If you want to remember something, take some vigorous exercise – but not immediately. A new study has found that exercise boosts people’s powers of recall, provided they leave an interval of a few hours between absorbing the new information and heading to the gym. Professor Guillén Fernández, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, the author of the study, suggests that exercise improves memory because it produces adrenaline and dopamine – neurotransmitters that have been linked to memory in studies on rats. It is still not clear why those who exercised right away saw no advantage, but Fernández speculates it could be because memories take a while to form as the brain absorbs the new information, and exercising too soon could disrupt this process.

Like all findings by scientists there are always exceptions.  I am one of them.  I get a lot of exercise.  My blood pressure is around 112/60 and my resting heart rate below 50. Notwithstanding this I cannot remember names, what day of the week it is, or where I left my glasses.  Perhaps if I ran four hours a day……….