Book Summary: Spark
John Ratey’s Spark discusses the connections between exercise and the brain. How exercise can increase your ability to learn and even cope with stress. Backed by science this book shows the many connections between how we move and how that impacts our thinking.
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Drinking Water – James Salzman
Quotes:
What it means is that you have the power to change your brain. All you have to do is lace up your running shoes.
Exercise is medicine.
One of the prominent features of exercise, which is sometimes not appreciated in studies, is an improvement in the rate of learning.
Spark Book Summary Notes:
The Basics
Lifting weights strengthens muscles right? Well, it also helps strengthen your brain. Your brain is quite malleable, which means that it can change over time and with exposure to the right things. One of those things is exercise.
Exercise has numerous effects on the body, some of which include; increases in levels of serotonin, dopamine and a protein called growth factor. These three components all have a positive effect on our brains. They work to sharpen our focus, increase our mood and motivation as well as strengthen the pathways between different connections in our brain.
The more you move, the sharper and more primed for learning you become.
Stress And Exercise
Stressful situations are a huge problem for most people. The overwhelm and chaos from some modern activities can do a real number on us. Physical activity though can dampen these effects.
Physical activity produces stress in the brain, the same as regular mental stress would. Unlike mental stress though, the stress caused by exercise is controlled. We don’t often train ourselves to complete and utter exhaustion. Just like how training does some damage to muscles that then gets repaired and strengthened, something similar happens in our brains. Only our brains build resistance to stress instead of exercise.
Feeling Down? Exercise!
Once considered purely psychological, we now know that a part of depression or even just feeling down can be physical. It makes sense since physical activity can also affect a persons mood, that the opposite is possible too.
While searching for a biological explanation of depression, scientists found the link between mood and activity. Exercise can help to reduce some of the signs and symptoms of people feeling down or even depressed. This is a direct result of the endorphins created during exercise which, similar to some mood enhancing drugs, create a feeling of euphoria.
Degeneration And Age
Poor lifestyle choices have been shown to increase your chances of developing degenerative brain disorders. Great lifestyle choice, on the other hand, do the opposite. This is increasingly important as we age.
Lifting weights has been shown to decrease the risk of osteoporosis while also helping the brain form new connections. Running lowers blood pressure as well as helps to keep your circulatory system healthy. Continuing to exercise, even low impact exercise such as swimming is incredibly important for preventing mental decline as we age.
Where the body goes the mind will follow.
