Does Music Make You Run Faster?

An expert on the effects of music on exercise, Dr. Costas Karageorghis, claims that listening to music while running can raise performance by up to 15%. To put this theory to the test, I took part in a special half marathon, which had groups of musicians playing at various points along the route.

As I was at the start, a singer sang an inspiring song for us. It may explain why I got off to a good start. But apart from the song at the start, I can hardly remember the music played along the course. “Outstanding runners”, says Karageorghis, “tend to focus on themselves when they are running.” According to him, most other runners look for encouragement and distraction from what is going on around them. It is true. Then what did other runners make of the music? Adam Bull usually runs marathons with no music and little crowd support. “The music here has been great for my performance. With the cheerful bands, you find yourself running to the beat, which helps.”

The only person I found who was less than happy with the music was Lois Lloyd. “I found the music wasn’t loud enough, so I ran with an MP 3 player.” she said. “I need my music all the time.”Karageorghis is not surprised when I tell him.   “There are many advantages to using your own player, rather than relying on the music on the course,” he says.

“It gives you a constant encouragement, and you can change the playlist to your taste.”

One runner told me there was a direct connection between the quality of the music on the course and how much it helped. But quality, of course, is based on personal opinions.

Of course, the music was not only there to help runners break their personal bests, but to provide a sense of occasion, draw out the crowds and create a festival atmosphere. Along with some spring sunshine, it certainly achieved that.

Researchers from the University of Western Australia recently studied 3,000 middle and high school students. Among them were 618 teenagers with one parent who lived away from home for long periods of time because of work. The researchers wanted to know how the work of these "fly-in, fly-out" parents might influence the health of their children.

A higher percentage of teenagers who experienced the long work absence of a parent had emotional（情感的）or behavioral problems compared with those whose parents worked more traditional hours. This supports earlier research finding high percentages of emotional problems in teenagers who often returned to an empty house after school or whose parents were seldom at dinner.

Findings also suggest that parents don't have to be home all the time to be present in their children's lives, but it helps to be home at certain times. And the best parental presence for a teenager may sometimes be like a potted plant.

Many parents of teenagers have known this to be true and find ways to be present without trying to start a conversation. One friend of mine quietly does housework each evening in the sitting room where her teenagers watch TV.

They enjoy one another's company without the need to talk. Another friend usually accepts his daughter's invitation to work or read nearby while she sits and does her homework. Perhaps, that, at least for some families, is the best way for a teenager and their parents to stay close.

In fact, many years of research suggest that children use their parents as a safe base from which to explore the world. Studies tell us that young children quietly follow their parents' movements from room to room, even while carrying on with their own activities. Perhaps our teens, like babies, feel most at ease when their parents are still around. They don't want to stay away from parents who allow them freedom.

A new school year is at hand, so as parents we could offer our teenagers a "potted flower" as a gift, whose quiet and steady（稳定的）presence will give them a great day.

It’s an attractive idea: by playing online problem-solving, matching and other games for a few minutes a day, people can improve such mental abilities as reasoning, language skills and memory. But whether these games deliver on those promises is up for debate.

Now, in perhaps the biggest real-world test of these programs, Stojanoski, a cognitive (认知的) neuroscientist at Western University in Ontario, and colleagues tested more than 1,000 people who regularly use brain trainers against around 7,500 people who don’t do the mini brain workouts.

The researchers involved 8,563 volunteers globally. Participants filled out an online questionnaire about their training habits, opinions about training benefits and which, if any, program they used. Some 1,009 participants reported using brain training programs for about eight months, on average, though the time length ranged from two weeks to more than five years. Next, the volunteers completed 12 cognitive tests assessing memory, reasoning and language skills. They faced memory exercises, spatial reasoning tasks such as mentally rotating objects and pattern-finding puzzles, and strategy challenges.

When researchers looked at the results, they saw that brain trainers on average had no mental ascendancy over the other group in memory, language skills and reasoning. Even among those who had used training programs for at least 18 months, brain training didn’t increase thinking abilities above the level of people who didn’t use the programs.

“No matter how we sliced the data, we were unable to find any evidence that brain training was associated with cognitive abilities,” says Stojanoski, “brain training may be beneficial in specific situations, but part of our goal was to look at brain training in the real world.”

That real world may be the best brain trainer, says Elizabeth Stine, a cognitive aging scientist at the University of Illinois. While it’s possible to improve mental abilities, she advocates practicing those skills in different real-life situations. “That’s a much better use of one’s time than sitting at a computer and doing little tasks.”