In Spark | Dr. John Ratey | Talks at Google

Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to another exciting afternoon of authors at Google today. We have Dr. John Rattie, who's going to be speaking to us today about the science of exercise in the brain. And so I know part of the reason why we all came here was for the Google 15, and part of the reason was to find out how exercise can make us smarter. And hopefully we'll address both of those questions today for our folks at YouTube, for our virtual audience, and for our VC audience. Please use the question mics over at the end for any questions that you may have towards the end of our talk. And without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to our author today.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I enjoy being here. I'm here with Christian Hojes, who's a partner of mine who invented the Smart Cycle, which is a revolutionary new toy to combine aerobic exercise and learning for kids. This is my dog, Jack. Jack Russell. He'll be helping me navigate through this talk. Jack is famous. He's brilliant. He's about ready to talk any day now. But like all Jack Russell's, he has attention deficit disorder, which I've written about three books on. Driven to distraction. Some of you might recognize that. But Jack was a poster child for two ADHD groups, national groups across the country for a couple years. But he's gotten better as we've exercised him. So now I like to think of exercise from an evolutionary perspective. When we were out there on the plains, we were running or moving from 10 to 12 miles on average per day. We're talking a half million years on the plains, on the savannas, running around. We made our genes there 10,000 years ago as we began to farm. Okay, 10,000. I used to say the genes travel and change at glacial speed, but you can't use that analogy anymore because the glaciers are moving, but very, very slowly. Okay? And so we have the genes that we developed over time. And one of the exciting new things I think in the past 10 years in neuroscience is how wrapped moving is to our cognition. And spend some time talking about that today. Now, you might have all seen this slide here. Wait a minute. Sorry. I always don't know. But you know, this is what happened than we are sitting and sedentary and not moving when our genes really code us to move all the time. But also they say, look, you might be going 40 miles tomorrow, so take a break. And if you're safe, you have food, you have entertainment, you don't need to be moving. So part of the reason why we gravitate to the couches and our clickers is because we're sort of meant to, to conserve in the same manner. We're meant to take in as high caloric food as we can because it might be a famine tomorrow, we may not find that food, we might not be able to catch the game. So anyway, there's a reason why we're in this obesity crisis in the past 30 years because things evolved and changed so rapidly and you all are part of the problem, but also the solution, hopefully. Now this is a paper that was in Journal peeds a couple years ago. This is, these are obese kids and these are their siblings and this is their IQ at the age of 5 or 4 or 5. So usually there's a scatter of about 10 points. With obesity, the kids are sort of slower. And this is what we have today where we can just take it easy, not have to bother about things nearly as much as we used to. And in the past 30 years it's gotten much, much worse. Now this is one of the brain slides you'll see because it's about exercise and how it affects the brain. You know, we grew up in the 90s and 80s and 90s when everybody was talking about the right, left brain difference in neuroscience. Today, most of us are talking about the front and the back. Back is input, sensory input. The front is all behavior. This is the motor cortex, sensory cortex. All this evolved as we, as we evolved as a species to help us plan better, how, how to move better, how to sequence our movement, how to evaluate consequence. What we did yesterday, all that comes up because of our frontal cortex, this whole area, this is where we think. This is where you come up with new ideas. This is where we abstract things. This is where we write new music and new books. And this is where we take in information at the beginning and guide not just movements, but our thinking and our speech. So in gender differences, everybody always wants to know. Some of you might have seen this very important slide done at Harvard Medical School where I teach and they're available on my website, so we can get through that fairly quickly. Anyway, this was compelling to me to sort of finally get to this book. This is my eighth and because I was introduced to this school in Naperville, Illinois and was on supersize me on the direct or on the dvd, on the director's cut, they interviewed one of the people. I dedicated the book to, Phil Lawlor, who was really responsible for evolving this revolutionary program at Naperville over the past 15 years. He sort of changed the whole focus from sports in physical education to fitness. And when they made Super Size Me, it was around 2002. At that time they had 19,000 kids in their school district. And they evaluated. 3% of them were overweight. Okay, the national average is 30%. At the same time, all their eighth graders took the International Science and math test, which the US uses scores in the mid teens or so. They lobbied to take it as a country. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore always are in the top five or so they took it, 96% of their eighth graders and they came in number one in the world in science and number six in math. Now, Naperville is a pretty upper middle class school district, but they beat out everybody, all comers, including other high schools all over the world. Anyway, now exercises sort of made it in the news. I understand you all had John Medina here some weeks ago and this is his cartoon that's out of Harvard Business School, Harvard Business Review in February. It's called breakthrough ideas of 2008. And this is what was put on there about the boardroom of the future. Why? Because being on the treadmill moving a little bit is better for your brain. It helps your brain think better. It helps your brain learn better and be more creative by moving just a little bit. And you're going to see a whole new series of machines that are coming that are going to help that happen. There's already a tread desk that's available and Steelcase, who makes these kinds of things, is coming out with a unit together soon. So that by moving a mile to a mile and a half a day. And I just saw two administrators, assistants that down in the Cooper Clinic down in Dallas, they've been on it for a year. They love it. They say they feel energized. Each of them have lost weight. They don't feel like they get tired. The only reason why they have to stop the machine is when they have to write. So they're typing away, you know, just moving all day long. Started by this crazy cardiologist up at the Mayo Clinic who has been doing it now for many, many years. But the whole concept of moving and learning sort of go together because it's so integrated. Our moving brain is really our thinking brain. And that's what most people don't get now. Also, exercise is good for other things. There's a great book, Running with the Antelope, Erasing the Antelope. And in it, this scientist talks about what we needed to do back on the planes. Exercising helps us have Patience, be optimistic, maintain our focus and our motivation. As I said, I've done a lot of work with attention deficit disorder and we always recognize that exercise was a very important component of helping these kids stay focused, get focused. Because we now know that exercise raises all these neurotransmitters that we're all invested in, especially in psychiatry. Serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine. So I always tell people that a lot of exercises like taking a little bit of Ritalin and a little bit of Prozac, so that you're more focused, you're less nudgy, you're less apt to be having to get up and move. You don't have the heebie jeebies as much as. So we see this in all of us. But a major impact has been on coming out of Duke University. The cardiology department there was one of the first to start exercising. Cardiac patients. Well, the psychologist noted that they were having a decrease in hostility, improvement in mood, improvement in anxiety. This is a paper that came out in 1999 where they compared split up 83 people who came in with depression. And these are, we have all these scales that look at depression and rate them. And they put them on increasing doses of Zoloft, or a third of them, and an exercise program. All these people were sedentary before they began. So they exercised them four times a week in a supervised setting for 40 minutes and raise their heart rate up to 75% max heart rate, which is, you know, sweating, sweating. And their moods improved at the end of four weeks. Everybody, this is a ten month style. But at the end of four weeks, all the various legs of this experiment, all of them had dropped about the same. So that exercise at four weeks was as good as medicine and good as the combined group. But at 10 months, those that were just exercising did better. It's a small number. So statistically, if you have one or two people who stopped their medication or stopped exercising and got redepressed, you're going to throw off this skew. But nevertheless, people who just were exercising felt better, better about themselves. They were the agent of change, et cetera. Well, this came out in 1999 and we made big news. Newsweek, New York Times, CBS, CNN. And made it there for about a day and then it was gone. Because of our ADD culture these days, things got wiped off. There was no Madison Avenue firm supporting it and keeping it in people's consciousness. So many of my colleagues don't know about it. There's been a whole raft of studies since then showing that exercise does improve mood, keeps our mood up, decreases our tension, decreases our feeling of fatigue, improves our vigor, improves our ability to perform and work. NASA did a study in the 70s showing there was a 17% increase in productivity if they gave during their break at lunch that the people exercised that, that improved on one of their facilities. Anyway, one of the big areas that we're always looking at is people that give up. There's a syndrome called learned helplessness. That's a code word for depression. And many of my ADD dyslexic people that can't get it learned to give up. Well, we now have rat models for everything including learned helplessness. And what we found recently and with people too, but first with the animals, is that if you pre exercise rats or mice and then put them in the learned helplessness paradigm, they'll have a harder time giving up and they'll be quicker to recover. And if you put them into that paradigm which is like there's no hope, there's no hope kind of feeling and then exercise and they're quicker to return to the try and figure out what's going on. And so anyway, I don't have enough time to talk about that. But anyway, exercise really optimizes our, our learning capacity in three different ways. First, it increases our ability to attend, increases the systems of the brain. The brain systems, our attention system, our motivation system, our memory system, our ability to use our frontal cortex. All the studies that have ever been done show an increased activity in the front part of the brain. As you recall, that's the area where we think, where we focus, where we stay focused so you're better able to stay with it. The next part area that exercise is probably the best of what we know to do and believe me, people are looking for ways of improving our ability to learn is at the cellular level. Exercise creates the best soup in the brain. Not only those neurotransmitters that I mentioned, but a whole new class of proteins called neurotropins. And the favorite neurotropin of us all is BDNF or brain derived neurotropic factor. What I simply call miracle grow of the brain. It's a brain fertilizer because that's what it does. It keeps the brain cells, it's released when the brain is active. When you're learning something in one area of the brain, you'll be activating, releasing bdnf. BDNF keeps those cells healthy, prepares them to wire together, which is a building block of learning. It puts, it makes for the right kind of environment helps deal internally in the cell itself builds up. It's what we call a stress inoculator. Exercise builds up our reserve of staff in there to clean up the toxic waste, because that we accumulate over time. So that's why we started worrying about this in neuroscience, because we know back in the 90s that exercise was one of those components that prevented the onset of Alzheimer's and cognitive decline. So from 1995, there were two or three papers in the journals, and at that point now there's over 300 papers a year in neuroscience. And exercise as well as finally, the clinical side is starting to go, but because they make ourselves more resilient, tougher to withstand the ravages of time and stresses in the future. Now, another new area that we just knew about since 1999 is what we call neurogenesis, or new cell growth, birthing new brain cells every day. Despite George Bush. We have stem cells in our brains, okay, different pockets. One that the one main major one feeds into an area called the hippocampus, which is sort of Grand Central station for memory. And we build new brain cells every day, maybe 10,000, maybe 12,000. No one's ever done a good enough study to count them. That's hard. That's hard to get human samples. But rats build about 66,000 new brain cells every day. And conservatively, we're a little. Probably a little more advanced and get more. So this is what has really excited researchers. And you see, Jack, I told you that after he's run, he. He's been able to sit down, take notes and stay with it when he doesn't get out, when he doesn't have recess, he has a problem. He gets bored very easily, as most ADD kids do. And he says, the hell with you. So now we know in the obesity studies that are coming out, we know in a very hard science way that increasing doses of exercise, this is a simple study to see how much exercise was needed to reduce weight in these overweight kids in Georgia. And so they just started a program after school, had 200 kids, divided them up into three categories. One that didn't change anything in the control group, another one that played games for 20 minutes and then the last one for 40 minutes. And the interesting part of this for me is that the changes in what's called our executive function, or ability to sort and sequence and plan and all those kinds of things that we all do with the front part of our brain. On neuropsych testing, the scores went up, and their math Scores went up simultaneously. So. And what was interesting for me is that they, I knew the people who did the study and they went in with the negative bias. They went in thinking they weren't going to see this kind of change. So it really surprised a bunch of the people on the team. So that's always nice when you get that in a study, another study looking at rats, because we know so much from the 90s, 95 to now, we know so much of what happens in the elderly brain. We know you regrow brain cells that you regrow areas of the brain that have shrunk. If you start sedentary people exercising after the age of 65, you improve their mood, decrease the stress, decrease their anxiety, do all those things that we really want to do to optimize our personhood as people. But we never did much look at kids except, except recently here in California, before Arnold came in even, you all were evaluating the kids in school in fifth, seventh and ninth grade, evaluating their fitness. So this is a study looking at a million children. Okay. And the fitness gram is six different evaluations of different kinds of fitness, including cardiovascular fitness and strength and all flexibility and other things. But the more fitness points the students had, the higher their scores on the. It's a Stanford test, not the national SATs to compare students across the school districts. So you see there was sort of this gradual uptick. The more fit they were, the higher they achieved. And this was done. People looked at it and saw that it was independent of their socioeconomic status, so it didn't discriminate. Now this is my good friend bdnf. That's the so called neurotropin that is important for our growth of our brain survival. Maturation of the, of the brain systems translates activity. It helps ourselves knit together, which is a building block of learning, and it increases our neuroplasticity. You all are very neuroplastic. You take in information all the time and your brain changes. That's what neuroplasticity means. Your brain learns things when it changes, when it grows. And exercise is probably the best thing that we know of to boost that ability to learn and to parse information and put things together. It does it by increasing our vascular flow, by getting collateral circulation like we do when you lift weights, you break down muscle and you set up a whole series of responses to say, we need more blood flow here, so let's make more blood vessels, let's make more fibers. The same thing happens in the brain, but you also increase a bunch of these little critters that are helpful for our brain cells to do what they're supposed to do, which is to adapt to new environments, code word learning to put together information and change the brain so that information is held. But what was fascinating to me in researching this book is that I learned about all these great things that come from our body. These little characters, little proteins, mitogens that are important mainly in the body. IGF1 is an insulin factor that causes us to make more insulin receptors so you reduce diabetes. FGF and VEGF are also involved in turning on the machinery to make more cells, including our stem cells in the brain, so that they travel up through the blood system into our brains to do good stuff to make more cells, but mainly to keep our plasticity of the cells that we have there going. And this is a building block of learning what you do when you learn anything. As you make more stuff coming out here and make more receptors on this side, it all changes. It's organic, it's beautiful. They showed a film from Germany some years ago showing it actually happening. And they saw this growth of an arm out from one side to the next as the nerve cell was more stimulated, that is, it was more active, it was growing more and better connection. Now when this is really, to me, it's exciting to you not. But we need. We don't make new blood vessels unless we stress our bodies or our muscles we damage. Then we make more blood vessels and it sets up this whole business of, of change. Stress is necessary for growth. And these are all growth factors. After you've damaged the muscle, these guys go up to the brain and are important for the brain to function well. This guy turns on the stem cells to divide and then that potentiates them to develop into new brain cells. So they've done all these studies on rats, humans, where the more you exercise, the more brain cells you have. And the rats are smarter and people, hopefully they're 11% smarter. But also, since I'm in California, talk about what happens locally at the muscle area or in the body. Two of the favorite factors that are released, the endorphins or internal morphine that we discovered in 77 or 73. Sorry. And then another one, the endocannabinoids, which is marijuana. So we have morphine receptors and marijuana receptors in our body all over the place. And why you don't feel pain when you're exercising and you're stressing your muscle until the next day is, is because these guys are liberated. They're stress factors. You block the pain signal going up to your brain until the next day, and then you wake up and then you're achy if you've pressed it. And they also start the repair process. And they also work in the brain. Not nearly so wonderful as you'd like to think, that we don't always get that endorphin rush when you do 10 minutes of exercising, but you get some endorphin release and some marijuana release and all these other things like serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine, which in my field, that's what we've been searching for, how to boost that, change that, lower that over these past 30 years. And exercise raises it very consistently and very nicely. So that's one of the reasons why, why we see such an effect of exercise. Now I mentioned these guys and they also, they start things rolling in terms of repair. That's we can stress, but you need that recovery period to repair, to grow. Cardiologists have also taught us just this past decade about another substance that's made in the heart called anp. In the atrium of our heart, as we, as our heart beats, we make more of this stuff, this ANP that goes up to the brain to shut down the stress response, okay? So the faster your heart rate is, if you, if you're taxing it aerobically, you're making more of this stuff. That is a natural control to turn down the panic or the feeling of being out of control. So you lower the blood pressure, et cetera. Now the people in New York, I'm from Boston and we always joke about New Yorkers, but at Columbia, they did this study that came out last year, the Department of Neurology, this guy didn't believe that exercise really had such a profound effect on the brain. So he took 11 healthy 30 year olds who weren't exercising and got them into an exercise program for three months, okay? And they did a fancy scan at the beginning, this area. They did some different kind of scan than even the MRI looks at blood flow as well as different stuff. And what they found was that there was a 30% increase in this area of the brain in terms of blood flow and density than there was at the beginning. And they had a control group and they didn't see much of a change. So in three months, they grew 30% more of their brains. And they did tests to show that there was a slight improvement in learning and memory scores. But it doesn't take much, it doesn't take much time. And all the studies that most of the studies have Been done. Look at people who are exercising at about the sweating heart rate, about the level of how. Where you are breathless and you're sweating, you're beginning to sweat. So it's sort of brisk walking up a slight hill, even. So, you know, there's a lot. So anyway, this is what I find with ADD people. Exercise has always been important for us as a tool to help people stay focused. There's Jack. When he's exercising, he loves to do the ball, and then he can bring the horses in. We don't have horses, but anyway, but. And this is Jack and his brother when they weren't out walking. Now, one of the things that's really so impressive, since I wrote the book, I've been getting reports from all these school systems all over the country about introducing exercise in 2007 in the fall. And one of the things that we see universally is that exercise drops aggression in the schools. These are inner city schools, right. And it's sort of. Everybody says, oh, it makes a lot of sense, right? It burn off energy. Well, well, there's a lot more to it. What they're doing is they're turning on their inhibitory powers of their frontal cortex. They're turning that part on to put the brakes on their impulsive actions, their impulsive feelings. So this is one of the schools in Kansas City where they introduced this program of daily pe. It was rudimentary. They were just using their cardiac monitors on their hand or on their risks to evaluate them, and they had to go out and run every day and play games, and there wasn't much fancy stuff going on. It was a poor school district. And what they found was obvious an improvement in their fitness scores. But the big point was that there was this 63% reduction in suspensions and disciplinary referrals. And this is another way to look at that. Suspensions dropped 66% and incidents dropped 59%. They also did it the same year they introduced this into a junior high school in Kansas City. And there's your controller, so you can forget about that. But in 2005, they had 1100 incidents. And in 2006, when they started the program, it dropped to 400 or so. It dropped by two thirds. Similarly, there was a drop in suspensions or incidents of reverse that the same sort of percentage. And this has happened all over the country. When they introduced very rudimentary program. This one is the one I like the most. It just happened in 2007. One of the PE teacher or a PT teacher at this magnet school in Charleston South Carolina came back after one of the lectures I gave and started, said, well, we have all of our kids for 40 minutes in the morning in the gym, sort of waiting for people to come in and the buses to all to come in. But she started an exercise program, very rudimentary. Playing basketball, jumping rope, doing pogo sticks. And they had a couple Dance Dance Revolution machines there. So. And she. Her job was to blow the whistle every eight minutes. That's all she did. And kids switched. Okay, that's all that happened. And you can see that disciplinary referrals dropped by a half and suspensions dropped by whatever per 2/3 or so. So it's even just introducing it. And now this is coming in from all over, just introducing. A daily dose of exercise has its effect on dropping the aggression. And it's one thing that we're trying to do is reintroduce exercise into the schools. And this is another school, the same school. And. Come on. Oh, God. Oh, my. See, I always go too fast. Sorry. And so there's a move to set. Instead of sending their unruly kids as a timeout, they put them in what's called a time in an exercise bike in the classroom. Lets them recover control. About five minutes on that, or this is the Dance Dance Revolution, and it's done right in the classroom or right next to it. And it helps not only burn off the energy of their outer control kids, but helps them know that they can remain in control of their impulses when they exercise. As I mentioned, Jack was an ADD kid and, you know, got into video games quite early and had a problem finishing all his work. And one of the addictions, ADD people tend to get addicted almost twice as much, twice as easily throughout their lives. So it's a big problem. And so with Jack, we have a scheduled program of exercise to keep him away from his addictions. But there was a time when we went away and came back and poor Jack had. Hadn't been walked, hadn't been exercised in the morning, so he had problems that showed up. Another part of the brain that develops is a cerebellum that grew along with our frontal cortex. And our cerebellum is this balance and rhythm maker in our brain that we thought was only about muscle control. But now we know it's important in every of the brain systems to sort of. I call it the rhythm and blues center of the brain. It needs to sort of keep things in time, keep things continuous, keep things in flow. And we know that by doing balance training, you can influence the cerebellum quite easily. And some of the schools are beginning to do this. I saw the medicine ball that you're sitting on or the exercise ball are now being in classrooms and started in Palo Alto actually, so quite near here back in 2000 or so when the special ed school teacher said these kids are so wormy, moving all the time, let's put them on an exercise ball. And she found very nice improvement in their ability to stay seated and also to achieve mastery of some math problems. And now it's spread all over. And so with that I'm going to stop now and answer questions that you all have. You have to use the mic up here. It's about that time. Yes, if you come down, sorry. It's for people out of the. In different parts of the world.

How long do those chemicals last that help training? So if like if we're designing a.

Training, say does somebody need to be.

Moving around while they're doing the learning?

No, it's all that is, you know, over time it grows the brain and grows the brain's capacity to learn. Now what we find is that the acute bout of exercise will improve the dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine for a couple hours, basically. So the focus is held in place for a few hours and the nudginess probably lasts a little longer. You're less nudging, you're less likely to scream out at your boss or your teacher or your neighbor. So for more than a few hours. But the fertilizer is there and it's more like a hormone. So it does longer term work in terms of development, terms of providing the right soup. So morning exercise I think is the best for everyone. But for the school systems, for workplace, that's what I would recommend, that it's a morning aerobics class or getting on the treadmill or spinning or actually if you live five miles from here, riding your bike to work. Good way to get your brain optimized for the rest of the day.

I was wondering if there's like an ideal frequency and intensity of.

Well, since there's not a lot of money that's been spent looking at that. So that's just being. Intensity, duration, gain is just being looked at. And this is what troubles a lot of people because even in the cardiologists they can't tell you how much you're supposed to do. But health and human services says for your body that you should be exercising for 40 minutes a day for at least five to six days a week. And some of those Days you should be going at moderate intensity. That's just for your body, that's for your heart. And keep the diabetes down, keep the weight down. That would be fine. Because most of the studies that have been done to at. Look, look at brain growth show maximum four times a week for sedentary people. So if you do what they say, you're going to prevent yourself from getting depressed, decrease your anxiety, improve your stress response. What happens over time when you're exercising? It's called stress inoculation. You're training your brain to handle stresses so you don't, you don't. Your trigger point for stress is race. So it's got to be a bigger load, a bigger stimulus for you to get stressed because your brain begins to change. It's automatic firing at a stressor. Yes.

Have there been any differences observed between the effects of aerobic exercise versus anaerobic exercise?

Good question. The problem always has been getting rats to lift weights. You know, it's really a problem. And also to hold yoga poses but for too long, you know, they just can't do it. But the anaerobic versus aerobic strength training is really important, especially as you age. You should do more of it. That should be a higher priority, not necessarily more of it. But when they've looked at strength training clinically and trying to figure out an animal model which where most of our stuff comes from, they find that aerobic training does a little bit better in almost every category and some a lot better. Anxiety for instance, is way better with aerobic versus strength training. But that's not to put strength training down, anaerobic training down, because it does have a positive effect on the brain. And they've done studies with 90 year olds in nursing homes and started strength training them and saw all kinds of changes that were amazing. Their genes that they were using dropped 30 years to 60 year old set of genes that they were using. Because the secret about aging I think is to remain in the challenge mode and to trick your body and your brain into thinking that you're young, basically that you're out there hunting and you're foraging and you're, you know, you're doing stuff rather than sitting on your butt. Yes. When you listed the advantages of exercise, it struck me that many of them are similar to the meditation based stress reduction. And one, if you could comment on that. And also combinations of. Well, the combination is great. I mean that's. I always tell people I do yoga three times a year without a doubt because it really stretches and strains and you release all kinds of good things when you're doing the exercises and balancing of a yoga training and then you meditate because you can stay focused. At least for me, that's necessary. But no, there are similar kinds of effects. But meditation doesn't give you this boost of neurochemistry. It sort of gets your waves in better shape and you're more in an alpha rhythm and you're calmer and all that is very, very useful and helps the brain grow, prevents the aging process from moving on, but not nearly like aerobic exercise does.

How does weight gain that maybe doesn't fall into the obese category, gaining 10, 20, 30 pounds and both affect your mental well being and also your ability to exercise and see the results?

Yes.

And are there categories, you know, 20.

Pounds, like fat and maybe fat, like a little bit overweight and. Yeah, yeah, there's all kinds of. I mean, you know, look at Glamour magazine or something, you know, I mean, there are different categories all along the way. Way right. And yes, more pounds on does decrease your ability to learn. And remember, maybe not as greatly as the obese kids, you're not going to see that kind of drop. But one of the big problems with aging is that we tend to put on weight as we get older, just naturally and programmatically, culturally. And as we put on that weight, our brain slows down because it has a lot to do with the fuel distribution and all of that, and fats going into the brain slow it down. So there is this correspondence and nowadays we're talking people that are doing research in Alzheimer's disease, for instance, are talking about Alzheimer's disorders being diabetes of the brain because they're so intertwined. And that basically is looking at it from being overweight. At any point, you're in what's called a metabolic syndrome. You're not handling the glucose as well. Might not be abnormal, but it's not being as good as it could be. As well as the cholesterol and lipids and all these other things that we know about and that having them out of balance, your brain isn't functioning optimally. So at any point in time, it's best to be slim. You know, the three things that they found in the study that propelled the researcher done at UC Irvine to get going on exercise was there are three things that prevented the onset of cognitive decline. One was learning, continuing to learn. One was caloric restriction, meaning really restricting caloric intake. And then third was exercise. And that sort of remained true to this day while everybody's doing Sudoku and Dieting, exercise is probably one of the stronger findings that you can improve your brain's ability to continue to serve you well. So, yes.

Yeah, I'd like to just say something like, I actually went to high school. Our high school was a rival of Naperville's high schools, and we were a math and science school, like, specifically. But Naperville was actually able to always beat us at math team and usually beat us in Science Olympiad, too.

Well, good. Yeah. Yeah. So he's proof.

So I can never figure out why, because they're just a public school, but we should be able to destroy.

Yeah, no, they just are a public school. That's the point. Moving 45 minutes a day. You know, they've evolved. Honestly, it's the most amazing program I've ever seen, you know, where they. They've elevated PE to a science. And you have these PE teachers running around with neuroscience articles, giving them to the English and math teacher. Especially the math teacher.

Yeah.

And they. That, of course, the PE department wants to claim responsibility for them coming in so high in math and science, but here's proof. Here's my expectorant.

But is there any way, like, you could tell my old high school to start exercising more?

Well, there's a lot happening in the schools. Thankfully, a lot is happening, and my book has been really important for that charge to get going. So there's schools changing all over the country, and hopefully people catch on that it's not decreasing their scores, but elevating their scores. Even in not such a gifted area as Naperville in the inner city. There's a school system in the rust belt of Pennsylvania that adopted this, Titusville, Pennsylvania, five years ago. And their scores were below the median in terms of their test scores compared to other high schools or schools in the state. They now are above the median. And the junior high school teacher says, well, yeah, one thing I can tell you about what's happened to our students and is that there hasn't been a fist fight in the junior high for the last four years since they installed the program. See, the schools don't keep data. And that's what I'm thinking. Google has to get in there and start keeping data of all kinds of things. You know, I mean, to evaluate our school system, and not in a condemning way, but in a way that's helpful to sort of see the results, because the school systems are all different. They're all district driven. They're just, you know, everybody can do whatever they want. And then it's budgets and all that. But what I'm saying is that we're seeing this effect even with not any increase in the budget. I mean, you can do it by just getting the kids moving.

So at least anecdotally, in American society, there's this kind of division between, you know, the eggheads and the jocks.

Right, Right.

And obviously there's a lot of problems in controlling for amount of time devoted to stuff, study and so forth. But can you talk to the stereotype that the athletes are the ones that are stupid?

Yes. Those that play football and basketball usually are okay because they have some kind of status. But you have your soccer players, even your ice hockey players, your. And that's in the northeast. We worry about that. And the rowers and the lacrosse players, they tend to have higher scores than when you compare them. And during the season, their scores go up. But basketball and football is a little bit different kind of thing. But that's in general. But the dumb jock, it's not like it makes you smarter. You still have to sit there and take it in and be attending to what's happening. It's called activity dependent learning. You need that activity going in your brain. Okay. To that is learning to guide those nerve cells to bind together. It just can't. Just doesn't happen. You're just blessed with the odyssey. You know the answer to the math question that you have, you have to also apply yourself and be interested and motivated enough to get it to sit there and train your brain. Yes.

What is Spark?

Spark is a name. It was just a name to sort of capture this. What exercise can do electrically, personally, chemically, can start the ball rolling in the brain. And so that's why we settled on the title. Yeah. Any other questions? No. Okay, well, thank you very much. Keep up the good work.