Research Hit: Watching Sport Can Grow Your Brain and Improve Wellbeing
A new study shows that watching sports clips can stimulate the reward centre in the brain and elevate wellbeing.
Where do you find these studies - really, watching sports grows our brains?
As I’ve said many times before, we do have to be careful with these statements such as “xxx grows your brain”. Firstly anything you do that is new will likely grow your brain, secondly this “growth” is minute and we don’t know if it improves your brain function, and thirdly sometimes expertise shrinks your brain i.e. you get so good that you need fewer brain resources.
But this study here is interesting because there are few studies that have looked at this aspect of watching sports.
Isn’t it the case that if you watch a sport your brain activates as if you were doing the sport?
Yes, indeed, watching anything will activate your brain to a degree in the same ways as doing it. However, this also depends on your expertise - the better you are at the given sport (or task you are viewing) the more similar the activation patterns.
But this paper by Keita Kinoshita et al. of Waseda University in Tokyo Japan didn’t focus on this but rather focused on wellbeing and watching sports and this included three studies.
Ok, and what did they find?
Well, first off they they analysed publicly available data on 20’000 Japanese residents on the influence of watching sports. This showed that there was a correlation between elevated wellbeing and watching sports.
So far so good, but this is hard to find any clear causation or deeper insights. For example, could watching sports with friends elevate wellbeing because you are with friends and not because of the sports viewing.
And how would you find that out?
This was in the second and third studies. In the second one they recruited 208 volunteers online who viewed different sports clips and reported on their wellbeing before and after viewing.
They found indeed that watching sports clip elevated wellbeing and interestingly popular sorts were more effective at this - probably because more people have a positive relationship with this sport. In this study an example was baseball which is popular in Japan.
Oh cool - so watching sport is good for you - but what about the “brain growth” you quoted?
Well, this was the third study where they scanned the brains of 14 participants while watching sports - and indeed they saw that there was elevated reward centre activation while watching sports - which explains the boost to wellbeing reported in the previous studies.
They also - this was a happy accident - discovered a statistically significant enlargement of reward structures in those who reported they habitually watched sports.
Hence my click-baity headline of watching sports growing your brain - growth wasn’t actually measured. And a huge caveat is that this is really small sample size
Nevertheless, this would logically match the data and reported levels of well-being across large populations groups. Of note that this was watching sports on screens and not live (but may also have been correlated).
So watching sports seems to be really good for you - but doing sports even more so I presume?
Well, obviously doing sports improves just about everything in brain and body - but if not, it’s good to know that watching sport ain’t bad for you either.
Reference
Keita Kinoshita, Kento Nakagawa, Shintaro Sato.
Watching sport enhances well-being: evidence from a multi-method approach.
Sport Management Review, 2024; 1
DOI: 10.1080/14413523.2024.2329831