Long-Term Potentiation
Terence Niehoff, March 10th, 2008
The Greatest Discovery You’ve Never Heard Of: health physical education
The important thing to remember here is that learning and memory are not just cognitive functions that take place in the brain; they are intimately involved in everything that we do with our bodies, from philosophy to strength training, from poetry to cardio. Just as LTP helps us remember the lyrics to a song or the password to a website, it also help us to remember the physical experience of being strong, fast or endurant. Indeed, more than one aging athlete has remarked that it’s not so much that his tissue is weak but rather that he has forgotten the sensation of physical competence and vigor. Just as getting in shape is a process of learning new sensations and strengthening neural pathways, getting out of shape is a process of forgetting.
Not a truer word said imho! An excellent reminder to pick myself up from my pc and train something useful, for me, at this stage of my life. To me, this is and always will be Wing Chun. As I feel I have enough to maintain my strength, speed and stamina within SLT alone as I understand it.
Is it just me? Or are there more of you out there who feel the same way? Words are just words after all. I often used to refer to SLT as ‘poetry in motion’.
Maybe even this process of neuron interaction is what the ancients referred to as ‘Chi’?