BYU Sweeps NCAA XC Team Titles ultramarathon runners? Well, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, there could be clues in there towards our evolutionary past.
Researchers from Loughborough University studied the brains of ultra endurance athletes competing in two five-day 250K races in Jordan and Sri Lanka. They found that runners who lost weight during those events showed “significant adaptation of cognitive function to promote foraging ability.” It would seem our hunter-gatherer past is never too far away.
The significant increase in performance of cognitive tasks linked to foraging ability, suggests a drive to find food and increase survival chances when the body is under “periods of energetic stress,” according to the research.
The study, delivered in collaboration with professor Jay Stock from Western University and professor Jonathan Wells from University College London, states that the changes are believed to happen as the “athletes’ brains remodeled to counteract a negative change in the environment.”
Dr. Danny Longman, the lead author of the study and lecturer in physiology at Loughborough University’s School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences says: “Throughout the human evolutionary journey, our ancestors regularly faced food insecurity and energetic stress.”
“Here, we worked with ultramarathon runners to study how our brains might adapt during conditions of energetic stress,” he explains. “In runners covering distances of 250K (155 miles), we found a significant increase in performance in cognitive tasks linked to foraging ability. This has clear adaptive value, as an improved ability to find food would increase survival chances.”
The study looked at cognitive plasticity—or the ability of the brain to adapt—across three key cognitive domains. Researchers found that while the cohort of athletes were under conditions of energetic deficit, performance in tasks of spatial working memory (e.g. storing location information, landscape navigation, facilitating resource location and calorie acquisition) increased.
However, while reaction time remained unchanged, episodic memory performance (the ability to recall information about specific events) decreased, therefore the researchers concluded that the tasks related to foraging were prioritized at the expense of episodic memory performance.
Interestingly, a previous study found that there are food biases at play when it comes to spatial working memory: a 2020 paper, published in the journal, Appetite, found that locations of calorie-rich and savory foods were recalled more accurately than the locations of calorie-poor or sweet foods.
