Quotes from John J. Ratey

In Britain, doctors now use exercise as a first-line treatment for depression, but it's vastly underutilized in the United States

After a stressful event, we often crave comfort food. Our body is calling for more glucose and simple carbohydrates and fat... And in modern life, people tend to have fewer friends and less support, because there's no tribe. Being alone is not good for the brain.

The best, however, based on everything I've read and seen, would be to do some form of aerobic activity six days a week, for forty-five minutes to an hour. Four of those days should be on the longer side, at moderate intensity, and two on the shorter side, at high

exercise has yet to be embraced as a medical treatment. It doesn't simply raise serotonin or dopamine or norepinephrine. It adjusts all of them, to levels that, we can only presume, have been optimally programmed by evolution.

One of the first symptoms of depression, even before your mood drops to new lows, is sleep disturbance. Either you can't get up or you can't get to sleep or both.

If everyone knew that exercise worked as well as Zoloft, I think we could put a real dent in the disease. Reading

The amount of data in the world is doubling every few years, but our attention system, like the rest of the brain, was built to make sense of the surrounding environment as it existed ten thousand years ago.

addition to priming our state of mind, exercise influences learning directly, at the cellular level, improving the brain's potential to log in and process new information.

An imbalance of these neurotransmitters is why some people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) come across as stress junkies. They have to get stressed to focus. It's one of the primary factors in procrastination. People learn to wait until the Sword of Damocles is ready to fall—it's only then, when stress unleashes norepinephrine and dopamine, that they can sit down and do the work.

Just as the mind can affect the body, the body can affect the mind. But the idea that we can alter our mental state by physically moving still has yet to be accepted by most physicians, let alone the broader public.

The mental and physical diseases we face in old age are tied together through the cardiovascular system and metabolic system. A

Indeed, in a 2007 study of humans, German researchers found that people learn vocabulary words 20 percent faster following exercise than they did before exercise, and that the rate of learning correlated directly with levels of BDNF. Along with that, people with a gene variation that robs them of BDNF are more likely to have learning deficiencies.

The more we build these networks and enrich our stores of memory and experience, the easier it is to learn, because what we already know serves as a foundation for forming increasingly complex thoughts.

Intensity was particularly important in his case because of the evidence that only rigorous exercise alleviates sensitivity to the physical arousal of anxiety.

In October of 2000 researchers from Duke University made the New York Times with a study showing that exercise is better than sertraline (Zoloft) at treating depression

Far from being hardwired, as scientists once envisioned it, the brain is constantly being rewired. I'm here to teach you how to be your own electrician.

People think of exercise in terms of physical health, but not mental health," says Jennifer Shaw, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Brookline, Massachusetts, who is a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School.

Like synaptic plasticity, "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.

This pattern of balancing between comfort and exploration of the unknown is how we build our brains

But nutrition affects BDNF, too. Eating a diet high in sugar decreases BDNF. Eating foods with folate, vitamin B12, and omega-3 fats increases BDNF in the brain, just as exercise does.

exercise provides an unparalleled stimulus, creating an environment in which the brain is ready, willing, and able to learn.

Students would be assessed on effort rather than skill. You didn't have to be a natural athlete to do well in gym.

One small but scientifically sound study from Japan found that jogging thirty minutes just two or three times a week for twelve weeks improved executive function. But it's important to mix in some form of activity that demands coordination beyond putting one foot in front of the other.... Aerobic exercise and complex activity have different beneficial effects on the brain. The good news is they're complementary.

Genes determine our risk for a disease, but our lifestyle and environment can either trigger or suppress those risks.