Cognitive neuroscience of physical exertion

我们是否有能力利用有氧运动作为一种生活方式，在整个生命周期内改善大脑健康，保护认知功能不受老龄化的精神和身体衰退的影响，这是欧洲联盟成功适应人口变化的一个关键挑战（地平线欧洲-群组1：健康）。尽管它很重要，但目前人们对运动时发生的复杂神经和认知适应性以及这些高度波动的动力学如何有助于解释运动对大脑和认知功能的潜在益处的理解还很有限。在这里，我们的目标是描述体力消耗的神经，认知和现象学特征，以了解有氧运动如何影响大脑和认知健康。为了应对这一挑战，我们将直接利用有关睡眠和意识复杂生理转变的知识，以及从复杂性度量和图论中获得的电生理学和高级计算工具。我们将首先跟踪一组健康年轻人在递增运动期间的EEG和心肺活动，直到精疲力竭，以揭示体力消耗的神经生理学标志物。然后，我们将通过跟踪神经活动在一个单一的会议期间的有氧运动，而参与者执行认知要求高的任务，在运动过程中的相关信息的认知处理的神经动力学的特点。此外，参与者将接受多层次的连续在家行为和EEG跟踪，以研究个体基线特征如何调节神经和认知动力学，以及体力消耗下的现象学体验。这个开创性的项目

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