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Exploring the link between exercise and brain function at work

I do not like to exercise for exercise’s sake. In fact, the only exercise I am likely to get would be in fleeing from someone who’s trying to get me to exercise. However, I don’t mind exercise if it goes hand in hand with a productive activity.

In other words, the only way I can exercise is if I’m accomplishing something else at the same time. For example, I don’t mind walking if I can cut the grass at the same time. I will use an exercise bike but only if I can read a book at the same time. It’s more a matter of a low threshold for boredom than it is laziness. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

So imagine my happy surprise when I read Jason Hiner’s blog called, “Can desk treadmills save the health of knowledge workers?” Exercise while I work? Sign me up!

What attracts me most about this idea is not really the physical fitness but more of the mental boost it gives you. On the occasion when I do walk merely for exercise I find myself coming up with pretty good ideas about how to solve issues at work or at home. (But then I usually just go home and collapse into a wheezing ball of post-exercise resentment.)

So what could I achieve if I got to exercise and work? There’s been a lot of interest lately in what some scientists call the Default Mode Network of the brain. DMN activity is highest during passive activity like daydreaming. Some scientists believe that the degradation in the DMN is a potential marker of diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Autism.

Now the deal is that when a healthy brain is focused on a specific activity requiring focus (like much of the knowledge worker’s day-to-day activity), DMN diminishes rapidly.

A study was done wherein FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) was used to investigate the effects of walking on the DMN in two groups of subjects. Taking benchmark tests at 6 months and 12 months, researchers found DMN connectivity significantly enhanced in a group of walkers as opposed to the control group, workers who just did toning and stretching exercises.

The walkers also exhibited increased connectivity in another area of brain circuitry called the Fronto-Executive Network (FEN) that is known to aid in the ability to perform complex tasks like planning, scheduling, and multi-tasking.

I thought this was pretty interesting and could make a good case for desk treadmills, at least until cost and liability issues gets them laughed out of the boardroom.

(Source: TechRepublic)

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Google Gives Real-Time Search Its Own Page

Clarifying in second paragraph that other services have been offering direct access to live updates, something that Google is now adding.

Google is digging deeper into real-time search, with a new search page that displays only results from timely sources, like updates from Twitter and other social networks.

Google is the default search engine for most people searching most topics. But as the real-time Web exploded, other search engines, like Twitter’s and Bing, became more useful for those who wanted quick access to just those live updates.

Take earthquakes, for instance. To learn about the science of earthquakes or the movie “Earthquake,” many people would go to Google. But when they feel a rumble while sitting on their couch, many go to Twitter instead to see if others are reporting the same thing.

At google.com/realtime, people will be able to search for those seconds-ago reports from Twitter as well as Buzz, Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace, Jaiku and Identi.ca.

The new page comes almost a year after Google licensed Twitter’s live data stream. Both Google and Bing began paying for Twitter updates last October. Bing quickly showed real-time results on a separate page, bing.com/social. Google took longer to display those results, and incorporates them into its main search results only when the topic has a real-time element.

Search “Tiger Woods” in Google today, for instance, and see Twitter posts about his current golf tournament and just-finalized divorce. But search another time, when he is not in the news, and there may be no real-time results.

People will use google.com/realtime when they are searching on a particular topic that they know is playing out now, like an earthquake, a loud noise or an event, said Dylan Casey, a product manager at Google, in an interview.

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The iTunes Ping Social Question: Follow, Friend, Or Lurk?

Right now, many of you are likely downloading iTunes 10, the latest version of Apple’s media software. The most notable feature in this new version is Ping, Apple’s first stab at building a music social network (or really any kind of social network). It’s interesting on a number of levels, but even the most basic level is pretty interesting: Ping’s social graph.

First of all, to use Ping at all you have to opt-in to it. While Apple CEO Steve Jobs touted the 160 million built-in users (it’s currently available in iTunes in 23 countries), that’s a bit misleading because many people won’t opt-in to using it — many of them for no other reason than they’re lazy or just don’t care. But assuming you do opt-in to it, the next social layer is interesting as well.

Immediately, you’re taken to a Privacy Settings page where Apple asks you how you’d like to use the service. This is where you decide if you want to use the friend model, the follow model, or the lurk model.

To be more clear, Apple asks you to decide between two things: do you want to allow people to follow you, or do you want no one to be able to follow you? The latter is a nice option because you can still use Ping, you simply use it as a lurker. You can see what other people with public profiles are doing, but they can’t see what you are doing. The other option is to let people follow you — but there’s a sub option to this. You can either let anyone follow you (think: Twitter) or you can get notifications to approve everyone who wants to follow you (think: Facebook).

Leave it to Apple to come up with a social graph dynamic that is fairly complicated but made to seem simple. I mean, this is almost the opposite of many of Facebook’s convoluted social rules. My argument recently has been that Facebook should have a simplified option to allow you to have both friends and followers — you know, like what Apple is doing here. Instead, everyone on Facebook is a friend or they’re some sub-list quasi-friend that you really hate but are connected with anyway. Or something. Or you can make a Page — which creates double the work for you and those people who also happen to be friends and followers. It’s just so ugh.

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20 Strange & Interesting Facts About Microsoft, Google & Apple

No three companies can be more different, but they affect our lives in the same way.

Microsoft, the oldest of the three, has the iron grip on desktop computing. Apple, next born, is about personal style thanks to iconic products like the Mac and the iPod. Google, the youngest, but arguably the most vivacious of the lot, has a finger in any pie that has to do with the internet (and beyond).

But how well do we know these three that are with us 24×7?

Every great company has a story behind its legend. Strange and interesting facts and anecdotes about behemoths such as these demonstrate that it’s not always about bits, bytes, multi-billion dollar revenues and lawsuits.

Interesting Facts About Google

• The well known ‘Don’t be evil’ is actually an informal motto of Google. It is a reference to their corporate philosophy which says that you can make money without being evil. It was coined by Paul Buchheit, the man behind Gmail.
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t know too much about HTML. That’s why the first homepage had a very bare bones design. The simple design caused people to just sit there looking at the screen during initial tests. Test users were actually waiting for the “rest of the page to load”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was added as a line as an end of page marker.

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