better spatial memory, and superior multitasking skills—attributes that have made gaming an unexpected training tool for surgeons, soldiers, and drone pilots.

The PLOS ONE data add weight to the idea that games can serve as mental calisthenics. Frequent players outperformed non-gamers on short-term memory, reasoning, and processing-speed tests. The genre of game—action, strategy or puzzle—was not recorded, a limitation that makes it impossible to say whether fast-paced action games or slower strategy titles drive the effect. Still, earlier studies suggest the former train visual attention, the latter planning and working memory.

Brain-imaging work supports this evidence: habitual gamers show greater volume in the hippocampus (vital for memory and navigation) and stronger connectivity in the prefrontal cortex (essential for decision-making). A controller, in other words, can be a form of cognitive resistance training.

What games did not provide, however, was any obvious balm for the psyche. Players were no less anxious or depressed than non-gamers. The stereotype of the gloomy adolescent gamer, hunched over a screen in a darkened room, was neither confirmed nor entirely dispelled. Perhaps gaming stimulates rather than soothes.

Correlation, not causation?

As with many such studies, causation remains murky. Perhaps mentally sharper people are drawn to gaming, or that happier people are more inclined to exercise. Self-reported activity is not always reliable, and the mental-health questionnaires were deliberately brief—two questions each—to ensure a good response rate. Yet our sample was large, the testing platform validated, and the results align with a growing body of evidence: what is good for the heart is good for mood; what challenges the brain keeps it nimble.

The mean age of the participants was 55 years, and we found little sign that age changed the pattern. The benefits of exercise for mood and of gaming for cognition seemed to apply equally to younger and older adults. That could have practical implications. As populations age, governments fret over both the mental and cognitive health of citizens. If these findings are replicated, encouraging older adults to combine physical activity with digital play could be a low-cost way to preserve both good mood and mental agility.

This finding also hints at a cultural reconciliation: traditionally, physical and intellectual pursuits were treated as opposites—jocks versus nerds. And it chimes with trends that see exercise apps gamify fitness, and virtual-reality headsets turn living rooms into makeshift gyms. After all, both movement and play are built into our biology; denying either is a recipe for dullness—of both body and mind.

The Manchester Science Festival, hosted by the Science and Industry Museum, allowed the scientists to engage directly with public audiences, crowd-source data, and test real-world uptake of neuro-behavioural studies. Sydni Paleczny concluded: ‘The festival provided a brilliant platform to discuss our results, explain the significance of the study, and encourage people to take part in research.’