Hardwired for laziness’ Our brain must work hard to avoid sloth

If getting to the gym seems like a struggle, researchers want you to know this: the struggle is real, and it's happening inside your brain. The brain is where Matthieu Boisgontier (KU Leuven / UBC) and his colleagues went looking for answers to what they call the "exercise paradox": for decades, society has encouraged people to be more physically active, yet statistics show that, despite our best intentions, we are actually becoming less active. Their findings, published in  Neuropsychologia,  suggest that our brain may simply be wired to prefer lying on the couch. (Continue reading below the video. Saving energy for survival "Conserving energy has been essential for humans' survival. It allowed us to be more efficient in searching for food and shelter, competing for sexual partners, and avoiding predators," explains senior author Matthieu Boisgontier, a postdoctoral researcher at the KU Leuven Department of Movement Sciences and the University of British Columbia. "The failure of public policies to counteract the pandemic of physical inactivity may thus be due to brain processes that have been developed and reinforced across evolution." Avatar experiment For the study, the researchers recruited young adults, sat them in front of a computer, and gave them control of an on-screen avatar.