Optimizing your Brain through Exercise

yes actually my story starts with the somebody from MIT way back professor here who went on to win the MacArthur prize and a whole variety of other things came to me and he said look I had to stop running the marathon training for the marathon he was one of the early marathoners because they heard his ankle and then his knee and he came in he said look I have adult onset attention deficit disorder said I've never had a problem with attention because I've always been running and that was my that's what stimulated me to get more into attention with my patients and Ned was Hallowell was work was my I was chief resident he was resident so we B we began to work together and that's how we went to a TD for 15 years or so and then I came back to the whole idea about exercise and its effect on the brain and I bring my dog who's a Jack Russell and when I got this dog I took him to the vet the vet said you got to put him on Ritalin that's my website and on Facebook that's me and then I'm happy to be partially funded by Reebok I was a funded before by Johnson Johnson which lets me go around to do things like this it's wonderful anyway so my understanding I think our understanding and neuroscience is that we need to move we are born movers it's only 10,000 years ago that we were hunter-gatherers and we moved anywhere from 10 to 14 miles a day foraging moving from place to place running climbing swimming no one was training for triathlons or marathons everybody was fit or you died so what we know and what happened over a half million years that we were hunter-gatherers is that our brains grew and our brains grew from the motor cortex the red area there out up front core-tex got added on piece by piece over those half million years and they essentially added we essentially added on those pieces to help us be the best movers to think and to plan and predict and to do all those lovely things that we humans evolved to do but those same nerve cells we use and are stimulated when we move so that's one of the key concepts in a very hard-edged scientist on at NYU Rodolfo Linnaeus said that in a great book that's which we call thinking is really the evolutionary internalization of movement meaning if we didn't move we wouldn't be thinkers if we weren't the queens and kings of movement we wouldn't be the kinds of thinkers and have an MIT Media Lab now if you read the New York Times you see these warnings all the time don't sit sitting is the new smoking okay and that's a neat phrase it encapsulate sit and everybody's talking about this and studying it seeing how much mortality morbidity is increased as we sit well then we have we know from studies that when we stand our brains or that a little bit better maybe 7% better than we are when we're sitting so that's why as a lecturer it's very hard to sit and lecture from or even with me I have to move around so that keeps me focused and what what it does is it because we're using muscles to stand using the large skeletal most of the core muscles all that it feeds back to the brain switches the brain on which feeds forward to the prefrontal cortex which is where we generate our thoughts and this talk and and where we learn as well as perform now we're getting more and more data more and more laboratories are picking up on the effect of movement on the brain it's a watershed event was 1995 when they coming from worrying about the growing problem down the road with us boomers of Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline there was a big MacArthur Study multi countries looking at what were the things have prevented the onset of cognitive decline and aging well there are three one was optimal weight 2 was continuous learning 3 was exercise now even when they factored out the effect on the cardiovascular system the prevention of stroke exercise was really the the most robust prevention for cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease so this started a whole series of reports that really was flowering right in the midst of when neuroscience was beginning to really take off and so we have before then I would have in scanning the MEDLINE there would be 10 to 14 new papers a month now I'm sent 40 to 60 new abstracts every week from the laboratory of Medicine so we everyone's interested in it now because we know that the major effector on our brain in fact probably the most effective thing that we can do because when we evolved we evolved all those brain cells and when we move we fire those brain cells and now we look at our brain is not a you know we look at it as a muscle so the more we use it the better it is the better it grows so we're we're when we exercise we're using those nerve cells that we use to think and learn and all of that now this year this past year there have been a lot of group good events about exercise finally the American Psychiatric Association said that exercise is in fact a treatment for depression even though we've known this back with Epocrates the Institute of medicines has said did a large study and said look physical education fitness based physical education should be a core subjects for all of our kids not because it makes them healthy but it improves test scores and that data is there and they came to that conclusion the head of the CDC said that exercise is the best medicine for most everything the cancer people now are are using exercise as a treatment for improving in our in you know our killer cells improving the effects of medicines and I started zeroed in on this topic back when I heard about this school in Naperville Illinois School District 19,000 kids they were on supersize me the movie they interviewed the real revolutionary physical educator who had changed the PE program in Naperville to a fitness based one they had the kids every day they had been the traditional PE but he felt that the kids were still not fit they were still overweight getting depressed all the things that that you know that he wanted to change in effect so he made a big switch and change in the physical education program and he got kids moving all the kids moving they had him every day for 40 minutes in a junior high school he convinced to two other teachers everyone started to move they threw the balls out so they did running games at its calisthenics and a couple years into it he realized he was still giving the athletes the best grades so he said aha wearable measurement he was the first one to use heart rate monitors in gym class and your butt your grade by being in your cardiac training zone the reason why it was in Super Size Me the movie which is all about our obesity crisis here is that in 2003 of 19,000 kids 3 percent of them were overweight three percent overweight they looked at seventy five hundred kids in high school not one was obese not one and the average then was thirty three percent of our kids being overweight now it's 37 percent so something was happening and this was a big part of it was this daily Fitness base exercise cut to they two years before they did this these measures 99% of the kids took the International science and math tests at Tim's test and you can do that as a country we took we take it every three years all countries in the world we're eight and usually the u.s. is in the teen and math so not only where they fit these these kids were with it and smart so that got me in an airplane to go out and see what was going on now we had known about the the power of exercise in my field in psychiatry for a long time Hippocrates wrote about it 300 years BC however it was never science it was never proven and then in the late 70s early 80s Duke University Medical School was very interested in exercise as a treatment for cardiac problems so they were getting all these post MI and angina patients to exercise on treadmills and the psychologists were seeing if they could change them from Taipei to type B what they found was remarkable that not only were they less aggressive less anxious less stress but their mood was better they were less depressed so they began then a love affair with exercise and depression and anxiety aggression in the department of psychology and they were falling right along and then did a whole series of studies throughout the 80s and 90s in this paper the data from this paper and just these are cue cards for me so but the data showed they late they took a hundred people who came in to duke over a four-year period of time wanting treatment for depression they put a third of those patients on Zoloft and increasing doses of Zoloft they put another third on an exercise regimen and they put the final third on both and what they found after four weeks is that all their depression scores dropped to the same level they became undepressed for weeks and at the end of four months which was the level that the time of the study it held so that this was a treatment well this was barely big news because here was the first time we've had really scientific validity validity comparing it to a drug saying look this is as good as a medication all the people those hundred people coming in were sedentary they hadn't been movers at all so it was really changing the way their life was was being led and it really had a big impact for about three days you know it was on the news it was in Newsweek Jane Brody wrote about it but we forgot most of the people in my profession never heard of it so in psychiatrists who head up depression groups now they're hearing about it so we've known this and and this happened in 1999 and they were criticized because they didn't have a placebo group so they ten years later they did another bigger study with a placebo group in it so randomized controlled all that stuff that we have to do and found the same effect that it was as good as our antidepressants also we know that it has an effect on anxiety and stress that the more fit you are the more stress it takes to get you stressed to turn on that sympathetic nervous system and then the fight or flight syndrome and now we know we're learning why we know we change the dynamics of the arousal centres in the midbrain when we exercise retrains change the dynamics of norepinephrine which starts the whole process but we also have an effect in the hippocampus which is a big Center for our work in exercise the hippocampus is a memory center for the brain sort of Grand Central Station but it also when we've learned in the past 10-15 years that it's also a controller of anxiety and panic this is where most of the binding sites for cortisol are in the epoch Hampus so when we are stress we can learn quicker for a while until we burn out and that's what happens if you chronically stress you begin to erode nerve cells well it's also the area of the brain that that we have this wonderful evolutionary process called neurogenesis that occurs neurogenesis which we discovered happened in humans in 1999 we didn't know that happened before it was hard for a lot of people to grok it to understand it but we in fact grow new nerve cells all the time that's what neurogenesis is and we have stem cells and we grow them into this memory area of the brain every day and activities such as learning meditation enjoying laughing being with someone increase the amount of new stem cells that we change into new nerve cells but nothing does it like exercise and Elizabeth Gould it from Princeton she this year her group looked at what were these new brain cells what what kind of new brain cells were we growing so they looked at rats as we always do and found that the fit rats grew more of these cells that contain gaba which is the brain's major inhibitor so it puts the brakes on the excitatory nerve cells that might be responding to stress or a threat or something that in it takes more of a threat to turn on our defensive system and our sympathetic nervous system because we have more gaba cells in our hippocampus interesting now as I say one of the my whole work life has sort of been wrapped up and understand the brain and how we can affect it and we can affect it with exercise or we can use our ample drugs that we have and we have many of them a lot of them are me to drugs there hasn't been a really new breakthrough for a long time that affect the brain but exercise does the same kind of thing that many of our medicines do I've always said that about of exercises like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin because it does the same thing it increases our neurotransmitters and the three that we in psychiatry have been addicted to or dopamine norepinephrine and serotonin well immediately exercise increases the concentration of these neurotransmitters so it's like getting a bit of psychopharmacology there so all these drugs and and these neurotransmitters modulate many and a lot of our important human systems brain systems attention effort aggression motivation concentration alertness and with exercise that you can change the level of concentration of these neurotransmitters and back in 95 the big study that showed that rats when you had mice running and then rats that you grew thicker brains you grew thicker cortexes and you also they also discovered that your hippocampus --is were bigger well we had learned about this substance BDNF brain-derived neurotropic factor some years before and we thought of it as a helpful fertilizer for the brain well the in the mice that whose brains grew because of exercising versus those who did exercise not only were they smarter their IQ their SAT scores went up 20% and from from seven days to four weeks of exercising daily but the brains are thicker better bigger and so this led to this revolution that we see around us and BDNF does a lot of things for in the in the brain helps our brain cells survive trains it to ourselves to migrate appropriately at birth and throughout helps with plasticity and that is this the basis of our learning is our brain cells have to grow and the BDNF and other factors support the growth of our brain cells right at the tip making us have more receptors on the postsynaptic side and presynaptic lis increase the amount of neurotransmitters that we have there by firing away so it's an important element and it's become important in psychiatry actually from 2002 on when we began to look at depression as the brain shutting down and act eroding and so BDNF became an important measurement and something that the biotech company said oh we got to learn how to make more BDNF and then we'll make a lot of money well they never really were able to do that in any kind of useful way but and all the medicines that we have that treat depression affect BDNF positively we increase our BDNF levels so it became the signal factor to look and see whether the drug was going to be an antidepressant if it increased or BDNF well nothing increases our BDNF like exercise does it Trump's everything all the drugs learning meditation everything else it exercise increases our BDNF because just in the past two years actually somebody from MIT showed that we make more BDNF when we fire our brain so there's a feedback loop that goes back to turn on the genes to make more BDNF which then is self-fertilizing so and the point being is that when you're exercising you're using more brain cells than in any other activity you're using a bigger swatch of those hundred billion nerve cells firing them away to act and that feeds back into more fertilizer we also learned about increasing our levels of the endorphins and the most people heard of that certainly connected to the marathon runners who can you know they can run up Heartbreak Hill because they're in this Nirvana State because we thought that there's just because they were at least releasing all these endorphins because we can measure this back in the 80s and it's true we do increase our endorphin levels but we also lately have featured and focused on another substance that we didn't know much about back then called the endocannabinoids most people know what cannabis is well the you know it was a big deal in neuroscience when we realized that we make our own marijuana receptors and we have two or three marijuana type neurotransmitters or neural hormones that are released when we injure our body and our parts of our body and have an effect not only at the body level but in our brains and that's one of the areas that has been so interesting to me that that our body has by exercising our body by weight training by movement of all sorts we have a feedback loop up to our brain and guide the brain we have all these factors that are produced when we exercise in our bodies that travel up to the brain to have an effect and there's a an interesting factor in the heart called atrial natriuretic protein a and P that is made when our atriums beat faster and this goes to make our cardiovascular system better but it also goes up to the brain to the hypothalamus to turn down central command of our the fight or flight syndrome or turned down the effect of the rapid heartbeat so studies have been done in Germany where they blocked a and P from getting into the brain and 100 percent of people who have this blocked develop a panic episode and so these is an anti panic kind of drug or if you will or of a factor that when we exercise we are producing more of this stuff as their heart beats faster and it will have another effect on slowing down our sympathetic nervous system or the anxiety and panic now we know what happens in the periphery um when we exercise we tear muscle fibers and the next phase of that is recovery and repair and we send out all these factors to help repair our muscles IGF to bring in more insulin receptors to feed the area that's wounded fgf2 to make more muscle fibers VEGF to make more klappa larry's to bring in more blood supply other cytokines that turn on the inflammation system or tune it down or bring in the killer cells and then we have the endorphins in endocannabinoids that are made right at the spot of our muscle damage and we all damage our muscle when we use them it's inevitable and so we're always creating this this these substances that have a direct effect on the body for repair but also have an effect at the brain to turn the brain cells on to help actually cement our learning a of them go up to do that and a number have to be we have to activate them from the periphery to turn on or stem cells to develop into new brain cells now there have been many studies that looked at exercise and its effect on cognition and especially preventing Alzheimer's disease in the Mayo Clinic reviewed over 1,600 papers last - two years ago now off off showing a positive sense of exercise preventing the onset of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease a very big watershed study came out of there because we and in neuroscience a big push was to say okay let's really prove that exercise was a useful thing to do to prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease so many groups have looked at this this one very important study at the University of Illinois took a hundred sixty nine year olds and divided them into two one group they're all sedentary one group they began exercising the other group they they did stretching and toning but they weren't getting their heart rates up the other group they got their heart rates up to about seventy five percent maximum and lasted for about thirty to forty minutes four times a week and what happened after six months is they looked at their fence at their MRIs and found that those who were exercising those areas that are blue and yellow there those are areas of brain growth in the sixty nine year olds their brains actually grew so they didn't it Road they grew and by the way they they did eleven percent better on their SAT scores after after exercising for six months now one of the sides I love to show audiences is this is that evolution has built in our ability to change and to change at any time if we go for it Ernestine Shepherd on our left up here at the age of 56 was had been obese all of her life and was a couch potato she decided she's going to get fit she started to run she started to go the gym there she is at the age of 74 mr.singh some of you might have heard of because he was on ESPN mr. Singh had never exercised at the age of 80 his wife died at the age of 81 his son died he got depressed he went to the doctor he said start running so he took him up on that there he is at the age of 100 finishing the Toronto Marathon he retired last year finishing the Hong Kong marathon at the age of 101 and I have this vision of him being like Forrest Gump saying I'm tired I'm not doing it anymore but you can do it and the point being is you can switch on the machinery the epigenetic forces to change your body your brain your abilities to to exercise to to do it so there's there's really no excuse now one of the areas that is very important to me and one of the reasons that I'm here and goal over is that I've been trying to get exercise back in our schools and because you know what's happened everybody's teaching their tests it's all about the test scores it's all about you know what I call no child helped it all and and race to the top and you know so and so they're they're cutting away recess they're cutting away PE and as well as music and art but they've certainly cut away PE and so what we're trying to show is that we're actually that PE Fitness based physical education is really a way to improve test scores because no one cares that it makes the kids healthier or less depressed there's no measurement for that yet but they do care about test scores so this is this is one of the in one of these groups again at the University of Illinois looked at twenty kids I think they were in sixth grade just sitting that's a slide on your left and that's a qejy which is just a measure of brain activity the colors mean more brain activity so they were just sitting there and so their brains were that kind of active they did an hour walk or I'm sorry a 20-minute walk they came back got situated retested their EJ's found that they had all this activity in their brain the brains were turned on which is what we see and what we think and what we know and so way I talked about exercise and its effect on cognition is that it affects our brains in three ways the it helps with our brain systems that I talked about before our attention system especially memory system motivation system as well it works right at the cellular level to create the right soup for our nerve cells that's women to be most likely to grow and change and that's what we want to do if we're going to log in any kind of information and third it promotes neurogenesis like nothing else which is new cell growth now I mentioned Jack and I thought I'd bring him back as I say I had him running every day to treat his ATD and after a good run he would come in and have what I call the jak effect he could take notes for me because they're also very smart dogs however there are times when there's no recess and he goes back to his old ATD ways and by the way whenever I give a lecture everybody wants this slide but anyway so and that's what we see in now studies have shown that exercise is a good way to treat a TD with or without medicine so your attention system is turned on you're you're more focused you're more able to withstand frustration you may have were able to power through the problem at hand and not get so frustrated we've known this we've known that the more fit you are the better student you are for a long time this is a slide from 2001 I believe 2002 from California where they've been testing kids they've been evaluating their levels of fitness a million kids a year for the past since 2001 and they see a graph graphs like this every single year in grades 5 7 & 9 that is the more fitness standards you meet in this thing of Fitnessgram the higher your test scores in both math and English and this has been repeated now every year this is what they see so we know this happens ken Cooper who came up with the word aerobics about 41 years ago now got together the money to do a big study in Texas where they looked at 2.6 million kids in one year evaluated their fitness scores and looked at all kinds of other parameters they looked at their test scores they looked at their grades they looked at their truancy they looked at their attendance they looked at aggression and impulsivity and they found a direct correlation with increasing test scores increasing grades increasing attendance at school decreasing a direct correlation a decreasing with outbursts and impulsivity in the classroom the more fit the person was the more the higher their test scores the better student they were and the less disruptive they were and so there's this what was important about his study is that he looked also at demographics and there was no difference with sexual gender ethnic racial SES of your parents and even the school you went to so the more fit you were the better student you were now this study sort of cinched it for us in this area came out of Sweden a couple years ago now where the epidemiologist looked at 1.2 million boys in Sweden who all of them have been evaluated at age 15 levels of their aerobic fitness and and strength and all those other kind of measures as well as their IQ and their cognitive performance on tests the boys were read at the age of 18 because they entered compulsory military service did the same test what they found is that if your aerobic fitness improve in your high school years so did your IQs so did your cognitive performance on tests and this held even with 650 sets of identical twins so if one twin improved cardiovascularly their IQs were higher than their non exercising other twin or their so that it it really led to a lot of changes in and if you look at the science and you pay attention to it that we know that exercise improves our ability to think and perform as well as having an effect on regulating our stress levels in our mood and all the things that I worry about as a psychiatrist and there we are at Harvard we started a project called Harvard on the move there's the president and Dan Lieberman and Chris McDougall and myself and it's been going on now for three years it's a daily movement activity of all Harvard students or as many as we can get running walking moving during lunch or in the mornings and it's it's it's still continues it's actually funded so that's what continues and who really listens to this are the are these moving and shakers from Taiwan in the bottom panel here is my meeting President Ma of Taiwan who read the book and said I'm bringing you over so it became sort of a rock star in Taiwan he had a president ma graduate from Harvard Law School and also was a triathlete so when he read the book he said we're changed we're making a sports island out of Taiwan and so he began to immediately increase the the currents of PE from twice a week to three times a week in all the schools just went boom doing this one of the advantage of a centralized government there are many disadvantages then a pen Oh above it is me meeting with the Minister of Education Science and Technology in South Korea who also read the book and changed the school system he increased the school time by an hour per day half of it devoted to returning physical education and sport half of it to math music and art back it had been weeded out of the South Korean curriculum over the years because everybody was interested in test scores test scores test scores they were worried more also about the increasing level of suicide amongst they lead the world in adolescent suicide so they were trying to kill two birds with one stone as it were him keep the test scores up there and make the kids less stressed then and there I am with dr. cow from Japan who was an assistant deputy of Education who also engineered some changes in the curriculum for all Japanese students increasing the amount of exercise they had in their week there's a new book that's coming out in June which is what you're all hearing about here wellness and I call will call it go wild and looking at diet exercise play sleep nature mindfulness and the connection in small groups now some things to do for you all this is a paper that was in the Harvard Business Review in 2008 this cartoon it's about the boardroom meeting room of the future which is it was sort of a seemingly something out of this world but I presented this part of the talk out at Google University some years ago and afterwards one of the Googlers came up and said you know that's the way our boardroom is look from the beginning so and and and I know some of you have have pre toured with the idea of having these treadmills with a desk on top you know the tread desks but and they have them in in a lot of places in Silicon Valley also now as standing desks because is has come into the schools but has also come into a lot of businesses to just get off of our our Duff's because we think better we do better we pay more attention this is a bunch of schools in Minnesota started it some years ago now tested it found that the kids had better attention had better retention had better performance did better felt better it wasn't about wellness per se but they were better students then way there's all these things that are happening around the country and one of them is something called the fit desk those people in the back or on a fit desks versus their kids in the standard chairs and the kids that were on the fit desk which is a really elaborate unstable bicycle underneath your desk they did better than the kids in just regular seating so it's something again to think about they're fairly inexpensive then there's the the exercise ball sitting on them improving attention it was started by a teacher for a D D kids out in Palo Alto a long time ago now brought in her exercise ball had her kids sit on it and found that they could they could pay attention better they could do better and now a number of colleges have looked at it and see that those kids sitting on the exercise bow in a class do better than those kids who don't one other helpful apt that I will recommend to you is something called the seven-minute exercise you can get it as free downloadable it's developed in Orlando at the human performance laboratory and it's it's a fun seven minute of exercise to get your going when you can't when you need to take a break when you need to clear your mind this will do it so it's something you can all use so we have some time I think for questions so are there any yes nope yes so I'm curious when you say exercise do you mean getting your heart rate up or is it also okay to go for a walk or well when you when you go for a walk you'll get your heart rate up there's no question about that you will get your higher it up but it really depends on heart rate that's what exercise means getting your heart rate pushing it seventy-five percent of your maximum 75 to 85% is where most people who are exercising truly exercising live and that's that's where all the studies that I have talked about in terms of depression anxiety but also in terms of improving our ability to take in information and perform on it on a test is there an optimal amount of time that you'd want to exercise and then as well it's always a question it you know usually people ask that because they don't they think what's the shortest time I can exercise exactly and it's true it's its duration versus intensity so the more intense and that's the big thing if you follow exercise these days is high intensity interval training there was just another article in The New York Times last week about high intensity interval training that you get a bang for your buck if you just do 30 seconds of their maximum heart rate for 30 seconds you do you change a lot of your hormones around and a lot of your neurotransmitters and they and actually the cardiologists are the ones who are doing this now and seeing that this has as much effect as you spending 30 minutes on the treadmill every day so just just by switching around and having those sprints and getting your exiting your heart rate way up and that's what have y'all heard of Tabata dr. Tabata from Japan these 4-minute exercises I usually put the audience through that when I have a lot of time but it's it's really was developed for the Olympic team but it's very popular and it's it will get you going it's 30 seconds in 10 seconds rest 30 seconds and 10 seconds rest and you go as fast as you can whatever it is can be weights can be push-ups can be squats can be jumping jacks can be running in place but it's you do six sets of 30 minutes 30 seconds sorry so that's the extreme for a short amount of time yes and there's what we were all sort of taught the 30 minutes or 40 minutes of you know yes 75% what about the I heard something about this too if you could just do a you know a good vigorous brisk walk or something for 10 minutes three times a day or something does that can that kind of equal the three the 30 minutes yes yes you know that's been studied we looked at people putting together three actually three ten-minute blocks they have the same effect as a 30-minute block of getting a heart rate up for things like extra for things like depression anxiety and cognition so the important ones are affected and it doesn't matter where they splitted up or not so you're walking up the stairs rather than taking the elevator is the way to break up your day and a way to make your brain better and to sort of get a Jag from from from using your body better yes stand up for this question so I'm a pianist and playing the piano key here so I'm a pianist and playing the piano is actually an incredibly intellectually taxing activity because you often have to juggle like multiple melodies in your head and especially when you're improvising you have to like think on the fly and playing the piano is a sitting activity but there's a huge difference between kind of just like sitting back like in a normal desk and sitting on the piano where your abs and back are engaged and you're kind of moving around like that so it kind of goes with your point of sitting on exercise balls is good but the other point I wanted to bring up is that in addition to just like basic sitting correctly on the piano with the thing that really makes your mind go more quickly when you're playing music is actually engaging in a rhythm that takes your whole body and I was wondering whether some of the positive effects of taking a walk could perhaps also be contributed attributed to the fact that walking is very rhythmic it kind of gets your body in the room oh yeah I'm sure rhythm plays a big role the longest living profession or conductors of Symphony Orchestra because what do they come out to to practice every day what do they walk on stage with their baton and a towel because they're jumping around they're in high aerobic state all the time plus they're thinking like you think when you're playing the piano all the time they're having to remember and move and get their orchestra in control so they have the lowest incidence of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease they live longer there because they're happily engaged for sure and they're moving all the time friend of mine started a whole process called conductor size where to get people conducting you know just playing yes just jumping around like he does and especially in the nursing homes and but also in the schools to get people moving again and I guess just a little tiny nugget and I wonder if so the way that we're thinking about it now is that we're living like really sedentary intellectual lives and then we're like compartmentalizing another part of our life devoted to like very very physical activities I wonder if perhaps the benefits could be amplified if at all times we're not only intellectually but also physically and perhaps even emotionally engaged and it's trying to combine multiple aspects work I think that's what this entire course is about and well-being is to really get to really get optimal engagement and and you're right I do think I mean we know from studies that you can raise your heart rate but if at the same time you have coordination challenges or thinking challenges you do better you do better because you're using more brain cells more intensely so and we've done studies to show that okay we have i mean that's that's for sure so really one of the best exercises you can do is dance because it demands so much I mean aerobic activity and thoughtfulness and and getting the dance steps right then you had a partner in that's complicated even more so your brain is really on fire with with the dance and then you get into the rhythm and you're you're really using so much of your brain and stressing it and that helps it grow and stay with you question yes yes okay she had a question how do you explain the fact that athletes are generally not the smartest people in school well here's the thing about that I always say just think how that dumb the dumb jocks would really be if they didn't exercise the issue about that is that they don't care a lot of the high level athletes you know the in basketball and football you know they're going on to the College of you know and March Madness is coming and all that you know that they're not as interested in learning that's not there in front of them they don't care about now the other side of that is many people who are really bright and are really committed to learning had a horrible experience in physical education it was a time of shame and humiliation and that's why so many that's why it's hard to get school boards to change their mind you know it's because these people have been wounded by their experience in physical education because they were nerdy or they were dis coordinated or whatever it was and they couldn't do it so they were you know felt horrible and so they have bad memories about physical education because it was just about who was the best and all that kind of stuff and they weren't and they remember yes yeah I'm thinking about is a son I'm thinking about tools that would compel that kind of activity and all the antagonists in our lives to tools that are antagonist to that like you know computer work with the mouse and a keyboard and when I think about for instance video games and watching kids for instance on video games they find the the least activity the least movement that will get the result in the game so you know how how can there be ways to push people towards this if you know if just knowing about it and you know we're lucky to be here to hear your lecture but there are you know huge populations of people stuck in sedentary live right can't be compelled no no you have to change it from bottom-up and top-down there's no question about it unless you live in a centralized government you know the guy can say okay we're going to change you know we're going to do this it's going to be different but no the but we actually use video games to increase activity not the sedentary video games but things like Dance Dance Revolution and the Wii Fitness and the Xbox has its own version of a fitness trainer so it can get kids moving they don't play those video games they've it's usually the war games or you know wo W or something like that yes last question because we're running out of time and John has a plane to catch I just want to say that I'm a little disappointed that I'm only kind of hearing about this today for the first time and you've written books and so have you ever gone to Michelle Obama and said hey you're talking all the time about X she's about five of my books yes I've been been there and said said these things and I thought when Obama first one because he's a everybody in the White House was a big exerciser at that point when he first kept in his first term anyway I don't know about now hmm but I knew both he and Michelle were big exercise and I thought this was going to be an easy thing to push through but there are 50,000 school boards in our country and the central the Department of Education may wish to change things but you have to change things 50,000 times so it's it and you get this resistance all the time because teachers think it's about seat time drill baby drill and that's the way we'll improve education and and and not by adding Fitness based physical education back to our schools and and that's been that is my mission is to get people moving for the schools but also for wellness I mean either there isn't any better medicine than exercise now you'll be Weller if you add exercise into you'll sleep better you'll go into slow-wave sleep quicker but so it's something that both things it's it wellness is a multi-faceted issue and you have to pay attention to all them but anyway thank you all for attending and and being so good thank you thank you very much John maybe will disable the elevators in the building or something too for all of those people that weren't here today so for those of you that are in the class that are registered for the class will meet in two four four in a couple of minutes so and everybody else thanks for coming

Channel: MIT Media Lab

Views: 112,439

Rating: 4.8711944 out of 5

Keywords: MIT, neurology, advancing wellbeing, learning, emotions, cognition

Id: cLBXtclu0sg

Length: 56min 52sec (3412 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/BigTimePapaAJJz]

it doesn't

[u/CommanderKenhan]

i suddenly became 200 iq by bench pressing