Absolutely, yes.
Everything we do every day, from the book we read to the movements we make, contributes to a continuous remodelling of neural networks.
Since the emergence of life, its development has been, for the most part, based on chemical exchanges without the presence of nervous systems. Intelligent decision-making and complex social behaviours ensured its evolution. Nervous systems are estimated to have appeared about 500 million years ago, about 3 billion years after the first cells appeared, 100 million years after the first complex multicellular organisms appeared. The nervous system emerged to support the functional development of complex organisms and to refine the homeostatic control systems that ensured survival. What is today the control centre of the organism appeared as a support element in the service of the organism.
There have been great advances in the understanding of specific brain processes, but still very little is known about how they work at a global level. The way the body relates and reacts to the environment has, over millions of years of evolution, conditioned the human mind. The brain, which is accepted as the seat of the mind and cognition, is intimately related to the rest of the body. It depends on the body to receive information from the environment and interacts with and is influenced by it. No distinction should be made between the mind and the body because there are only physical experiences and processes. We are an integral organism that communicates as a whole and is susceptible to be influenced by any stimulus coming from the system itself or from the outside. That is why we should broaden our view of the mind and see it as a metaphysical representation of everything that happens in the whole organism, not only in the brain.
Mind and body are inseparable because software computes through hardware. This concept has its intellectual roots in the early 20th century and now is known as Embodied Cognition, which emphasises the importance of the body and relativises the widely accepted view of the brain as the sole director.
Cognition is a process occurring in the mind that aims, in simplified form, to know and produce responses. It is the perception, processing and understanding of information in order to establish a relationship with the environment. Cognition is performed for action, so we must consider the environment as part of the cognitive process.
The body is the means by which the human mind relates to that environment. And the movements of the body, however simple they may be, require global brain activity, not only for their motor aspect but also for their cognitive, emotional and sentimental components that are registered in different parts of the brain, not only in the motor cortex.
A simple movement such as walking relies on billions of electrical impulses, coordinated by the brain with extreme precision. It requires coordination between the visual, tactile, vestibular, proprioceptive and musculoskeletal systems, as well as different areas of the brain such as the prefrontal cortex, primary motor cortex, premotor cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum, memory, different sensory cortexes and the limbic system. Each involved joint is coordinated by muscles which, depending on the movement, can be those that produce the movement or those that control it with great precision. Each of these muscles is composed of hundreds of thousands of individual muscle fibres. Depending on the intensity of the contraction of each muscle to produce that movement, the brain activates the necessary ones in a coordinated way. Millions of fibres from different muscles must be activated in a synchronised and coordinated way to produce the different phases of the movement and keep the body upright and in balance. Normally we do this unconsciously but it is a very complex process of a succession of neural events that if you think about it, it is hard to imagine how it is achieved.
And that is only part of the process. A multitude of muscles that do not participate in this movement and that could interfere with the fluidity of the movement must also be inhibited. This inhibition is very energy-intensive. At the same time, it is also necessary to process all the information that the organism sends to the brain in the form of feedback informing it of the result of the movement in order to make any necessary adjustments and corrections to the movement. As that information goes to the brain, other information comes from the parts of the brain involved in maintaining the movement. In tenths of a second the information is analysed and the necessary micro-adjustments are made. A huge volume of computation is performed to adjust muscles, position, balance, etc. The level of computation per unit of time is so high that it would take several supercomputers to match this computational power without taking into account its energy efficiency (the consumption of a normal 60-watt light bulb).
Cognitive functions such as memory, perception, recognition, recognition, attention, orientation, reasoning, planning, information analysis and decision-making, organisation, cognitive flexibility to react to novelty, anticipation, inhibition, monitoring, attention switching and memory updating are involved in these seemingly simple movements.
Performing a new movement, or a complex movement or the combination or simultaneity of movements considerably increases the difficulty of this already extremely complex process. A performance in this direction can be a challenging challenge and a greater demand on the cognitive functions involved. The brain has to process more information and make more complex decisions, sometimes very quickly. This results in increased brain stimulation and development. That is why exercise, especially ENRICHED EXERCISE, can be associated with performance in decision-making, memory and learning tasks. Numerous studies have shown a correlation between exercise and cognition. While correlation is not causation, we should not ignore this link between the physical and the cognitive. It can never be said that exercise makes a person more intelligent, just as it can never be said of learning to read.
This is why we must understand movement as a cognitive phenomenon, which can be modulated to make it more or less complex, and which can demand the maximum of the brain’s capacity. This is the fundamental principle of the Neuroexercise and the Exercise for Brain programme.
We are not made to move, we are what we are thanks to our movements. The origin of the mind lies in the whole body and it is the brain that makes it possible. Some Artificial Intelligence researchers claim that the only way to true and safe intelligence is through a body that can perceive its environment, operate, move and react, and that gives it a real understanding of the world through trial and error. It is possible that the key to the emergence of a safe, intelligent artificial mind is a body.