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Spark: How Exercise Supercharges the Brain
Spark: How Exercise Supercharges the Brain
by Abeed Z.
“OK, once you’re done with your warm-up,” says Phys. Ed. teacher Neil Duncan, “We’re going to head out to the track and run the mile.” The freshmen push through a set of heavy metal doors and hit the track on a crisp October morning. It's 7:10 am at Naperville Central High school, the birthplace of the fitness-learning revolution. Naperville inspired John Ratey to write his bestselling book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. As an educational experiment, Naperville had created Zero Hour fitness with 19,000 students to test if exercise improved grades. They included programs like running, aerobic machines, climbing walls, and kickboxing, and researchers across the world swarmed to see the results: Naperville made some of the fittest kids in America and, shockingly, some of the smartest. This lowly public school fared better on state tests than top tier Illinois private schools. In the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study from 200 000 students from 38 countries, Naperville came 6th in math and 1st in science in front of Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong!
Click the Pic to read about SPARK
Ratey, also a professor at Harvard Medical School, shows that learning is a product of evolution, a process that began long ago when humans had to walk 5 to 10 miles a day hunting for food. For millions of years they were spotting animal tracks, remembering their trail, and storing it for future hunts, so the brain enhanced learning during these hikes. Ratey says, “The ancient rhythms of activity ingrained in our DNA translate roughly to the varied intensity of walking, jogging, running, and sprinting.”
When you exercise - Ratey says only aerobics like jogging and running - the brain readies for hunting which bursts the gates for a flood of ancient learning gifts. With the heart pumping, the neurons are eager to bind and stick into memory, while each single neuron out of billions is drastically more effective. The neurons are interconnected to each other by branches called synapses. The thicker and more numerous these synapses are the faster and larger data they can transfer. BDNF is the wonder treatment for synapses, what Ratey called “Miracle-gro for the brain,” that compounds the natural learning process: it improves functions of neurons, encourages their growth, and most significantly, sprouts new synapses. Above all, the greatest benefit seen is neurogenesis - when new neurons are created in the brain. For the longest time, scientists believed the brain came with a fixed number of neurons which could only die afterwards. This process of birthing new, fresh neurons is another reason why Naperville’s Zero Hour fitness class scores 17% better than average.
For the past 3 months, I've been running high-intensity for 15 minutes immediately after school and it feels like I'm cheating - a hack. In previous years, I used to labour over worksheets, practice quizzes, caged in my room studying for 4 to 6 hours per test (high-achieving students know what I mean). Now with exercise, as a senior in packed quadmesters, my test scores (~98%) are near perfect and I study half, sometimes even a quarter of the time! Ratey repeats, “one of the prominent features of exercise, which is sometimes not appreciated in studies, is an improvement in the rate of learning.” Every problem and concept I study gets gelled into my brain, fluidly makes connections, and deepens my understanding where I learn at such a furious pace that it makes learning without exercise look sluggish, pathetic.
Regardless of fitness level, jumping jacks, skipping, jogging around the block for 10 to 15 minutes will produce phenomenal results. Your fitness is unimportant as long as you're keeping at a high heart rate and sometimes working up a sweat. It's a trivial amount of time to create fresh neurons, BDNF-accelerated learning, and faster synapse growth to replace hours of studying. Exercise isn’t small improvements - it's life changing. Try it out and witness how exercise supercharges the brain.
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