Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

by John J. Ratey

Building muscles and conditioning the heart and lungs are essentially side effects.

I often tell my patients that the point of exercise is to build and condition the brain.

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.

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.

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.