Top athletes may also possess sharp minds
TUESDAY, MARCH 19, 2013 10:54 AM

While professional athletes need to train regularly to stay fit, new research reveals that these individuals' brains may also be in good shape. For this reason, athletes should consider taking a break from hitting the gym so they can complete an IQ test and see how sharp their mind actually is.

Based on the findings of a recent University of Illinois study, not only do elite volleyball players excel on the court, but on cognitive tasks as well. This research, which appears in the journal "Frontiers in Psychology," involved 87 top-ranked Brazilian volleyball players and 67 contemporaries who were not considered to be athletic. When these individuals took memory tests and engaged in other cognitive activities, the athletes were found to perform at a higher level than their fellow participants.

"We found that athletes were generally able to inhibit behavior, to stop quickly when they had to, which is very important in sport and in daily life, " said Arthur Kramer, a professor of psychology at the University, who also led the study. "They were also able to activate, to pick up information from a glance and to switch between tasks more quickly than nonathletes."