Spark Quotes

“In order to cope with anxiousness, for instance, you need to let certain well-worn paths grow over while you blaze alternate trails.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“The paradox is that our wonderful ability to adapt and grow doesn’t happen without stress—we can’t have the good without a bit of the bad.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark

“A notable experiment in 2007 showed that cognitive flexibility improves after just one thirty-five-minute treadmill session at either 60 percent or 70 percent of maximum heart rate.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“As the stories of BDNF and exercise developed in parallel, it became clear that BDNF was important not merely for the survival of neurons but also for their growth (sprouting new branches) and thus for learning. Eero Castrén, as well as Susan Patterson from Kandel’s lab at Columbia, found that if you stimulate LTP in mice by making them learn, BDNF levels increase. Looking inside their brains, researchers determined that mice without BDNF lose their capacity for LTP; conversely, injecting BDNF directly into the brains of rats encouraged LTP.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“One of the prominent features of exercise, which is sometimes not appreciated in studies, is an improvement in the rate of learning, and I think that’s a really cool take-home message,” Cotman says. “Because it suggests that if you’re in good shape, you may be able to learn and function more efficiently.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Unlike humans, rodents seem to inherently enjoy physical activity, and Cotman’s mice ran several kilometers a night. They were divided into four groups: mice running for two, four, or seven nights, and one control group with no running wheel. When their brains were injected with a molecule that binds to BDNF and scanned, not only did the scans of the running rodents show an increase in BDNF over controls, but the farther each mouse ran, the higher the levels were.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“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.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“physical activity sparks biological changes that encourage brain cells to bind to one another.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark

“study shows that exercise—or at least the resulting fitness levels—can have a powerful impact on that fundamental skill.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“used”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“Public health recommendations, from the Centers for Disease Control to the American College of Sports Medicine, suggest doing some form of moderate aerobic exercise for thirty minutes at least five days a week.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“perhaps because of the way he dressed, I thought of a goth girl named Rachel who had really transformed herself by playing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR),”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“If you’re not eating, not caring about your body, letting it waste away, having your mind distorted by being constantly intoxicated, you can’t be a serious exerciser. You can’t do it.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain