Cognitive neuroscience of physical exertion

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Our ability to capitalize on aerobic exercise as a lifestyle for improving brain health across the lifespan and protecting cognitive functions from the mental and physical decline of ageing, is a crucial challenge for the successful adaptation of the European Union to demographic change (Horizon Europe - Cluster 1: Health). Despite its importance, there is currently poor understanding of the complex neural and cognitive adaptations that occur while exercising, and how these highly-fluctuating dynamics help explain the potential exercise-induced benefits on brain and cognitive function. Here, we aim to characterize the neural, cognitive, and phenomenological signatures of physical exertion to understand how aerobic exercise impacts on brain and cognitive health. To address this challenge, we will directly leverage from the knowledge established about sleep and consciousness complex physiological transitions, and the electrophysiology and advanced computational tools derived from complexity measures and graph theory. We will first track EEG and cardiorespiratory activity in a group of healthy young adults during an incremental exercise session until exhaustion to uncover neurophysiological markers of physical exertion. Then, we will characterize the neural dynamics governing the cognitive processing of relevant information during exercise by tracking neural activity during a single session of aerobic exercise while participants perform a cognitively demanding task. In addition, participants will undergo a multilevel continuous at-home behavioral and EEG tracking, to investigate how individual baseline characteristics can modulate neural and cognitive dynamics, as well as the phenomenological experience, under physical exertion. This pioneering project goes