A recent EEG study (that is, research that involves measuring brain activity) suggests that our brains may be predisposed to prefer sitting or resting rather than moving—even in individuals who report that physical activity they want Researchers tried to find out if our brains are prone to laziness. You can read more about their findings and the course of the study in the article.
Are our brains prone to laziness? They tried to answer that researchers from Switzerland. To answer the question, zakaj individuals who want to exercise so often find an excuse to avoid sports, they designed interesting study, which included the measurement of brain activity.
It was included in the research 29 young adults. All of them defined themselves as people who have a great desire for physical activity, but it was not necessary that they also played sports. While they are with the device EEG measures brain activity, the participants had to perform task on the computer screen. They controlled the avatar and their task was to avatars move as quickly as possible to other avatars on the screen that are physically active, and move away from avatars that are not physically active as quickly as possible (say they are lying, sitting or sleeping). Then they got just the opposite instruction – they had to approach inactive avatars and move away from active ones as quickly as possible. Such a task can show us what our conscious attitude towards something is.
The participants had shorter reaction time when they had to approach physical active avatars as physically inactive. From this we can conclude that they are on conscious level preferred physical activity. However, the research also involved recording brain activity. EEG results showed that individuals must spend much more energy to get closer to physically active avatars and that they avoided avatars that were sleeping or lying down. What this means on a biological and evolutionary level we can only guess for now. One of the possible explanations is that in order to survive, our ancestors had to look after their energy supply (for example, food was not plentiful as it is today) and therefore their brains were more "satisfied" when they could rest. It is possible that evolution has not yet caught up with our needs and so this mechanism, which was once absolutely necessary, became non-functional today. The bright side is that while our brains may be prone to laziness, we humans do decision-making ability and we can force ourselves to be physically active here and there.
More information:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
