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In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man can attain perfection. —Plato
Poster
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I often tell my patients that the point of exercise is to build and condition the brain.
In today’s technology-driven, plasma-screened-in world, it’s easy to forget that we are born movers—animals, in fact—because we’ve engineered movement right out of our lives.
The relationship between food, physical activity, and learning is hardwired into the brain’s circuitry.
10 percent of the population has type 2 diabetes, a preventable and ruinous disease that stems from inactivity and poor nutrition.
inactivity is killing our brains too—physically shriveling them.
fellow medical professionals at Harvard,
My experience working with the most complicated psychiatric patients set me on a path of investigation into the ways in which treating the body can transform the mind.
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.
was already known that exercise increases levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine—important neurotransmitters that traffic in thoughts and emotions.
toxic levels of stress erode the connections between the billions of nerve cells in the brain or that chronic depression shrinks certain areas of the brain.
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exercise unleashes a cascade of neurochemicals and growth factors that can reverse this process, physically bolstering the brain’s infrastructure.
exercise causes those branches to grow and bloom with new buds, thus enhancing brain function at a fundamental level.
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.
the microenvironment of the brain,
Why should you care about how your brain works? For one thing, it’s running the show. Right now the front of your brain is firing signals about what you’re reading, and how much of it you soak up has a lot to do with whether there is a proper balance of neurochemicals and growth factors to bind neurons together.
Good for students to read
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If you had half an hour of exercise this morning, you’re in the right frame of mind to sit still and focus on this paragraph, and your brain is far more equipped to remember it.
you’ll be motivated to include it in your life in a positive way, rather than think of it as something you should do. Of course you should exercise, but I won’t be preaching here. (It probably wouldn’t help: experiments with lab rats suggest that forced exercise doesn’t do the trick quite like voluntary exercise.)
If you can get to the point where you’re consistently saying to yourself exercise is something you want to do, then you’re charting a course to a different future—one that’s less about surviving and more about thriving.
these seemingly unrelated threads are tied together at a fundamental level of biology.
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 administration is so impressed that it incorporates Zero Hour into the high school curriculum as a first-period literacy class called Learning Readiness PE.
all students schedule their hardest subjects immediately after gym,
What’s being taught, really, is a lifestyle. The students are developing healthy habits, skills, and a sense of fun, along with a knowledge of how their bodies work.
“It’s a good thing that we’ve at least got some Napervilles—it shows that it can be done.”
If this is our business, I thought, we’re going bankrupt.”
would run the mile. Every single week! His decision met with groans from students, complaints from parents, and notes from doctors.
Anytime you got a personal best, no matter what it was, you moved up a letter grade.”
a gray-haired furnace of a man with steady eyes and a facts-is-facts delivery.
“In our department, we create the brain cells,” Zientarski says. “It’s up to the other teachers to fill them.”
one study from Virginia Tech showed that cutting gym class and allocating more time to math, science, and reading did not improve test scores, as so many school administrators assume it will.
students with higher fitness scores also have higher test scores.
results also showed that within the lower-income students, fitter kids scored better than unfit kids. This is a powerful statistic in itself. It suggests that although parents may not have immediate control over their financial situations, they can improve their kids’ chances of performing well by encouraging them to get in shape. Exercise could break the cycle.
Facile but still convincing
Exercise in itself is not fun. It’s work. So if you can make them understand it, show them the benefits—that’s a radical transformation.
We want them to be able to communicate. We want them to be able to work in small groups. We want them to be able to problem solve. We want them to be risk takers. Where does that happen?” he asks, eyeballing his guests. “Science class? I don’t think so.”
Hattie
“Body mass index and aerobic fitness really stuck out in our regression equation,” Castelli says. “They were the most significant contributors. I was really surprised it was that clear-cut.”
During the cognitive testing, the kids wore something like a swim cap embedded with electrodes that measured electrical activity in the brain. The electroencephalogram (EEG) showed more activity in fit kids’ brains, indicating that more neurons involved in attention were being recruited for a given task. “We see better integrity there,” Hillman explains. In other words, better fitness equals better attention and, thus, better results.
“fit kids slow down and make sure they get that next one right.” The ability to stop and consider a response, to use the experience of a wrong choice as a guide in making the next decision, relates to executive function, which is controlled by an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex.
If a child with ADHD took the flanker test, she would hit the wrong button before being able to stop herself, or hesitate too long to hit the right button.
The swimming pool leveled the playing field in other ways too.
Lol
The sidelines are fertile ground for developing the very sorts of issues that exercise ameliorates.
The final exam is based on how accurately the students remember ten facts about a partner after spending fifteen minutes chatting.
square-dance students get to practice how to talk and interact in a nontoxic setting.
By having the structure, opportunity, and expectation, socially anxious students log in positive memories about the way to approach someone, how close to stand, and when to let the other person speak.
Exercise serves as the social lubricant,
Titusville, Pennsylvania, a defunct industrial town of six thousand that’s been left for dead in a stretch of hill country between Pittsburgh and Lake Erie.
75 percent of the kindergartners received government assistance for school lunches. Which is to say, this is not a wealthy suburb.
Equally important are the psychosocial effects McCord has noticed: not a single fist fight among the 550 junior high kids since 2000.
news that one PE4life school in the inner city reduced its disciplinary problems by 67 percent.
The brain is made up of one hundred billion neurons of various types that chat with one another by way of hundreds of different chemicals, to govern our every thought and action.
