I've been reading about neurology and physical exercise.  The available research out there demonstrates that the best way to have a sound mind in old age is to become physically fit.  According to Ratey, Research performed on retired nuns demonstrate that physical exercises eliminates, or at least greatly reduces the impact of elderly dementia such as Alzheimers.  They found that the nuns who participated in physical exercise outwardly showed no sign of dementia despite the fact that post-humous brain evaluations demonstrated the same scar tissue as those seniors with dementia.  The conclusion was that physical exercise helps create, recruit and reroute neurons to keep the brain healthy and young.

Want to keep your brain young?  Try exercising.

John Medina echoes this notion in his book titled Brain Rules.  He suggests that the reason so many people have cognitive problems is due to a lack of physical activity.  He goes on to claim that the human brain evolved due to the very demanding physical activity that our earliest ancestors had to exert just to survive.  "The earliest humans had to travel 10 to 20 kilometers a day....That means our fancy brains developed not while we were lounging around but while we were working out."   Several paragraphs later he says. "Given our relative wimpiness in the animal kingdom... we grew up in top physical shape or not at all." 

 

A few questions surge from this reading.  How much of our modern brain is really associated with physical activity?  As the perfect sphere that I am, this question hunted me while I read the book.  A closer look at the study revealed that a fit lifestyle helps improve the cardiovascular system. This in turn helps reduce the likelihood of stroke or heart attacks.  This improved blood flow also help irrigate the brain.  This awareness reminded me of the time when I went with fellow educators to a conference a UCLA.  At times we listened to a very monotonous speaker.  You know, the kind of speakers who have the same dynamic speech as a static television set.  Sure enough, after 30 minutes of his speech, I lost focus and was about ready to call it a day.  I got up to go to the bathroom.  Once I reached the bottom of the three flights of stairs, I was exhausted, but I also noticed something that pleasantly surprised me;  My mind was once again and cognitively alert.  I made my way back up the three flights of stairs to the conference and, despite the physical sense of exhaustion, I felt mentally and physically energized. 

 

 

Medina continues to inform us about the role exercise plays on the brain, "exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving and fluid intelligence tasks." This comes as little surprise even to a lounge tater tot as myself.  Dr. Howard Pierce reminds us in Owner's Manual to the Brain  that prior research has demonstrated that the neurotransmitters that are crucial in the formation of memories include dopamine and norepinephrine.  Additional research has demonstrated that exercise stimulates the production of these very neurotransmitters.  Furthermore, John Ratey informs us in Spark: The revolutionary study of brain and body that exercise also helps relieve stress.  The reduction of this stress, then goes on to relax the neurons in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain.  Neurodynamics informs us that when the amygdala is overly excited by way of excessive emotional distress the signals have less of an opposition to travel to the prefrontal cortex where the higher thinking processes required for proper memory and learning occur.  Numerous studies document this.  Judy Willis, Howard Pierce, John Ratey, John Medina, Jim Krashen, and Jim Cummins are just a few who converge on these essential findings.  Furthermore, exercise strengthens the blood vessels in the dentate gyrus and the hippocampus.  This helps strengthen the brain's formation of memories by increasing oxygen that is available and cleaning out waste products that result from such a busy brain.

 

As an educator, the following lines hit me strong, "Recall that our evolutionary ancestors were used to walking up to 12 miles per day.  This means that our evolutionary history was supported by Olympic caliber bodies.  We were not used to sitting in classrooms for 8 hours at a stretch."  This means that our Victorian style of classroom setup is counter to the natural evolution of the brain.  Sadly, in our standards driven educational context we have eliminated exercise.  Ratey starts the first chapter of Spark by discussing an experiment done in a particular district in the state of Illinois.  The district got hold of heart monitors and had the children wearing them for PE as the first hour of the day.  Students who kept their heart rate at 60

 

 

Certain continued studies demonstrated that if you take a few sedentary people and moved them through physical training, cognitive abilities tend to rise in as little as four months.  The rise itself was not necessarily large, but it was large enough to be statistically significant.  However, there were also these two sobering pieces of information also provided.  First caveat was that too much exertion to the point of extreme exhaustion tended to counteract the effect.  The second caveat was that the cognitive effects of exercise gradually subsided once the exercise regimen ceased.