Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

by John J. Ratey

As the saying goes, neurons that fire together wire together.

tell people that going for a run is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin because, like the drugs, exercise elevates these neurotransmitters.

brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Whereas neurotransmitters carry out signaling, neurotrophins such as BDNF build and maintain the cell circuitry—the infrastructure itself.

neuroscientist Eric Kandel a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize—is that repeated activation, or practice, causes the synapses themselves to swell and make stronger connections. A neuron is like a tree that instead of leaves has synapses along its dendritic branches; eventually new branches sprout, providing more synapses to further solidify the connections.

Oakley

Llinás’s interpretation: “That which we call thinking is the evolutionary internalization of movement.”

Interesting !

The brain circuits that our ancient ancestors used to start a fire are the same ones we use today to learn French.

The prefrontal cortex is the boss. As such, it is responsible for, among other things, keeping tabs on our current situation through so-called working memory, inhibiting stimuli and initiating action, judging, planning, predicting—all executive functions. As the CEO of the brain, the prefrontal cortex has to stay in close contact with the COO—the motor cortex—as well as many other areas.

A memory, scientists believe, is a collection of information fragments dispersed throughout the brain.

Someone tell Proust

Brain scans show that when we learn a new word, for example, the prefrontal cortex lights up with activity (as does the hippocampus and other pertinent areas, such as the auditory cortex). 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.

Delegating fundamental knowledge and skills to these subconscious areas frees up the rest of the brain to continue adapting, a crucial arrangement.

Good zombies Oakley

Which is why a morning run is so important.

By showing that exercise sparks the master molecule of the learning process, Cotman nailed down a direct biological connection between movement and cognitive function. In doing so, he blazed the trail for the study of exercise in neuroscience.

Hebb’s work ties in with exercise because physical activity counts as novel experience, at least as far as the brain is concerned.

Novels

All this work established the metaphor of the brain as a muscle, and the notion of use it or lose it. Aside from challenging the long-standing separation between biology and psychology, the social implications of environmental enrichment were radical. The Berkeley studies led to the creation of Head Start, the federal education program that provides funding to send disadvantaged children to preschool. Why should poor kids be left in bare cages? The field took off, and neuroscientists began to investigate different ways to stimulate brain growth.

environmental enrichment made the neurons sprout new dendrites.

they’re interested in exercise. Rather, they make the mice run because it “massively increases neurogenesis,” as the title of a 2006 study in Hippocampus proclaimed, and thus allows researchers to deconstruct the chain of signals behind the process.

That’s what the pharmaceutical companies need to create drugs. They dream of an anti-Alzheimer’s pill that regenerates neurons to keep memory intact. “There has to be some kind of chemical stuff in the [hippocampus] that is sensing exercise and saying, OK, let’s start cranking out new cells,” says Columbia University neurologist Scott Small, who recently used a novel MRI technique to track neurogenesis in live human subjects. “If we can identify those molecular pathways, we might be able to think of clever ways to induce

It’s about growth versus decay, activity versus inactivity. The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too. Learning and memory evolved in concert with the motor functions that allowed our ancestors to track down food, so as far as our brains are concerned, if we’re not moving, there’s no real need to learn anything.

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.

OK, but now you want to know what the best exercise plan is. I wish there were an ideal type and amount of activity to suggest for building your brain, but scientists are only beginning to tackle such questions. “Nobody’s done that research yet,” says William Greenough. “But I suspect in five years we’ll know a lot more.”

But it’s important to mix in some form of activity that demands coordination beyond putting one foot in front of the other.

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. While aerobic exercise elevates neurotransmitters, creates new blood vessels that pipe in growth factors, and spawns new cells, complex activities put all that material to use by strengthening and expanding networks. 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.

synapses bushier.

stress is a threat to the body’s equilibrium.

stress results from the brain getting locked into the same pattern, typically one marked by pessimism, fear, and retreat.

Neurons get broken down and built up just like muscles—stressing them makes them more resilient. This is how exercise forces the body and mind to adapt.

stress seems to have an effect on the brain similar to that of vaccines on the immune system. In limited doses, it causes brain cells to overcompensate and thus gird themselves against future demands. Neuroscientists call this phenomenon stress inoculation.

The fight-or-flight response calls into action several of the body’s most powerful hormones and scores of neurochemicals in the brain.

Trauma

The amygdala’s job is to assign intensity to the incoming information, which may or may not be obviously survival related.

Two neurotransmitters put the brain on alert: norepinephrine arouses attention, then dopamine sharpens and focuses it. An imbalance of these neurotransmitters is why some people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) come across as stress junkies. They have to get stressed to focus. It’s one of the primary factors in procrastination. 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. A need for stress also explains why ADHD patients sometimes seem to shoot themselves in the foot. When everything is going well, they need to stir up the situation, and they subconsciously find a way to create a crisis.

Explaining classroom behaviors

(Unrelenting cortisol also explains why some marathon runners carry a slight paunch despite all their training—their bodies never get a chance to adequately recover.)

why people who are depressed have trouble learning. It’s not just lack of motivation, it’s because the hippocampal neurons have bolstered their glutamate machinery and shut out less important stimuli. They’re obsessed with the stress.

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Human studies also show that excess cortisol can block access to existing memories, which explains how people can forget where the fire exit is when there’s actually a fire—the lines are down, so to speak. With too much stress, we lose the ability to form unrelated memories, and we might not be able to retrieve the ones we have.

Home visits

The next time you’re forced to participate in a fire drill, consider that the neurological point of the exercise is to make those circuits stronger, to burn in the memory. With an overload of stress, as I’ll explain later, you get the petri dish effect—cortisol eroding neurons.

Home Visits

From the time Homo sapiens emerged two million years ago, until the agricultural revolution, ten thousand years ago, everyone was a hunter-gatherer, and life was marked by periods of intense physical activity followed by days of rest. It was feast or famine. By calculating how much our forebears “exercised” and comparing it to figures from today, it’s easy to see where the problem lies: Our average energy expenditure per unit of body mass is less than 38 percent of that of our Stone Age ancestors. And I think it’s fair to say that our calorie intake has increased quite a bit. The kicker is that even if we followed the most demanding governmental recommendations for exercise and logged thirty minutes of physical activity a day, we’d still be at less than half the energy expenditure for which our genes are encoded. Paleolithic man had to walk five to ten miles on an average day, just to be able to eat.

the less physically active we are, the less likely we’ll be to reach out and touch someone. Studies show that by adding physical activity to our lives, we become more socially active—it boosts our confidence and provides an opportunity to meet people. The vigor and motivation that exercise brings helps us establish and maintain social connections.

When you suffer from chronic stress, you lose the capacity to compare the situation to other memories or to recall that you can grab a jump rope and immediately relieve the stress or that you have friends to talk to or that it’s not the end of the world. Positive and realistic thoughts become less accessible, and eventually brain chemistry can shift toward anxiety or depression.

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.

physically active people have 50 percent less chance of developing colon cancer;

Just keep in mind that the more stress you have, the more your body needs to move to keep your brain running smoothly.

When you’re facing an upcoming speech or a brewing confrontation with your boss, anxiety sharpens your attention so you can meet the challenge.

People who suffer from panic disorder seem perfectly at ease most of the time but then are blindsided by crippling fear and physical pain that can be mistaken for a heart attack.

Panic is the most intense form of anxiety, and it is at the root of all phobia—a paralyzing fear of a specific object or situation that instills a powerful and often unreasonable compulsion to avoid the source (spiders for the arachnophobe, open spaces for the agoraphobe).

social anxiety disorder, which I think of as performance anxiety in e...

when you sense this physical arousal, that awareness alone can trigger a state of anxiety or panic. You lose control because you feel like you’re going to lose control.

Over time, you teach the brain that the symptoms don’t always spell doom and that you can survive; you’re reprogramming the cognitive misinterpretation. The fact that aerobic exercise works immediately to fend off the state of anxiety has been well established for many, many years.

By building up parallel circuitry to the fear memory, the brain creates a neutral alternative to the expected anxiety, learning that everything is OK.

When we experience the symptoms without the panic, the brain goes through a cognitive restructuring.

“In essence,” he writes, his approach is a matter of “getting back on the horse that threw you.”