Spark

by John J. Ratey

What’s even more disturbing, and what virtually no one recognizes, is that inactivity is killing our brains too—physically shriveling them.

When the CDE repeated the study in 2002, it factored in socioeconomic status. As expected, students with a higher standard of living scored better on the academic tests, but the results also showed that within the lower-income students, fitter kids scored better than unfit kids.

Disgregacion por estado socioeconómico

Quite the opposite—it discouraged exercise. The cruel irony was that the shy, the clumsy, the out of shape—some of the kids who could most benefit from exercise—were pushed aside to sit on the bleachers.

If you never practice the word again, the attraction between the synapses involved naturally diminishes, weakening the signal.

Once the circuit has been established by the firing of glutamate, and the word is learned, the prefrontal cortex goes dark. It has overseen the initial stages of the project, and now it can leave the responsibility to a team of capable employees while it moves on to new challenges.

Patterns of thinking and movement that are automatic get stored in the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and brain stem—primitive areas that until recently scientists thought related only to movement.

However, blood flow shifts back almost immediately after you finish exercising, and this is the perfect time to focus on a project that demands sharp thinking and complex analysis.

The trait correlates with high-performance levels in intellectually demanding jobs. So if you have an important afternoon brainstorming session scheduled, going for a short, intense run during lunchtime is a smart idea.

What I would suggest, then, is to either choose a sport that simultaneously taxes the cardiovascular system and the brain—tennis is a good example—or do a ten-minute aerobic warm-up before something nonaerobic and skill-based, such as rock climbing or balance drills.

People learn to wait until the Sword of Damocles is ready to fall—it’s only then, when stress unleashes norepinephrine and dopamine, that they can sit down and do the work.

Cortisol also begins restocking the shelves, so to speak, replenishing energy stores depleted by the action of epinephrine. It converts protein into glycogen and begins the process of storing fat.

El estres engorda

One of the problems with chronic stress is that if the HPA axis is guzzling all the fuel to keep the system on alert, the thinking parts of the brain are being robbed of energy.

A huge part of the problem with social anxiety, whether it’s at the level of Ellen’s phobia or milder social apprehension, is that the more we withdraw, the less practice we get interacting, and the scarier the prospect becomes.

(This is why breathing into a paper bag stops us from hyperventilating: it forces us to rebreathe the carbon dioxide.)

Overcoming Anxiety through Active Coping.” Essentially, active coping means doing something in response to whatever danger or problem is causing anxiety rather than passively worrying about

Studies have shown that anxious people respond well to any directed distraction—quietly sitting, meditating, eating lunch with a group, reading a magazine. But the antianxiety effects of exercise last longer and carry the other side benefits listed here.

Why not come out with both guns blazing? I think combining medicine with exercise can be a great approach. Medicine provides immediate safety, and exercise gets at the fundamentals of anxiety.

About 17 percent of American adults experience depression at some point in their lives, to the tune of $26.1 billion in health care costs each year.

runner’s high, but there were conflicting results. Then we found that endorphins produced in the body—the ones detected in the runners—cannot pass into the brain, and scientific enthusiasm for the endorphin rush faded.

the lab. Now we’re coming back around to them. Studies suggest that endorphins produced directly in the brain contribute to the general feeling of well-being that usually comes along with exercise.

Depression also affects the body, shutting down the drive to sleep, eat, have sex, and generally look after ourselves on a primitive level. Psychiatrist Alexander Niculescu sees depression as a survival instinct to conserve resources in an environment void of hope—“to keep still and stay out of harm’s way,” he wrote in a 2005 article in Genome Biology.

If we look at depression as a sort of brain lock, then we can see a common thread between these approaches: They are all shocks of a sort. They send sparks flying to change the dynamic in the brain. Some parts are stuck in a constant whir, and others are locked in place.

Trivedi and Dunn based the high dose on public health recommendations for exercise, which suggest thirty minutes of moderate aerobic activity on most days.

One of the first symptoms of depression, even before your mood drops to new lows, is sleep disturbance.

I think of it as sleep inertia—trouble starting or stopping.

Burn those 1,400 calories as if your life depended on it, and nip it in the bud.

I tell my patients a more helpful way to think of ADHD is as an attention variability disorder; the deficit is one of consistency.

ADHD work differently from those without ADHD. Zametkin and his colleagues found that the group with ADHD showed 10 percent less brain activity than the control group, and the largest deficit was within the prefrontal cortex, which has a firm hand in regulating behavior.

They feel as though they’re always racing, and they finish our sentences because they assume they know what we’re going to say or they’re bored by it.

Suena familiar

Road rage is essentially a temper tantrum, and a red flag for particularly hyperactive forms of ADHD.

The attention circuits are jointly regulated by the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and dopamine,

These are the chemicals targeted by ADHD medications.

One of the common symptoms in people with ADHD is abnormal sleep patterns: they often have problems going to sleep or staying asleep, and they suffer sleep disturbances such as sleepwalking or sleeptalking and nightmares.

If you want a minimum, I would say thirty minutes of aerobic exercise. It’s not a lot of time, especially considering that it will help you focus enough to make the most of the rest of your day.

All the things people become addicted to—alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, drugs, sex, carbohydrates, gambling, playing video games, shopping, living on the edge—boost the dopamine in the nucleus accumbens.

while sex increases dopamine levels 50 to 100

percent, cocaine sends dopamine skyrocketing 300 to 800 percent beyond normal levels.

groundbreaking study in 1990 revealed, for instance, that a lot of alcoholics have a gene variation (the D2R2 allele) that robs their reward center of dopamine receptors, lowering levels of the neurotransmitter.

Without question, if the reward center isn’t receiving enough input, you’re genetically predisposed to be constantly craving, relentlessly searching for a way to compensate for the deficit.

A recent study from Holland also showed that, like hard-core addicts, many skydivers don’t experience pleasure from typical daily life.

Studies in rats show that if they get used to a chronic dose of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—the active compound in marijuana—and then are deprived of it, the brain floods the system with corticotropin-releasing factor, which activates the amygdala and thus the entire stress system.

And why isn’t there such a thing as swimmer’s high? One intriguing theory is based on the relatively new finding that there are endocannabinoid receptors in the skin that may be activated only by all the pounding and jostling of running.

The researchers characterized self-regulation as a resource that can be depleted but also recharged like a muscle.

the brains of women with the diagnosis had an impaired ability to “trap” tryptophan in the prefrontal cortex, thus limiting the production of serotonin, which helps regulate mood and behavior such as angry outbursts.

The notion that exercise alleviates physical symptoms both before and during menstruation is far more accepted than its proposed effects on mood and anxiety.

A failure of these underlying connections explains why people who are obese are twice as likely to suffer from dementia, and why those with heart disease are at far greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia.

Starting at about age forty, we lose on average 5 percent of our overall brain volume per decade, up until about age seventy, when any number of conditions can accelerate the process.

If your brain isn’t actively growing, then it’s dying. Exercise is one of the few ways to counter the process of aging because it slows down the natural decline of the stress threshold.

Age happens. There’s nothing you can do about the why, but you can definitely do something about the how and the when.

It showed that people who feel lonely—those who identify with statements such as “I miss having people around” and “I experience a general sense of emptiness”—are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s.