Spark!: How exercise will improve the performance of your brain

As we adapted to an ever-changing environment over the past half million years, our thinking brain evolved from the need to hone motor skills. We envision our hunter-gatherer ancestors as brutes who relied primarily on physical prowess, but to survive over the long haul they had to use their smarts to find and store food. The relationship between f

“neurogenesis is clearly involved in our interactions with our environment, both emotionally and cognitively,” says neuroscientist Fred Gage, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

It’s a handy metaphor to get the point across, but the deeper explanation is that exercise balances neurotransmitters—along with the rest of the neurochemicals in the brain. And as you’ll see, keeping your brain in balance can change your life.

The notion that it might is supported by emerging research showing that physical activity sparks biological changes that encourage brain cells to bind to one another.

My hope is that we can use these examples as a new cultural model and, ultimately, reconnect the body and the brain. As you’ll see, they belong together.

Darwin taught us that learning is the survival mechanism we use to adapt to constantly changing environments. Inside the microenvironment of the brain, that means forging new connections between cells to relay information. When we learn something, whether it’s a French word or a salsa step, cells morph in order to encode that information; the memor

To take the example of karate, as you perfect certain forms, you can incorporate them into more complicated movements, and before long you have new responses to new situations. The same would hold true for learning tango. The fact that you have to react to another person puts further demands on your attention, judgment, and precision of movement, e

Learning from our mistakes is profoundly important in everyday life, and Hillman’s study shows that exercise—or at least the resulting fitness levels—can have a powerful impact on that fundamental skill.

Right now the front of your brain is firing signals about what you’re reading, and how much of it you soak up has a lot to do with whether there is a proper balance of neurochemicals and growth factors to bind neurons together. Exercise has a documented, dramatic effect on these essential ingredients. It sets the stage, and when you sit down to lea

Take the cerebellum, which coordinates motor movements and allows us to do everything from returning a tennis serve to resisting the pull of gravity. Starting with evidence that the trunk of nerve cells connecting the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex are proportionally thicker in humans than in monkeys, it now appears that this motor center also