But even here the body/mind distinction proves illusory. Consider a new paper by Daniel Longman, Jay Stock and Jonathan Wells. Their subjects were sixty-two male rowers from the University of Cambridge. They were all in excellent shape. On their first visit to the lab, the men rowed as intensely as possible for three minutes as the scientists tracked their total power output. On their second visit, the men were given an arduous mental task. Seventy-five words were briefly flashed on a screen; their job was to remember as many of them as possible.

The last visit to the lab combined these two measures. While the men worked up a sweat on the rowing machine, they were simultaneously shown a new set of words and asked to remember them. As expected, combining the tasks led to a dropoff in performance: the men remembered fewer words and generated less power on the rowing machine.

But here’s the interesting part: the decline was asymmetric, with physical performance suffering a dropoff that was roughly 25 percent greater than mental performance.

What accounts for this asymmetry? The scientists suggest that it’s rooted in the scarcity of blood sugar and oxygen, as the brain and body compete for the same finite resources. And since we are creatures of cogito—thinking is our competitive advantage—it only makes sense that we’d privilege the cortex over our quadriceps.

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