Hey, sports fans! You know how sometimes, when you’re watching the the seventh inning of a relatively meaningless midseason baseball game, and you get that twinge in your gut? The one that says: “Hey, you know, you’re sort of wasting your life here. The baseball will be here when you get back. Go read a book or something. Watch a foreign film. Ride your bike. Enrich yourself.” And then you eat like a whole bag of chili-cheese Fritos and your gut, mercifully, quiets down?

Feel the twinge no more: According to a new study (via Deuce of Davenport), sports actually improve brain function. It’s science:

Being an athlete or merely a fan improves language skills when it comes to discussing their sport because parts of the brain usually involved in playing sports are instead used to understand sport language, new research at the University of Chicago shows. The research was conducted on hockey players, fans, and people who’d never seen or played the game. It shows, for the first time, that a region of the brain usually associated with planning and controlling actions is activated when players and fans listen to conversations about their sport. The brain boost helps athletes and fans understanding of information about their sport, even though at the time when people are listening to this sport language they have no intention to act.

Of course, watching sports only makes you more intelligent about sports. Sitting down to watch old Bulls DVD’s will not make you suddenly able to recite Proust, nor, apparently, would writing a dissertation on the World Bank help you understand the tenets of the dribble-drive motion.

This sounds less like science than common sense, but hey: Who said you had the cite the whole study when speaking to your gut? Just tell it you’re getting smarter. Don’t tell what you’re getting smarter at. Self-rationalization is easy!