When exercising – brains vs. brawn – which wins?

They both degrade but brain not as fast.

Do brains trump brawn? A remarkable new study of how the human body prioritizes its inner workings found that if you intensely think at the same time as you intensely exercise, your performance in both thinking and moving can worsen. But your muscles’ performance will decline much more than your brain’s will, the study found.

The implication of this victory is that thinking probably provided more advantage for us during evolution than brawniness, Dr. Longman says, and on those occasions that both systems needed to be fed, the brain got its portion first.

Of course, this study was very short-term and viewed the tug-of-war between brains and muscles only indirectly. The researchers did not track actual changes in blood sugar uptake by any tissues. They also looked only at quite-intense exercise and used memory recall as their sole marker for thinking.

But even with these limitations, the study to some extent advances our understanding of how we became the species that we are, Dr. Longman says.

“For me, the main message of this study is a bit philosophical,” he says. “An enlarged and highly functioning brain is one of the key factors that make us human. This study demonstrated, in a very simple way, this defining characteristic of our species.”

More humbly, the results also indicate that intense workouts may not be the optimal time to compose your next epic poem or calculate tax withholding.