Just Climbing Trees Can Help Boost Your Memory

How do you improve your memory?

Simple. By climbing a tree. Scientists discovered that fundamental pastimes like "climbing trees, running barefoot and crawling dramatically" can actually improve your memory, according to dailymail.

In fact, "working memory - the type of memory we use every day to remember phone numbers, follow directions and use a shopping list" gets a 50 per cent boost. Even playing squash, tennis and football can improve your memory. They make the brain more balanced to orientation and get a strong workout.

Researchers from the University of North Florida put 72 men and women between 18 and 59 years to a test of "working memory" which made them memorise lists of numbers in reverse order.

After that, a few of them went through two hours of obstacle course-like activities, such as "climbing trees, running barefoot and crawling along a narrow beam."

Other students just listened to lectures or went through yoga classes before getting their memories tested.

Surprisingly, only the people of the obstacle course did better, according to the Perceptual and Motor Skills reports.

Even the yoga students did not benefit from it, which indicates that the type of exercise was found to be more important. By climbing trees, you could improve your 'proprioceptive' skills, or the brain's ability to become aware of its legs, arms, hands and feet in space even without checking them out.

A spokesman for the researchers said: "Proprioceptively dynamic training may place a greater demand on working memory because as the environment and terrain changes, the individual recruits working memory to update information to adapt appropriately.

"Though the yoga group engaged in proprioceptive activities that required awareness of body position, it was relatively static, as they performed yoga in a small space, which didn't allow for locomotion or navigation."

Ross Alloway, part of the husband -wife team looking into the experiment said: "This research suggests that by doing activities that make us think, we can exercise our brains as well as our bodies. By taking a break to do activities that are unpredictable and require us to consciously adapt our movements, we can boost our working memory to perform better in the classroom and the boardroom."

Dr Tracy Alloway, the other part of the team, added: "Improving working memory can have a beneficial effect on so many areas in our life, and it's exciting to see that proprioceptive activities can enhance it in such a short period of time."