Research Hit: Watching Sport Can Grow Your Brain and Improve Wellbeing

A new study shows that watching sports clips can stimulate the reward centre in the brain and elevate wellbeing.

Where do you find these studies — really, watching sports grows our brains?

As I’ve said many times before, we do have to be careful with these statements such as “xxx grows your brain”. Firstly anything you do that is new will likely grow your brain, secondly this “growth” is minute and we don’t know if it improves your brain function, and thirdly sometimes expertise shrinks your brain i.e. you get so good that you need fewer brain resources.

But this study here is interesting because there are few studies that have looked at this aspect of watching sports.

Isn’t it the case that if you watch a sport your brain activates as if you were doing the sport?

Yes, indeed, watching anything will activate your brain to a degree in the same ways as doing it. However, this also depends on your expertise — the better you are at the given sport (or task you are viewing) the more similar the activation patterns.

But this paper by Keita Kinoshita et al. of Waseda University in Tokyo Japan didn’t focus on this but rather focused…