Submission + - Dump jock vs. smart homeboy ?
Rhabarber writes: "Back in 2003, Paul Graham wrote in his essay Why Nerds are Unpopular: 'All other things being equal, [most kids] would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.' Notoric geeks would go even further and claim a reverse correlation between mental and physical strengths suggesting you to concentrate on the one you're better in.
Vayman and Gomez-Pinilla argue in their recent review Revenge of the 'Sit'... published in Journal of Neuroscience Research (subscription required) that regular physical activity (and fasting btw.) may be an evolutionary programmed necessity for our body and brain to deliver full performance. They write: 'To take the metaphor of the sea squirt, we can visualize an extreme example of this connection between motricity and mentality. The sea squirt is a marine creature that starts life as a motile larva, equipped with a rudimentary brain-like ganglion of about 300 neurons. After swimming to its final habitat destination it puts its roots down. Once it becomes a sessile organism, it has no further use for a 'brain', and so the cerebral ganglion breaks down.'
A more general (and publicly available) write up on the topic was published by sciencenews.org (Part 1 and Part 2) in February.
So let's drop dr. pepper and the pizza, suspend WoW for an minute, eat a carott and run around the block :-O"
