Introduction
Physical activity, specifically aerobic exercise, increases hippocampal and medial temporal lobe volumes, so these parts of the brain in higher-fit adults are significantly larger. This could imply that exercise is a stimulus to hippocampal plasticity.3,4 Plasticity refers to modification of neural tissue of the living brain and nervous system in response to experience and injury.
These changes in the brains of aerobically trained subjects are bigger, and they demonstrate considerably greater improvement on a neuropsychological test battery including depression scores, sensory thresholds and visual acuity.3,4
The degree to which this exercise practice can alter late adulthood volume of the hippocampus is still unknown. 5
This small but indispensable region of our brain is located in the medial temporal lobe beneath the cortical surface.
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It is thought that the hippocampus works with the amygdala, which is another important part of the limbic system responsible for fear and for storing memories of events for future recognition. Thus both the hippocampus and the limbic system play essential roles in human memory.
Experts believe the hippocampus may work as a gateway through which new memories pass to enter to the permanent long-term memory storage.5 It is generally agreed that the hippocampus also has part of the role of detecting new surroundings, occurrences and stimuli. Some scientists believe it is specifically involved in declarative memory (explicit memory), which is one of the two main types of memory into which long-term memory is divided, and consists of facts, events and performance skills that can be consciously recalled or declared. It has to do with information that can be explicitly stored and