Interview: The New Science of Exercise with John Ratey, MD

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I am thrilled to be chatting with John Ratey, MD, who is the author of a number of books, including the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, which. Which we're going to talk about today. And then we're going to follow up with another chat on his most recent book called Go Wild, which is another fantastic read. This book changed my life. I mean, just to capture the science of exercise the way that John has was incredibly inspiring, and I'm really excited to tap into some of my favorite big ideas, and I have a sense that it's going to be transformative for you as well. Very briefly, John is a professor at the Harvard Medical School. He's a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. As I mentioned, he's published a number of books, including Go Wild, Driven to Distraction, which I still need to read. Excited about that, and A User's Guide to the Brain. John, I really appreciate you taking the time, and I'm excited to chat.

I'm glad to be here, and I hope to be transformative. I love the idea.

All right, well, let's jump in. So, Spark, the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise in the Brain. I'm actually just curious, what led you to name the book Spark? I love that name. And I have a hunch that there's a really powerful connection there.

Oh, yeah. We're looking for something to capture the electricity in the brain from people. We think of it as neurochemical, mainly in most of our lives, but it's actually neurochemical. Neurochemical to electrical, you know, so it's neuro, electrical, chemical. Electrical. So, and it's somehow the nerve. The nerve neurotransporters going across the synapse causing a spark on the other side was how it really came to be. So that's how it started.

That's great. And so then, obviously, when we're exercising, we're kind of. We're generating that spark. Talk to us about that on a high level. What does it mean, the new science of exercise in the brain?

Well, the new science is really about how exercise is sort of taken front and center on how we can make our brains better. You know, it started really, the science began when we began to learn about neuroplasticity, which is how the brain can grow and how its job is to grow and how we grow our new information in. And if our nerve cells aren't growing, then we're not learning and then they're eroding. And so that really captured me. And we learned so much more about it in the 90s when a study was done looking at mice that were running on a treadmill every day. And Carl Cotman at the University of California, Irvine, did this study and found and did what I call the mice sats before and after a week and a half, and compared it to their brothers and sisters who weren't running wheels. They averaged about 4 kilometers a night, and their SAT test scores went up about 20%. They looked at their brains and their cortexes. The top part of uncovering of their brains were thicker and key memory area and learning area of the brain. The hippocampus was bigger. And this led to lots of derision in neuroscience community of Carl. But it prevailed and people began to look at it. And then five years later, we learned that we were making new brain cells in the human brain. And then it took off like a rocket ship. Wow.

And one of the connections you make in the book in detail, which just blew me away, was the whole research done at Naperville. Can you talk to us about not just the mice SATs, but these student SATs?

But that's what got us started. And then in 2002, 2003, I learned about Naperville, Illinois, their school system, which had 19,000 kids in it, School District 2 or 3. And they were on Super Size Me, the movie. They had interviewed the baseball coach, a PE teacher who turned that school around some 20 years before. And it involved this amazing physical education program where kids focused on fitness every day because they had PE every day. And so they were working on their fitness. And he sort of equaled the playing field by having them wear heart rate monitors. So everybody was competing against themselves. And you got your grade by being in your cardiac training zone. And what had resulted after 20 years is that they looked at these 19,000 kids and 3% of them were overweight. And 33% of the US kids were overweight at that time. And some Years before that, 99% of them had took the international science and math test or the TIMSS test. And they scored number one in the world in science and number. And the US Is usually in the mid to lower teens in science and math. So something was happening here that was remarkable. Not only were they fit, in shape, motivated, but they were doing better than certainly their peers, but their peers around the world.

Staggering. I mean, you wrote in 2001, Fit Kids scored twice as well on academic tests as their Unfit peers. That's just mind boggling.

Right, Right. No, it is. And now we're beginning to see the reasons behind that. For instance, studies out of University of Illinois showing that kids already at the age of 10, those that were classified as fit, if they could run 400 meters versus those kids that couldn't, who were classified as unfit already in the mri, their hippocampuses, which is their hippocampi, which is the suborgan of the brain that's responsible for memory and learning. Are key players not responsible, but it's involved in memory and learning in a very big way. Was already 15% bigger than their unfit kids, their unfit classmates. So something was already happening with kids that had achieved a level of fitness. And so this meant they had more nerve cells working for them to learn. Yeah.

Which is just literally astonishing to me. And then you also talked about. And I want to just kind of capture this and bring it into our lives and what we as listeners can do in our lives. This Naperville, I think it was Naperville that integrated the learning readiness zero hour. And then they tested the relative time in which they exercised and did their most difficult work, which for these kids was learning how to read. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Yes. This had sort of been natural history, really, because the guidance counselor had already been advising their juniors and seniors when they were taking their college level courses to take it right after pen. But this led then the head of PE in the school to say, okay, in ninth grade, we have a whole bunch of reading readiness courses, kids that aren't quite up to snuff with reading because of reading problems, etc. So he started a special program in the morning before school to have the kids come in, those that volunteered an hour earlier and have a special PE class and then tested them out and found that those kids that came in and did that improved twice as much as their peers over the course of the year. And then they did fancier studies later on to show that it didn't matter whether it was in the morning or in the afternoon, if their reading readiness class was followed by the PE class, it improved their scores times two. And this was amazing. And they did the same thing in math readiness. So it really solidified it in my mind. And that really got me to sit down and write Spark.

Yeah, that's awesome. We joked before we started our chat that I was inspired. I watched your TED Talk on the same theme. And you told the audience, I think before you started the talk, you said, hey, look, we all need to move a little bit, so we're actually ready to do this talk. And we should have had our audience do the same. Right. In hindsight, but I took that inspiration, and I jokingly told you that I banged out 30 burpees before we chatted. And that's just what I do now before I do anything. And it's amazing to feel my energy kind of go up and all that stuff. Can you talk to us about the practical implications of moving if we want to get into a state, and the fact that it sounds like we can just do a little bit to get optimized?

Right, right, right. And in fact, I'm talking to you at my standing desk, so that's one way of moving a little bit.

Yeah, me too.

But what you did is it's not just you got your wiggles out or you got more oxygen to your brain, which you did, but at the same time, you move more brain cells than in any other human activity, which then changes the neurochemistry of your brain, which quickly improves your mood, improves your focus, improves your motivation, and also readies the nerve cells to be at their best, to be at their most neuroplastic, the most able to grow. And that's why you feel so much different. It changes the chemistry of your brain. It increases what I say. It's like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin holistically so that you feel calmer, more focused, more ready, and you can stay with your attention system that much better.

So good. And that's one of my favorite phrases ever. That exercise is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin. That's such a good line. Boosts our mood and increases our focus. So just very practically speaking, what's required, how much movement is required to get that little bit of spark?

Well, you know, it's really interesting. You did it in 30 burpees. I had the class in the Ted Talk to 10 Hindu Squats, you know, pulling their muscles in and all. And that helps a little bit. And I think, you know, we see as much as changes in classes, for instance, as much as four movements of good movement, of good activity, a good physical activity. Four minutes can make a difference in all kinds of things, especially in. In discipline issues, in attention issues, but also in performance issues. So just four minutes, if you're really moving, you can make a difference.

That's great. Obviously, one of the lines you had in the book, we'll get to a little bit Is a little is good, more is better.

Right, Right, right, right, right.

Well, let's talk about exercise and its effect. Obviously, in the book you talk about a lot of different facets. Creativity is one of the big ones. We talked about that a little and how it increases cognitive flexibility, et cetera. But I'd like to hear you describe the effects of exercise on mood and specifically on depression. Can you talk to us about some of the research and practical implications?

Yes. We've known about the effect of exercise on mood since Hippocrates. He wrote about it. That was his treatment for depression. Okay, 300 BC. And we've always known about it. And people have been studying it and writing about it clinically. But it really took off in the late 70s, early 80s at Duke University Medical School where they were looking at type A versus type B personalities and people with heart problems and getting them exercising and all of a sudden noticing, hey, it dropped their aggression, their aggressive behavior, it dropped their mood. I mean, it dropped their depression, dropped their anxiety, increased their feeling of well being and wellness. And this is something that then they began to really study. And a lot of other people have weighed in on at the University of Texas and various places around this country. But now all over the world, when I talk about a revolution, I really mean it. Before 1995, there were probably 20 to 30 papers a month in the medical literature on exercise and its effect on the brain. Now there are at least 60 to 80 new articles a week that I get sent to me, abstracts on exercise and its effect on the brain. And a lot of that has to do with changing our moods. When they did a study at Duke comparing exercise to Zoloft on depressed people over a four year period, what they found is that the change in depression scores was the same after two weeks and then four weeks and then four months. In other words, it sustained. If they had increasing doses of Zoloft or they got the sedentary people, they were all sedentary to move on treadmills for three or four times a week for 30 minutes. So it really had the same effect as our antidepressants. And we know, we know from epidemiology that if you are fit and if you are exercising, you will have much less likely chance of getting depression.

As a guy who struggled with my own form of depression years ago, I knew none of this stuff. I ate horribly, which we're going to talk more about in Go Wild, and everything was just off. And now it's at the place where you literally couldn't pay me to move. I know what it feels like to not move. And, you know, all the sensitivities to that, that it's just extraordinary. And it's one of those things that makes me scratch my head of how is it possible? And obviously there are a lot of reasons why this isn't the case, that this isn't promoted as much as the Zoloft and antidepressants, given the fact it's been proven to be as effective.

Right, right. No, no. You scratch your head and you bang your head. I mean, you know, that's what I do about the schools and also about my own, you know, about medicine and psychiatry and. Because it is a way of treating your whole body and your brain. And that's what's so remarkable. That's what the revolution is, that we now have the science as to what's happening, and we're drilling down to look at how it really affects stress, what changes in the brain that are caused to make our resistance to stressors greater. We've actually seen the changes, you know, in the different cells that are made and certainly in the different levels of neurotransmitters that are in key areas of the brain that are part of the stress response. So all this is. We're getting to know what's going on with the effect of exercise.

Unbelievably inspiring. And it's interesting, too, because you wrote Spark in 2008, and then you wrote Go Wild, of course, in 2014. And in Go Wild, you referenced the 2010. The 2010 fact that the American Psychiatric association finally issued new guidelines for treating depression. And for the first time, exercise was listed as a proven treatment. Thus the APA finally caught up with Hippocrates.

Right? Exactly, exactly. And it took Dr. Treviti from Texas, who had done a lot of research early in his career on exercise and was a leading neuroscientist, I mean, psychopharmacologist, on the treatment of depression, to really lobby for this, you know, so it took somebody who stood in both camps to bring it to some, you know, to bring it to a vote, if you will, and to say, look, this is really something. This is not really just the exercisers wanting to horn in on our craft.

So if someone's listening and they or someone they love struggles with depression or other mood issues, is this kind of one of the first things you write in your prescription pad?

Yeah. In fact, in Quebec, the province of Quebec now has its own prescription page or the own prescription pad that has the amount of exercise you're Prescribing how often you do it during the day, and it might just be for starting out at four minutes, four times a day. But they have their own prescription pad that all licensed MDs are going to have, not just for depression, but certainly for depression. But so anyone who's depressed or has a tendency to go into deep dark moods, get moving and stay moving.

We got an amen to that. That's awesome. Well, so let's talk about that. So let's talk about the prescription pad. And what do you recommend? What are the proper levels of movement or the kind of optimal.

Optimal is. I mean, if one did what the Health and Human Services recommends, which is an hour, five days a week, two or three of those days being moderate to vigorous activity for 20 minutes, you know, do that three times a week, along with just walking or swimming slowly or hiking gradually and you know, you will achieve those goals. That's what is recommended by Health and Human Services now. And that would encompass it. But really, if you can do 20 minutes, three to four times a week of moderate to vigorous exercise, and by that, if you're a walker, I mean walking uphill, walking fast, pressing yourself so you're sweat, so you can't talk to your neighbor or to somebody you're walking with. If you're in a walking group, which is the best way to do it, by the way, Walk with people and outside and certainly in go wild, we'll talk a bit about that. But because nature is so important, but you know, you just want to be moving and you want to be able to come back to us. That's why it's important to do it perhaps with a group at first or to have some supportive person go with you if you're depressed to make sure you do it. In Britain, they had set up a whole. They had voted on the House of Commons and voted on something in 2004 to set up all these clinics around the Commonwealth to get everyone who was depressed to let people know so that they could act as mentors for them, that they could act as, you know, reminders to get out there, to go with them. Because this was a good antidepressant, they were convinced. And so it's really getting yourself to do something that's sustainable and then be.

Consistent about it and then notice. Like, I now move every day and I have a kind of a fun thing that I do. I do a little bit of stretching, I do one sun salutation, I do 10 pull ups and then I do 100 burpees and I do 1,000 meters of rowing and I walk 10,000 steps. That's my fun game. I check each one of those off every day.

Oh, that's great.

I'll do moderate to once in a while, I'll go hard. And you also recommend that once in a while you want to run like you need to run to save your life.

Right, right, right. You want to be a hunter gatherer who's running away from the big cats, you know? Yeah.

But the consistency. When I used to not move every day, literally, I would know, like on a day after I took a day off or two days off. And certainly if I ever took three days off, I would feel different. And I only need to feel that so many times before you do something about it. Right. But for those listening, just try it. Make it an experiment and see how you feel on days when you move and days when you don't and build that consistent habit. And again, you mentioned that with other people and outside. We'll talk about that a little bit more in the go wild chat. But this is all so good. So we're boosting our creativity. You also really strongly advocate that if you. You said if you have a tendency toward addictive behavior, it's vital to develop some sort of consistent exercise habit. Again, it's probably a lot of what we've already talked about. What's going on with that? How do we diffuse the addictive behavior?

What you're doing. Okay, the big addiction neurotransmitter and the motivation neurotransmitter and the pleasure neurotransmitter that everybody's focused on is dopamine. Right. And it's very much involved with the attention system, which I spent most of my life talking about before. Spark. And exercise is one of the best ways of raising dopamine in your system. Not only raising dopamine for the moment, but also making more neuro. The enzyme chains that make more of the neurotransmitter, making more receptors in the area of pleasure and craving because they're similar. And so you avoid the tendency to get into these addictive behaviors by satisfying the craving part. And this is one of the things we see in people who like you. Did you have a great exercise program? 100 burpees is a lot of burpees. Geez. Burpees is the most hated exercise in the world, but it's a good one. But what you do is you turn down the craving. So, yeah, initially you'll. You want to eat more because you're burning more calories et Cetera. But eventually you'll turn down the cravings. And especially for those dreaded carbohydrates, You won't be looking for something to supply a neurologic need, a neurochemical need to get more dopamine into the pleasure area of your brain because you have done it with your exercising.

So good. And we're going to talk more about the carbohydrates. We're going to talk about the Stone Age activity levels in our chat on Go Wild. Is there anything that we haven't talked about yet in the context of the new science of exercise that you feel we should discuss?

Yes, there is. There's one important area that you hinted about and that's creativity. There was a great study out of Stanford, which I'll try to summarize quickly, where they got about 150 first year students. I'm sure they were first year psych students that had to volunteer, but they tested them in a bunch of different ways using five different creativity tests. And one group was sitting and just sitting and they tested them. Then one group was walking both outside and on a treadmill and the third group was sitting after they walked for 10 minutes and I only walked for 10 minutes in these paradigms. And what they found was there was a 30% increase in creativity while they were walking. Okay, not walking fast, just walking, just moving. And there was a 15% increase when they were done walking and sitting. But the best was when they were walking. So this leads a lot of credibility to people that have walking groups walking meetings. Richard Branson is a virgin group, doesn't have chairs in their meeting rooms and has walking meetings because he can't sit still. He's treating his add, I'm sure. But a lot of the high tech industry has bought into that. So they have a lot of these walking meetings. It's a flashback to the Greeks. You know, when Plato and Aristotle were teaching, they were walking meetings. And then later St Ignatius Loyola, the order always was he was teaching while they were walking. So. And it improves your creative thinking. So it's something talk about optimal, you know, to optimize your ability to come up with new ideas and stuff. Go, literally go for a walk. And if you're with someone, that's even better because then you'll be talking about things.

Incredibly inspiring. Well, I'd like to wrap up these chats with this question. If you were going to give one piece of advice for someone passionate about optimizing their lives, and it may be something we already discussed or something outside of that, what would that one piece of advice be?

Well, I would say to stand up. Stand up first and be up because we're learning so much the fact that sitting is a new smoking, but it also turns your brain on probably about 7 to 10% better than when you're sitting. So when you're working, when you can be up and be more alert, be more focused, be more attentive.

Yeah, that's great. I'm sitting at a standing desk right now and you are as well. Do you work throughout the day in a standing position or do you alternate between sitting and standing?

Well, I sit and stand because I still have some psychiatric patients and I'm on an airplane and so there are a lot of different times I'm in the chair, but when I'm writing or by myself, I'm at my standing desks. So I really value that.

That's fantastic. And people can learn more about you. Is the best place johnrady.com, facebook it is.

And for Facebook people, which is probably everybody but the Facebook page where we post a new article every day, is on exercise or health in general, meditation and what have you, but mainly exercise is John RadyMD that's fantastic. Yeah.

Facebook.com JohnRadyMD for daily articles and wisdom on exercise and a range of topics. This is our chat on Spark. Join us for we'll share our chat on Go Wild tomorrow. So join us tomorrow for our chat on Go Wild, which is an awesome look at how to free your body and mind from the afflictions of civilization. John, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me on. Look forward to it.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule.

Of course, it's too late to go.

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