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January 20 - February 20, 2020
This was most true when they reached what’s called the ventilatory threshold, the
point at which you have to breathe harder to fuel your heart. Music is one way to shape the meaning of what you feel when you work hard.
As the big finale, I had chosen “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from the film version of the Broadway musical Hairspray.
Months after I participated in the Dance for PD class, as I was poring over the neuroscience of music, I found myself thinking about that grand right and left—how we greeted one another with handshakes and smiles. Movement is necessary for the most basic forms of self-expression, including speech, facial expressions, and gestures. The body is how we translate what is happening inside us—thoughts, feelings, desires—into something observable that other people can understand.
When you listen to joyful music, the zygomaticus major—the muscle that draws the corner of your lips toward your cheekbone when you smile—contracts reflexively, similar to when a physician taps your kneecap to make your leg swing.
These neurons also prime the unconscious mimicry we engage in when we want to connect with others. Smiling when someone smiles at you.
Human beings are also storytellers, and the stories we choose to tell shape how we think about ourselves and the world. One of the most powerful ways that movement can affect us is through its ability to change our most deeply held stories.
One of the most useful distinctions the team learned early on is the difference between terror and horror. Terror is anticipatory fear, or expecting something to be awful. Horror is the actual experience being awful.
And having learned that there is nothing they can do to prevent the shocks, they stop trying to improve their situation in other stressful contexts—a phenomenon known as learned helplessness.
The ability to perceive your body’s movements is called proprioception, from the Latin roots for “one’s own self” and “to grasp.” Proprioception, sometimes referred to as the “sixth sense,” helps us move through space with ease and skill. But it also plays a surprisingly important role in self-concept—how
DPI Adaptive Fitness in Fairfax, Virginia, is the Wall of Greatness.
As writer Jonah Lehrer observes, “When I watch Kobe glide to the basket for a dunk, a few deluded cells in my premotor cortex are convinced that I, myself, am touching the rim. And when he hits a three pointer, my mirror neurons light up as if I’ve just made the crucial shot.” I would argue this perception is not so much a delusion as an evolutionary
advantage.
Heard started to walk the family dog more often. She worked her way up to thirty minutes on an elliptical machine. Within a year, she joined a local running group. The leader who set the group’s pace slowed the entire pack when Heard first joined, so she wouldn’t feel left behind.
Psychologists call physical activity that takes place in a natural environment green exercise.
At the Hong-reung Arboretum in Seoul, Korea, middle-aged adults being treated for depression walked among the trees and alpine plants before participating in their weekly cognitive behavioral therapy sessions. At the end of one month, 61 percent of the forest-walkers were in remission, three times the rate of patients whose psychotherapy took place in a hospital. In an Austrian study, adding mountain hiking to standard medical treatment reduced suicidal thinking and hopelessness among individuals who had previously attempted suicide.
Left to its own devices, the human mind holds imaginary conversations, replays past experiences, and reflects on the future.
For many of us, the mind’s default has a negative bias. Its most familiar habits are to ruminate on past hurts, criticize ourselves or others, and rehearse reasons to worry.
One of the most effective ways to quiet the default state is meditation. In brain-imaging studies, focused breathing, mindfulness, and repeating a mantra have all been shown to deactivate hubs of the default mode network.
Green exercise appears to do something similar to the brain, but without the need for such dedicated mind-training.
Notably, the very same neurological change has also been detected in two of the most promising experimental treatments for depression: transcranial magnetic stimulation, which delivers an electric current to the brain through a magnetic coil on the scalp, and ketamine, an anesthetic used on the battlefield during the Vietnam War and popularized as a recreational drug during 1990s rave culture.
The psychological effects of physical activity are often compared to mind-altering substances.
In Finding Ultra, Rich Roll recalls such an experience as he ran through the hills of California’s Topanga State Park.
The human longing to connect with nature is called biophilia, which literally means love of life.
They describe the smell of space, which lingers on spacesuits, as metallic, sweet, and reminiscent of welding fumes.
The communities that form around movement practices, such as CrossFit, running, group exercise, and recreational sports, are perfect examples of this.
E. O. Wilson, the biologist who argued that humans have a hardwired need to connect with nature, also observed, “People must belong to a tribe. They yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves.”
A sunrise jolt of cortisol brings you out of hibernation and tells you to rejoin the world.
In North America alone, the annual number of individuals who completed an ultramarathon jumped from 650 in 1980 to over 79,000 in 2017. The oldest official ultramarathon, the 90K Comrades Marathon in South Africa, was founded in 1921 by World War I veteran Vic Clapham to commemorate the hardships of war and the camaraderie of his fellow soldiers.
Irisin is best known for its role in metabolism—it helps the body burn fat as fuel.
The destruction of dopamine neurons contributes to a wide range of disorders, including depression and Parkinson’s disease, and is one of the most insidious side effects of drug addiction.
At age fifty-seven, adventure athlete Terri Schneider has summited the highest peaks of Africa, South America, and Europe.
One of Schneider’s most memorable big stretches took place almost twenty-five years ago, in the very first Eco-Challenge, a ten-day nonstop team adventure race in Utah.
In a 2017 essay, Norwegian ethicist Sigmund Loland posed the question: If it becomes possible, should we replace exercise with a pill? Scientists are already trying to manufacture medicines that mimic the health benefits of exercise. What if they succeed?
If you’re looking for a guideline, it’s this: Move. Any kind, any amount, and any way that makes you happy. Move whatever parts of your body still move, with gratitude.
