How Big is Your Hippocampus?

While we're buzzing around the childhood obesity epidemic, we have yet another reason to tout the benefits of exercise in children: it grows a bigger hippocampus.

If you picture a herd of grazing hippos on a sprawling university lawn then we should hang out together more often.

But that's not what I mean.

The hippocampus is that place deep down inside your brain that helps out with memory, reasoning and understanding. You can read all about the effect of exercise on the hippocampus at Science Daily.

I consider myself superfit but my memory, reasoning and understanding are lackluster, which suggests the bigger hippocampus theory doesn't apply to adults. But this is about the children right? It's all about what's good for the children...

And that's exercise. Because exercise, in addition to keeping them at a healthy weight and free from all those nasty chronic diseases, makes our kids smarter. Smarter than their exercising parents, apparently.