The editorial, led by Keying Zhang of Southeast University’s Department of Physical Education, together with Chunmei Cao of Tsinghua University and Yih-Kuen Jan of the University of Illinois, frames what they see as the central challenge of modern exercise neuroscience. The field, they argue, has spent years accumulating evidence that aerobic exercise is good for the brain. The harder question — and the one this Research Topic confronts — is when those benefits emerge, for whom, at what dose, and through which specific neural processes. The five contributing studies, which include three evidence syntheses, one electroencephalography microstate investigation, and one multimodal magnetic resonance imaging study, suggest that the answer is not a single mechanism but a mosaic of context-dependent ones.

The most striking pattern to emerge from the collection is an asymmetry in the evidence itself. Emotional outcomes are the most consistently supported behavioral domain across the five articles, while cognitive benefits appear less uniform and sleep benefits remain only weakly connected to direct mechanistic evidence. In one of the outcome-focused reviews, Wang and colleagues synthesized 19 randomized controlled trials in healthy adults and found that acute aerobic exercise reliably increased positive mood and reduced negative mood, while longer-term exercise programs reduced negative mood. Pooled effects on cognition and sleep, however, did not reach statistical significance. That dissociation — robust mood effects alongside weaker cognitive and sleep signals — is exactly the kind of outcome-specific variation the editorial argues the field must take seriously rather than average away.

A second review, by Yang and colleagues, examined 14 randomized trials involving 982 university students and found reductions in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and perceived stress following exercise interventions. Notably, the dose-response analyses suggested that psychological benefits may vary with how exercise is prescribed — the intensity, duration, frequency, and total length of the intervention. But the authors were careful to present their proposed dose ranges as indicative rather than definitive thresholds, a caution that reflects a deeper problem in the literature. Exercise dose is not a single number. It is a composite of intensity, duration, frequency, total intervention length, modality, and adherence, and different studies weight these components differently, making it genuinely difficult to compare prescriptions across trials or to isolate which component drives which benefit.

This is where the editorial stakes its central claim: aerobic exercise should not be treated as a unitary exposure producing a unitary benefit. Some of the variation across studies certainly reflects differences in design, measurement, and intervention reporting — the methodological noise that plagues any young field. But the editors argue that reproducible differences across outcomes and populations may also carry biologically meaningful information. Distinguishing the two is now the field’s central methodological task, and it is one that matters for anyone hoping to translate exercise science into precise, individualized prescriptions.

The electrophysiological studies in the collection push the question from whether exercise changes brain activity to how those changes are actually expressed. Liu and colleagues synthesized 13 randomized controlled trials and found that exercise interventions were associated, on average, with greater EEG alpha-band power — a spectral measure often linked to relaxed wakefulness and cortical inhibition. But the heterogeneity across studies was substantial, and the prediction interval crossed the null, meaning that individual studies could plausibly show effects in either direction. The editors also note that because the review included exercise modalities beyond aerobic exercise, its findings are better interpreted as broad evidence of exercise-related electrophysiological modulation than as an aerobic-specific neural signature. Alpha power, moreover, is highly sensitive to recording state and analytic choices, which cautions against treating any single spectral measure as a context-free biomarker of exercise benefit.

Perhaps the most conceptually innovative contribution comes from Yao and colleagues, who examined a different dimension of EEG organization altogether. Rather than measuring signal magnitude, they studied EEG microstates — brief, quasi-stable patterns of scalp electrical activity that are thought to reflect the sequential activation of large-scale brain networks. Their study compared adolescents with depressive symptoms and healthy peers who completed both traditional and virtual-reality-enhanced aerobic cycling sessions. Both conditions improved mood, but the VR-enhanced exercise was accompanied by distinctive changes in microstate dynamics, including reduced occurrence of microstate C, prolonged duration of microstate D, and altered transitions between states. Selected microstate measures were also associated with post-exercise mood. These findings remain candidate neural correlates rather than established mechanisms, but they raise a testable hypothesis: the immediate psychological response to exercise may be reflected partly in the way large-scale neural states reorganize over time, not merely in how strong the underlying signals are.

The structural side of the story comes from Zhang and colleagues, who combined structural MRI, resting-state functional MRI, and graded exercise testing in 32 men spanning high-level endurance athletes, moderately trained runners, and active controls. Their analysis found that aerobic-capacity indicators were associated with gray-matter volume, fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation, and degree centrality across distributed cortical and cerebellar regions — though the pattern became more selective after multiple-comparison correction. The editors are careful about what this means. The study does not provide evidence for a defined training trajectory, in which fitness progressively sculpts specific regions. Instead, it offers a broader view of aerobic fitness as a distributed brain-physiology phenotype, with descriptive differences across training levels that were less stable in sensitivity analyses and should remain hypothesis-generating rather than conclusive.

Read together, the EEG and MRI studies raise what the editors call a multiscale question: how are rapid neural responses to a single bout of exercise related, if at all, to the brain characteristics observed across different levels of fitness and training experience? A single cycling session alters microstate dynamics within minutes. Years of endurance training appear associated with distributed differences in gray matter and functional connectivity. Whether these are points on a single continuum — acute responses that, repeated over time, consolidate into structural and functional adaptation — or fundamentally separate phenomena, remains one of the field’s most important open questions. The honest answer, the editors concede, is that methodological heterogeneity, limited longitudinal evidence, modest sample sizes, and the correlational nature of several brain-behavior relationships continue to constrain mechanistic interpretation.

The path forward, they argue, is not simply to accumulate more evidence that exercise is beneficial, but to connect currently separated levels of explanation. Future studies should integrate multidimensional exercise dose, physiological responses, behavioral outcomes, and multimodal brain measures within randomized and longitudinal designs, while explicitly distinguishing acute neural responses from adaptations that emerge with repeated training. One emerging experimental opportunity is the integration of virtual reality with aerobic exercise. Beyond its obvious appeal for engagement and adherence, VR may allow contextual and sensory features to be manipulated while key exercise parameters are held constant — a design that could finally test whether similar physiological demands produce different neural and psychological responses under different experiential conditions. The working framework the editors propose treats exercise as a multiscale process in which dose and context shape physiological state, acute neural dynamics, repeated adaptation, and ultimately behavioral outcome. The key question, and the one that could transform exercise from a general recommendation into a targeted intervention, is whether transient exercise-related neural responses can be linked prospectively to durable adaptation and to individual differences in cognitive, sleep, and emotional benefit.

Subject of Research: Brain-based neural mechanisms underlying the effects of aerobic exercise on cognition, sleep, and emotional wellbeing

Article Title: Editorial: Brain-based mechanisms underlying the cognitive, sleep, and emotional benefits of aerobic exercise

Article References: Zhang, K., Cao, C., & Jan, Y.-K. (2026). Editorial: Brain-based mechanisms underlying the cognitive, sleep, and emotional benefits of aerobic exercise. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 20, Article 2010856. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2026.2010856

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2026.2010856

Keywords: aerobic exercise, EEG microstates, alpha-band power, brain plasticity, cognition, mood, sleep, virtual reality, MRI, exercise dose, depression, neuroscience