Learning the asanas of yoga, the positions of ballet, the skills of gymnastics, the elements of figure skating, the contortions of Pilates, the forms of karate—all these practices engage nerve cells throughout the brain. Studies of dancers, for example, show that moving to an irregular rhythm versus a regular one improves brain plasticity. Because

This is why learning how to play the piano makes it easier for kids to learn math. The prefrontal cortex will co-opt the mental power of the physical skills and apply it to other situations.

Living in an environment with more sensory and social stimuli, the lab tests showed, altered the structure and function of the brain. Not only did the rats fare better on learning tasks, but their brains weighed more compared to those housed alone in bare cages.

By showing that exercise sparks the master molecule of the learning process, Cotman nailed down a direct biological connection between movement and cognitive function.

For an inner-city school to go through such a rapid transformation, and for such a depressed town as Titusville to come alive as it has, is remarkable. McCord’s community rallies around the Stephanies of the world rather than just the football team, and as the schoolchildren grow up, a larger percentage will continue to move and be active. They’ll

In a seminal study in the early 1970s, he used an electron microscope to show that environmental enrichment made the neurons sprout new dendrites. The branching caused by the environmental stimulation of learning, exercise, and social contact caused the synapses to form more connections, and those connections had thicker myelin sheaths, which

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

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.

lecturing to teachers and doctors about the positive impact of physical activity on mood, attention, self-esteem, and social skills,