Spark Quotes

“Next comes a husky boy in baggy shorts. “Bring it on in, Doug,” Duncan says. “What’d you get?” “Nine minutes.” “Flat?” “Yeah.” “Nice work.” When Michelle and Krissy finally saunter over, Duncan asks for their times, but Michelle’s watch is still running. Apparently, she didn’t hit the blue button. Krissy did, though, and their times are the same. She holds up her wrist for Duncan. “Ten twelve,” he says, noting the time on his clipboard. What he doesn’t say is “It looked like you two were really loafing around out there!” The fact is, they weren’t. When Duncan downloads Michelle’s monitor, he’ll find that her average heart rate during her ten-minute mile was 191, a serious workout for even a trained athlete. She gets an A for the day.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“What Rusty finally sees—that he can find pleasure without drugs—is vital to resisting the urge. When you talk to hard-core addicts, you often hear that they feel numb to most things. Naturally satisfying forms of stimulation such as love, food, and social interaction are a bland backdrop to the vivid experience of the drug. The normal course of life doesn’t do it—they can’t feel it.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“One of the responsibilities of the prefrontal cortex is to assess risk versus reward and to decide whether to inhibit behavior that may cause harm. With addicts, it’s not so much that they make bad choices as that they fail to inhibit behavior that has become reflexive. We know from studies in animals and humans that cocaine, for one, damages nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex and even reduces gray matter. And in recent years, imaging studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until we are well into our twenties, which could explain why most people who experiment with drugs and get hooked do so as teenagers or during early adulthood, when their inhibition hasn’t fully developed. “They end up with a hypersensitive system that wants drugs, and they make very bad decisions,” says Robinson. “It’s the worst of both possible worlds.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Typically, when we learn something, the connections stabilize and the levels of dopamine tail off over time. With addiction, especially drug addiction, dopamine floods the system with each drug use, reinforcing the memory and pushing other stimuli further into the background. Animal studies show that drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine make the dendrites in the nucleus accumbens bloom, thus increasing their synaptic connections. The changes can remain months and maybe even years after the drugs are stopped, which is why it’s so easy to relapse. One way to look at addiction is that the brain has learned something too well. These adaptations lead to a vicious cycle in which the basal ganglia goes on autopilot whenever you smell fried chicken, and the prefrontal cortex can’t override your actions even though you may know better.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“The National Institute on Drug Abuse now defines addiction as a compulsion that persists in spite of negative health and social consequences. Plenty of people use and abuse drugs, but only relatively few become addicts. Why? While dopamine in the reward center creates the initial interest in a drug or behavior and provides the motivation to get it, what makes addiction such a stubborn problem is the structural changes it causes in the brain. Scientists now consider addiction a chronic disease because it wires in a memory that triggers reflexive behavior. The same changes occur regardless of whether the addiction is to drugs or gambling or eating. Once the reward has the brain’s attention, the prefrontal cortex instructs the hippocampus to remember the scenario and sensation in vivid detail. If it’s greasy food that you can’t resist, the brain links the aroma of Kentucky Fried Chicken to Colonel Sanders’s beard and that red and white bucket. Those cues take on salience and get linked together into a web of associations. Each time you drive up to KFC, the synaptic connections linking everything together get stronger and pick up new cues. This is how habits are formed.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“The reward center is where ADHD and addiction overlap, which explains why both problems undermine motivation, self-control, and memory. It is no coincidence that about half of those with ADHD also struggle with substance abuse of some kind. The implications have changed the way scientists describe addiction. The pivotal issues seem to be salience and motivation rather than pleasure. In this context, salience means something that stands out against the landscape of life, predominating over all other stimuli. Cues for both pleasure and pain send dopamine coursing through the nucleus accumbens to attract our attention so we can take action to survive. For the developing substance abuser, the overload of dopamine has tricked the brain into thinking that paying attention to the drug is a matter of life or death. “Drugs are tapping into the very core systems that have evolved to mediate survival,” says Robinson. “They activate the system in ways it was never meant to be activated.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“I try to do my workout first thing in the morning, both for the structure it affords and to set the right tone for the day. A lot of times, that keeps me going. And once I get into the intensity of therapy sessions, it’s easy for me to hyperfocus on each patient. Researchers haven’t quantified how long the spike in dopamine and norepinephrine lasts after exercise, but anecdotal evidence suggests an hour or maybe ninety minutes of calm and clarity. I tell people who need medication to take it at the point when the effects of exercise are wearing off, to get the most benefit from both approaches.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“It’s true that many ADHD kids are more active than their peers—studies show they have less body fat, on average—and I see plenty of adults with ADHD who are already exercising. But they need to be doing more, and on a regular basis. In general, I tell my patients to make every effort to institute a regimen of daily exercise—or at least during the five weekdays, when they need to focus at school or work. Dishman’s study suggests that submaximal exercise, which would be 65 to 75 percent of maximum heart rate, is more effective with girls, while more vigorous exercise (just below the anaerobic threshold, which I’ll explain in chapter 10) works better for boys. We don’t really have parallel data for adults, but from what I’ve seen, it’s important to get the heart rate up there—maybe 75 percent of your maximum for twenty or thirty minutes. For ADHD in particular, the complex, focus-intensive sports such as martial arts and gymnastics are a great way to tax the brain. By engaging every element of the attention system, it holds you rapt. These sports are just more interesting than running on a treadmill, and participation tends to be self-perpetuating—it’s easier to stick with”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“I tell my patients they need to develop militant vigilance in terms of scheduling and structure. If you set up your environment in a certain way, you can corral your attention through your own actions and become more productive. Arrange your day and your surroundings in a way that encourages focus and accomplishment—moving the ball forward rather than letting it ricochet off the walls. I’m not suggesting that getting organized and establishing structure can melt away symptoms, but it can funnel your attention in the right direction. Today many people are using ADHD coaches to help them do this. The external accountability is a powerful way to help you maintain routines such as exercise and to meet your goals.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“For most of my patients, I suggest exercise as a tool to help them manage their symptoms along with their medication. The best strategy is to exercise in the morning, and then take the medication about an hour later, which is generally when the immediate focusing effects of exercise begin to wear off. For a number of patients, I find that if they exercise daily, they need a lower dose of stimulant.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Everyone agrees that exercise boosts levels of dopamine and norepinephrine. And one of the intracellular effects of these neurotransmitters, according to Yale University neurobiologist Amy Arnsten, is an improvement in the prefrontal cortex’s signal-to-noise ratio. She has found that norepinephrine boosts the signal quality of synaptic transmission, while dopamine decreases the noise, or static of undirected neuron chatter, by preventing the receiving cell from processing irrelevant signals. Arnsten also suggests that levels of the attention neurotransmitters follow an upside-down U pattern, meaning that increasing them helps to a point, after which there’s a negative effect. As with every other part of the brain, the neurological soup needs to be at optimum levels. Exercise is the best recipe.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“The cerebellum sends information to the prefrontal and motor cortices—the centers for thinking and movement—but along the route is an important cluster of nerve cells called the basal ganglia, which acts as a sort of automatic transmission, subconsciously shifting attentional resources as the cortex demands. It’s modulated by dopamine signals stemming from the substantia nigra. Dopamine works like transmission fluid: if there’s not enough, as is the case in people with ADHD, attention can’t easily be shifted or can only be shifted all the way into high gear.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“The prefrontal cortex bears responsibility for ADHD too. We can think of inattention in general as an inability to inhibit interest in unimportant stimuli and motor impulses. In other words, we can’t stop paying attention to what we shouldn’t be paying attention to. The prefrontal cortex is also the home of working memory, which sustains attention during a delay for a reward, and holds multiple issues in the mind at once. If working memory is impaired, we can’t stay on task or work toward a long-term goal because we can’t keep an idea in mind long enough to operate on it or to ponder, process, sequence, plan, rehearse, and evaluate consequences. Working memory, which is like our random-access memory (RAM), can be considered the backbone of all the executive functions. A failure of working memory is also why people with ADHD are terrible at keeping track of time and thus prone to procrastination. They literally forget to worry about the passing time, so they never get started on the task at hand.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Psychiatrist Alexander Niculescu sees depression as a survival instinct to conserve resources in an environment void of hope—”to keep still and stay out of harm’s way,” he wrote in a 2005 article in Genome Biology. It’s a form of hibernation: When the emotional landscape turns wintry, our neurobiology tells us to stay inside.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Redefining depression as a connectivity issue helps explain the wide range of symptoms people experience. It’s not just a matter of feeling empty, helpless, and hopeless. It affects learning, attention, energy, and motivation—disparate systems that involve different parts of the thinking brain. Depression also affects the body, shutting down the drive to sleep, eat, have sex, and generally look after ourselves on a primitive level.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Now we see depression as a physical alteration of the brain’s emotional circuitry. Norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin are essential messengers that ferry information across the synapses, but without enough good connections in place, these neurotransmitters can only do so much. As far as the brain is concerned, it’s job is to transfer information and constantly rewire itself to help us adapt and survive. In depression, it seems that in certain areas, the brain’s ability to adapt grinds to a halt. The shutdown in depression is a shutdown of learning at the cellular level. Not only is the brain locked into a negative loop of self-hate, but it also loses the flexibility to work its way out of the hole.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Gray matter is the thin, wrinkly covering of the brain made up of cells that direct all of our complex functions such as attention, emotions, memory, and consciousness. The MRI scans pointed toward a radical notion: that chronic depression may cause structural damage in the thinking brain. Related research showed that depressed patients also had measurable changes in the amygdala and the hippocampus, crucial players in the stress response. We knew the amygdala was central to our emotional life, but we were just discovering that the memory center was also involved in stress and depression.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Serotonin is equally affected by exercise, and it’s important for mood, impulse control, and self-esteem. It also helps stave off stress by counteracting cortisol, and it primes the cellular connections in the cortex and hippocampus that are important for learning.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Exercise also boosts dopamine, which improves mood and feelings of wellness and jump-starts the attention system. Dopamine is all about motivation and attention. Studies have shown that chronic exercise increases dopamine storage in the brain and also triggers the production of enzymes that create dopamine receptors in the reward center of the brain, and this provides a feeling of satisfaction when we have accomplished something. If the demand is there, the dopamine genes get activated to produce more, and the overall effect is a more stable regulation of these pathways, which are important to controlling addictions.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Aside from elevating endorphins, exercise regulates all of the neurotransmitters targeted by antidepressants. For starters, exercise immediately elevates levels of Schildkraut’s favorite neurotransmitter, norepinephrine, in certain areas of the brain. It wakes up the brain and gets it going and improves self-esteem, which is one component of depression.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Sexual feelings and passions are primary drivers in all of us, and muzzling them can leave us with a general lack of passion for life or a lack of intimacy or maybe a list of missed opportunities.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“The problem with the strictly biological interpretation of psychology is that we sometimes lose sight of the fact that the mind, brain, and body all influence one another. In addition to feeling good when you exercise, you feel good about yourself, and that has a positive effect that can’t be traced to a particular chemical or area in the brain. If you’ve been feeling down and you start to exercise and feel better, the sense that you’re going to be OK and that you can count on yourself shifts your entire attitude. The stability of the routine alone can dramatically improve your mood. Clearly, there’s something going on.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Pain is related to depression, and after Pert’s discovery, others conducted experiments to see if endorphins were indeed the link between exercise and elevated mood. They expected to find that endorphin-blocking drugs would prevent runner’s high, but there were conflicting results. Then we found that endorphins produced in the body—the ones detected in the runners—cannot pass into the brain, and scientific enthusiasm for the endorphin rush faded. Endorphins obviously weren’t the single answer, so they were abandoned in the lab. Now we’re coming back around to them. Studies suggest that endorphins produced directly in the brain contribute to the general feeling of well-being that usually comes along with exercise. The truth is, how much they contribute to the magic is uncertain.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Endorphins are considered stress hormones—and there are forty types of them, with receptors throughout the brain and body—that calm the brain and relieve muscle pain during strenuous exercise. They are the elixir of heroism, helping us ignore pain when we’re physically overextended so we can finish the task at hand.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Within the spectrum of symptoms, there are distinctly different types of depression. I’ve had patients who don’t eat and can’t sleep, and others who eat too much and are so fatigued they feel like they can’t get out of bed in the morning. Some can’t make even the simplest decision, and they quietly withdraw from the world in a posture of helplessness, while others shout and challenge everything and everyone. Such contradictions make treatment difficult. If you have breast cancer, a biopsy can determine the best treatment. If you have depression, you may take a psychological test, and then it’s a matter of trial and error to find a drug that might work; there is no blood test for depression.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Overall, I think of depression as an erosion of connections—in your life as well as between your brain cells. Exercise reestablishes those connections.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Aerobic exercise has a positive impact on the entire range of depressive symptoms, regardless of whether they come individually, in the form of a mild episode, or conspire to form a disorder.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“One of the hurdles to conquering depression is that the disorder encompasses such a broad array of symptoms, most of which all of us experience at some point. Who doesn’t feel grouchy, irritable, pessimistic, lethargic, apathetic, self-critical, or melancholy on occasion? Sadness, for instance, is a normal aspect of the human condition—a response to a loss. But being sad isn’t the same as being depressed, unless the feeling never goes away or comes along with a certain number of the other symptoms.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“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. According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States and Canada, ahead of coronary heart disease, any given cancer, and AIDS. About 17 percent of American adults experience depression at some point in their lives, to the tune of $26.1 billion in health care costs each year.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“In the fifty years since then, mood disorders have been the focal point of psychiatric research. We still don’t know what causes depression, but we’ve made great strides in describing the brain activity underlying emotions. And the more we’ve learned about the biology of mood, the more we’ve come to understand how aerobic exercise alters it. In fact, it’s largely through depression research that we know as much as we do about what exercise does for the brain. It counteracts depression at almost every level.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain