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Hi, everybody Dr. Cobb back with you.
Hope you’re having a fantastic week.
This week I want to talk about a research study that was just published last month, that relates to a lot of topics that we cover in deal related into the brain.
Now, if you’ve been watching the 7 videos that we have up on the website now, or reading anything about Z-Health recently. You know that we talk a ton about the brain and that the brain and its functional capacity is really where we drive all of our ideas about health and fitness and rehabilitation from.
Now, the study that was publish was very interesting to me, because what it looked at was a simple test of what they call system integrity, called reaction time, and mortality. This was a study that looked at people over 15 years.
Basically what they looked at, I think about 5,000 people and they gave them a very simple reaction time test. In other words you’re sitting looking at a computer screen. There’s a bump that they had to push, and with somebody flashes up on the screen, they have to hit the button. Then we measure how quickly they can do that. They did this initial test, and then they followed up on these people for 15 years.
What they discovered was that the people had the slowest reaction times in the early phases of testing, actually had a 25% greater risk of dying in the following 15 years. Now that may sound a little bit weird but from our perspective it is a evident that this is an interesting test that looks at system integrity. How was the brain processing information, in other words how are the eyes functioning?
Are the eyes able to take in information, send that information to the brain, have the brain make a decision about it and then enact through the muscles of the body.
Now, why does this matter to you? Well what we’re going to do is at the end of this video we’re actually going to put a link to some simple online tests. Some simple online reaction games that you could play, and you could actually test and see where you’re at.
Now this is not to say that if you do this test and you don’t score super well on them, that you’re going to die. Okay I don’t want you to take it that way because that’s not how Science works. But what I do want you to understand is that reaction times, just likes everything else i the human body can be improved with training. Now, am I saying that if you work on your reaction time, it may prevent you from dying?
Again I’m not saying that. We can’t take science and extrapolate it to that point yet. From my perspective, if I’m looking at being as healthy as possible, for as long as possible throughout my whole life and it takes me a few minutes, a few times a week to work on my reaction time and it may have a positive impact on my brain and the rest of my body, do you think I’m going to try it?
Absolutely I’m going to give it a shot.
Like I said I just want to encourage you this month to explore this idea, take a few minutes each day to play video game from your kids. If you get one of this links, or follow one of the links after the video, play some games on your computer, see where you fall.
Because as I said it’s a really fascinating study because in relationship to what they look at, after they control for all the other factors, they found that reaction time was second only to smoking in predicting mortality over 15 years.
To me, like I said, a really telling study, a really telling idea and it something that I want us to be all considering. Because I love simple things that I can do to test myself, and to improve myself on a daily basis. And working on your reaction time may give you some incredible results going forward.
Take that for what it’s worth, I hope that’s interesting to you, please let us know if you have any questions that we can help you with in anyway this week.
Thanks.
Note: Z-Health is not affiliated in anyway with the following links. Follow at your own risk.
http://www.silvergames.com/reaction-time-test
