Catswatch

A study designed to look at the combined effects of music and short-term exercise on mental performance found that listening to music while exercising helped to increase scores on a verbal fluency test among cardiac rehabilitation patients. The study carried out by psychologists at the Ohio state of university was reported in the journal Heart & Lung.
The study included 33 men and women in the final weeks of a cardiac rehabilitation program. Most participants had undergone bypass surgery, angioplasty or cardiac catheterization. The researches asked participants to complete a verbal fluency test before and after two separate sessions of exercising on a treadmill. The workouts were scheduled a week apart and lasted about 30 minutes. Participants listened to classical music during one of the sessions.
The researchers tested each person’s verbal fluency before and after each exercise session by asking participants to generate lists of words in specific categories. This kind of task challenges the part of the brain that handles planning and abstract thought as well as a person’s capacity for organized verbal processing.
Participants reported felling better emotionally and mentally after working out regardless of whether or not they listened to music. But the improvement in verbal fluency test performance after listening to music was more than double that of the non-music condition.read summary...