Effect of acute aerobic exercise on EEG rhythms stressed from sound and mental task

We investigated response of electroencephalogram (EEG) to acute aerobic exercise with low intensity after performing mental task with listening to sound in order to measure a recovery effect of the acute exercise on the EEG. The mean amplitude of the low-alpha wave (8-10 Hz) was reduced during performing mental arithmetic and/or listening to 5 KHz unpleasant tone by 7-17 %. In particular, the mean amplitude in the low-alpha wave showed statistically significant difference between the mental arithmetic during listening to the 5 KHz tone and the resting state prior to stress experiments. On the other hand, the low-alpha wave was fixed after an acute exercise of 20 min; the mean amplitude exceeded up to 29 % of the amplitude in the pre-stressed resting. Similar results were obtained for the theta wave. Contrastively other EEG rhythms with higher frequency (high-alpha (10-13Hz), beta (15-30Hz) and gamma (30-45Hz) waves) showed no significant main effect of experimental conditions. The observation indicates that the acute exercise with low intensity may be responsible for the recovery / enhancement of the low-alpha and theta waves.