Run like you’re being chased
The results suggest a new role for this area of the brain, says Dayu Lin, a neuroscientist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. But she notes that it’s important to consider the results from a non-human perspective. “Mice don’t exercise,” she says. “Do they voluntarily think, ‘I need to get fit to so I’m gonna get on the running wheel?’”
Instead, Lin notes that this area of the hypothalamus is also associated with how animals respond to predators. Lin wonders if the effects of the exercise on the brain could be because the animals are running like they would if they were under extreme stress—the stress of predation.
Mice run on a treadmill during an experiment examining how exercise activates neurons in the brain’s ventromedial hypothalamus—a region that may help drive improvements in endurance.
Video by Morgan Kindle
Betley and his colleagues repeated some of the studies with mice that were not on treadmills. Instead, the animals were given access to running wheels in their cages, but not forced to run. The mice ran with gusto, and the researchers showed that when they blocked SF-1-containing cells in these animals, they failed to benefit from the increased movement.
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“The science is top notch, and the results—which are obtained using state of the art techniques—are important,” says Alan Watts, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. But mice, he notes, are much smaller than humans. “As a species mice are very poor models for human energy control,” he says. Humans are going to have to get on treadmills to find out if our brains work the same way.