Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

by John J. Ratey

To keep our brains at peak performance, our bodies need to work hard. In Spark, I’ll demonstrate how and why physical activity is crucial to the way we think and feel. I’ll explain the science of how exercise cues the building blocks of learning in the brain; how it affects mood, anxiety, and attention; how it guards against stress and reverses some of the effects of aging in the brain; and how in women it can help stave off the sometimes tumultuous effects of hormonal changes.

It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes.

Exercise has a documented, dramatic effect on these essential ingredients. It sets the stage, and when you sit down to learn something new, that stimulation strengthens the relevant connections; with practice, the circuit develops definition, as if you’re wearing down a path through a forest.

In order to cope with anxiousness, for instance, you need to let certain well-worn paths grow over while you blaze alternate trails.

takes guilt out of the equation when you recognize that there’s a biological basis for certain emotional issues.

My hope is that if you understand how physical activity improves brain function, you’ll be motivated to include it in your life in a positive way, rather than think of it as something you should do.

I want to cement the idea that exercise has a profound impact on cognitive abilities and mental health. It is simply one of the best treatments we have for most psychiatric problems.

The heart rate monitors were a springboard for everything. I started thinking back to all the kids we must have turned off to exercise because we weren’t able to give them credit. I didn’t have an athlete in class who knew how to work as hard as that little girl.”

Naperville’s gym students are graded on how much time they spend in their target heart rate zones during any given activity.

Learning from our mistakes is profoundly important in everyday life, and Hillman’s study shows that exercise—or at least the resulting fitness levels—can have a powerful impact on that fundamental skill.

the class is set up to use movement as a framework for teaching social skills—a

The activity serves both as a distraction and as a confidence builder.

Their brains are primed by the movement, and they lay down circuits that record the experience, which at first may be painful but which becomes less so in the context of an experience shared by the entire class.

Now you know how exercise improves learning on three levels: first, it optimizes your mind-set to improve alertness, attention, and motivation; second, it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another, which is the cellular basis for logging in new information; and third, it spurs the development of new nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus.

you can’t learn difficult material while you’re exercising at high intensity because blood is shunted away from the prefrontal cortex, and this hampers your executive function.

Cognitive flexibility is an important executive function that reflects our ability to shift thinking and to produce a steady flow of creative thoughts and answers as opposed to a regurgitation of the usual responses. 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.

The more we build these networks and enrich our stores of memory and experience, the easier it is to learn, because what we already know serves as a foundation for forming increasingly complex thoughts.

jogging thirty minutes just two or three times a week for twelve weeks improved executive function.

This extends what we know from the neurogenesis research: that aerobic exercise and complex activity have different beneficial effects on the brain. The good news is they’re complementary.

your regimen has to include skill acquisition and aerobic exercise.”

The more complex the movements, the more complex the synaptic connections. And even though these circuits are created through movement, they can be recruited by other areas and used for thinking.

This is why learning how to play the piano makes it easier for kids to learn math. The prefrontal cortex will co-opt the mental power of the physical skills and apply it to other situations.

moving to an irregular rhythm versus a regular one improves brain plasticity.

Both stress and inactivity—the twin hallmarks of modern life—play big roles in the development of arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and other autoimmune disorders.

twenty-three of thirty-five studies show an increased risk of breast cancer for those women who are inactive; physically active people have 50 percent less chance of developing colon cancer; and active men over sixty-five have a 70 percent lower chance of developing the advanced, typically fatal form of prostate cancer.

A lot of people who are treated for panic disorder can go on to have a completely different kind of life. The farther they get from their last panic episode, the less likely they are to have another panic episode. The same holds true for any brand and any degree of anxiety.

Exercise can have an even more dramatic effect on milder anxiety, the kind that isn’t bad enough for medication but is still troublesome.

cleared the way for talk therapy to get at the underlying issues.

BILL DIDN’T KNOW he was missing out. When he turned fifty, he realized he was twenty pounds overweight, and he decided to go on a diet and start running. Before long, he began losing weight, and he noticed some dramatic side effects: he became less critical—of himself and of others—and less of a grouch.

He discovered, entirely by accident, that he could be happier.

Pure serendipity led to our first antidepressants, when in the 1950s it was discovered that an experimental tuberculosis drug made people “inappropriately happy.”

In Britain, doctors now use exercise as a first-line treatment for depression, but it’s vastly underutilized in the United States, and that’s a shame.

Who doesn’t feel grouchy, irritable, pessimistic, lethargic, apathetic, self-critical, or melancholy on occasion?

Just because you don’t have all the symptoms of depression doesn’t mean you can’t feel better.

I think of depression as an erosion of connections—in your life as well as between your brain cells. Exercise reestablishes those connections.

different types of depression.

we discovered that they increase the activity of the so-called monoamine neurotransmitters: norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin.

depression is caused by a deficit of these three neurotransmitters.

Most of our treatments and research since then has been about trying to reverse that deficit.

exercise as therapy is “How much should I do?”

some exercise is good, more is better (to a point).

thirty minutes of moderate aerobic activity on most days.

three hours at moderate intensity per week.

eighty minutes p...

Just multiply your body weight by eight to figure out how much you should be burning for the high dose, and then head to the gym to find out how many calories you burn during a given workou...

These are people who aren’t clinically depressed but who tend to look at life with a primarily pessimistic attitude, or who have the impression that nobody in the world, themselves included, meets their high standards.

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

you can’t get up or you can’t get to sleep or both.

First you lose your energy, then your inte...

go for a walk in the dawn light and do it every day.