Spark

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Exercise helps produce the chemicals in the brain that grow new neurons in the brain, increasing our learning aptitude.

Dr. John J. Ratey, M.D., is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and has a private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It fortifies your bones. Osteoporosis doesn’t have much to do with the brain, but it’s important to mention because you need a strong carriage to continue exercising as you age, and it is a largely preventable disease. Osteoporosis afflicts twenty million women and two million men in this country. More women every year die from hip fractures — a vulnerability of osteoporosis — than from breast cancer. Women reach peak bone mass at around thirty, and after that they lose about 1 percent a year until menopause, when the pace doubles. The result is that by age sixty, about 30 percent of a woman’s bone mass has disappeared. Unless, that is, she takes calcium and vitamin D (which comes free with ten minutes of morning sun a day) and does some form of exercise or strength training to stress the bones. Walking doesn’t quite do the job — save that for later in life. But as a young adult, weight training or any sport that involves running or jumping will counteract the natural loss. The degree to which you can prevent the loss is impressive: one study found that women can double their leg strength in just a few months of weight training. Even women in their nineties can improve their strength and prevent this heartbreaking disease. I have faith that when people come to recognize how their lifestyle can improve their health span--living better, not simply longer--they will, at the very least, be more inclined to stay active. And when they come to accept that exercise is as important for the brain as it is for the heart, they’ll commit to it. Here’s how exercise keeps you going: Oh my god. According to this book I am a walking recipe for Alzheimer's disease. This is a book by a Harvard psychiatrist about the link between mental health and exercise. As life-long depression sufferer with not one, but two parents who suffer/ed from Alzheimer's, I'm pretty much in the exponentially high risk category for dementia. But there is hope, if I get off my ass and start exercising.

And so on. Perhaps this will make me sound very ignorant, but most of the science boiled down to: exercise makes the body produce chemical X, which is beneficial to the brain.

Central to the thesis of the book are the myriad benefits exercise has on the health and well-being of your entire body, as well as your mind. Ratey writes: This book gets a bit repetitive after awhile (I quit after reading about 3/4 of it), and the conclusions he drew from some of the research studies seemed to really be stretching what you could reasonably conclude from the actual results. The big idea of the book is very simple: Physical activity is a necessary part of our evolution to develop ourselves both physically and mentally. John Ratey, the author, starts the book with a hypothesis that we have developed superior brains because we're creatures that need to move to find food. Adding on to that exercise keeps us sharp through several neuro-pathways that helps us learn the best ways to manage our food, predict how our environments work and remember all of this for the future use. In essence the connection between physical activity and learning is hardwired into the brain's circuitry. The book opens with a visit to Naperville Central High School in Illinois where a young physical education teacher is introducing Zero Hour PE class as an educational experiment. The object of this experiment is to see if physical activity “sparks biological changes that encourage brain cells” creating an environment in which the brain is able to learn. Here there is a unique approach to physical education. The goal is to teach fitness instead of sports. They use a heart monitor to measure effort instead of performance. Students are graded on their effort not their achievement. They use “small-sided sports” like three-on-three basketball or four-on-four soccer to eliminate a lot of the inactivity found in most sports.I love the research based evidence presented throughout the book which not only convince us that exercise is beneficial but also explains how it's beneficial.

People who are addicted to bad habits get addicted to it because they need the pleasure to overcome depression, anger, stress and pain. This book tells us how to avoid bad habits and start exercising. People who thinks that exercise is an additional work or burden should read this book and understand the importance of exercise and how it can change their life. Physical activities change biological reaction in the body. People who do regular exercise stay on top on a country level - which includes technology, sports, etc. Ratey goes in depth with research and science and explains the most complex parts and functions of brain, different neurotransmitters and different issues such as stress, anxiety, depression, attention deficit, addiction aging, hormonal changes and many more unfamiliar details about effects of exercise, everything written in well organized and in easy- read way that makes the reader not to put this book down. The last couple of years has had an explosion of Neuroscience books. What is even more unbelievable is that the researchers have actually decided to share what they are discovering in a way anyone can understand instead of the typical closed circle of academia. Now, it is a universal fact that exercise is good for you. It’s been said and done so what’s so different about this book? Well, 'Spark' dives deeper and attempts to find out the effect of exercise on the brain. The book provides a detailed explanation of how different parts of the brain work on a biological level to carry out the everyday functions and what part of the brain is responsible for different tasks. We get to learn how the brain is able to function at a cellular level like how the neurons communicate with each other to carry the signal that governs our actions. It was interesting to know how the role of different neurotransmitters and how exercise helps to balance them out. Exercise is a preventive medicine as well as an antidote. Exercise particularly affects our executive function - planning, organization, initiate or delay a response, consequence evaluation, learning from mistake, maintain the focus, working memory and it helps us to access the front part of the brainTo some extent the discoveries aren't surprising, but then it is always nice to actually have hard-evidence for something many people just intuited. With this book as well as a few others I have now adopted the paradigm of the baseline human body template being that of a stone-age hunter/gatherer. In the stages of evolution of the human body and mind we spent most of our time in that time period, with our bodies being finely tuned to that lifestyle. Now anytime we deviate too far from that active lifestyle and diet we start to experience the detrimental effects. Our sedentary easy-access-to-processed-food lifestyles are in direct contradiction to what our bodies were optimized for hence all the multitude of obvious ailments plaguing the industrialized world.

But perhaps I did not like the book as much as I expected because it did not resonant with my own experience. Three years ago, I went from hardly ever exercising to running four or five times a week. However, I really cannot say that I feel mentally sharper, or significantly calmer, or even less anxious than I did before. (Ratey promises quite a lot!) If anything, I feel slightly dumber.I opened this book thinking that, because I exercise consistently, and because I like being praised for my intellect, I was in for a festival of self-congratulation. After all, according to Ratey (Hagerman helped with the writing but the book is Ratey’s brainchild), I am doing everything right—or close enough—and I should be reaping massive cognitive and emotional benefits from my exercise routine. Even so, I found myself curiously disappointed as I read. This book is simple and straightforward. I went into it with a view to get to know more about the effects of exercise on the brain but learned a lot of important things about the working of the brain. The important thing I learned is that brain can be analogous to a muscle: it can change and improve, it grows with use but withers due to inactivity like it follows the principle ‘use it or lose it’. For people out there, the points stated in the book about how exercise affects your learning and how it can improve your physical and mental health will certainly be a powerful motivator to get them to adopt the habit of exercising in their daily life. As a gym teacher, I am all about movement. I want my kids to be active and engaged for as much of class as possible. But even though I was already on the exercise bandwagon, I had no idea how extensive the benefits of exercise really are. In Spark, John Ratey explains why the benefits of exercise to the heart, lungs, and muscles, are secondary to the benefits of exercise to the brain. The first chapter is the most engaging, where he shows how a few rogue school systems boosted test scores and lowered behavioral issues by introducing morning exercise programs. One school scored in the top 5 in the world in math and science. The first few chapters in this book begun as a delightful and insightful exploration into a high school that revolutionised the way they did exercise/gym class and the significant positive effects that had. I was delighted by the book in the first few chapters and excited to read the rest. but from then on i was very disappointed.