26. The Brain Benefits of Walking, with Neuroscientist and Author Shane O'Mara

Today we explore the ways in which learning, memory, and creativity are affected by our level of activity, specifically while walking. Shane O’Mara, author of In Praise of Walking, helps us understand the overall health benefits of movement, the ways in which walking specifically helps nourish the brain and how it relates to creativity, and the intricate interplay among memory, navigation, and imagination in the brain’s hippocampal formation. Shane helps us consider how the teacher’s advice to stop staring out the window and to pay attention may be outdated, and closes with a reading from James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the best all-time stories about foot travel.Given this reference, our feature today is the Irish author James Joyce. Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and died in Zurich in 1941 at the age of 59. He created works that explored new modes of writing, and used stream of consciousness and abrupt changes in point of view.  His Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in 1916, Ulysses from 1922 and Finnegans Wake from 1939 are several of his most enduring works. They are a source of inspiration in dedicated English students, and bafflement in everyone else. Regardless, it’s clear that a lot of interesting ideas come out of Dublin. On this episode of On the Dogwatch we have the great pleasure to be joined by neuroscientist, author, and confirmed bipedalist Shane O’Mara. Shane is Professor of Experimental Brain Research at Trinity College Dublin, and his research explores the systems of the brain that underlie learning, memory, and cognition. He is author of In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration, in addition to Why Torture Doesn’t Work, and A Brain for Business - A Brain for Life.