Quotes from John J. Ratey

Exercise is not an instant cure, but you need to get your brain working again, and if you move your body your brain won't have any choice.

For a short time, one or two hours, stress does wonderful things for the brain," Sapolsky told the conference. "More oxygen and glucose are delivered to the brain. The hippocampus, which is involved in memory, works better when you are stressed for a little while. Your brain releases more dopamine, which plays a role in the experience of pleasure, early on during stress; it feels wonderful, and your brain works better.

What is different about meditation and a number of other practices like talk therapy or exercise or sound nutrition is that we are deliberately shaping our brains, intervening in the building process. Someone once argued that there is no choice

Humans cannot be born with fully formed brains simply because the resulting head would not fit through the birth canal. Rather, our brains are built and formed after we are born, like a ship in a bottle, a process that takes fifteen, maybe twenty years.

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.

A notable experiment in 2007 showed that cognitive flexibility improves after just one thirty-five-minute treadmill session at either 60 percent or 70 percent of maximum heart rate.

was oxytocin and, especially in the male, vasopressin. These are two closely related biochemicals, technically neuropeptides (brain chemicals). This discovery alone ratchets up the relevance of the finding to the human condition: oxytocin is the most common gene-generated molecule in the human brain. In voles, it is the transformative switch. And not just in prairie voles, it turns

The process of digestion of carbohydrates is a disassembly of the larger, complex molecules of starches to yield sugars, and this elemental and straightforward process begins in your mouth. So simple is the process that some starches are rendered into sugars through chewing and saliva even before they hit your throat. The result is a long list of sugars, but these in turn reduce to two in the main: glucose and fructose.

physical activity sparks biological changes that encourage brain cells to bind to one another.

The ability to calmly speak with one's spouse as to the whereabouts of the espresso tamper means asking the autonomic nervous system to perform two contradictory goals at the same time—and the key to that, says Porges, is the vagal brake. The vagus nerve links up all the tools we need to respond to an existential threat, and so the vagal brake is a signal sent through the system for everything to stand down and engage—at ease. And it turns out there is a simple measure

If you come away from this book with one rule and one rule only, it is this: don't drink sugar water. In any form. Not a Big Gulp Coke. Not a Knudsen's 100 percent natural and organic fruit juice.

Sensitivity to dopamine also declines because dopamine receptors, anticipating high levels, have down-regulated. This may explain Goethe's famous remark, 'Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days.

Dealing with a lion every now and again makes you better at dealing with lions. Allowing your life to surmount occasional challenges is inoculation—almost literally—against future stress. This brings us back to a central point in this book: variety. Remember, we argued from

Dietary cholesterol, for instance, has an insignificant effect on blood cholesterol. It might elevate cholesterol levels in a small percentage of highly sensitive individuals, but for most of us, it's clinically meaningless." At the same time, a diet high in carbohydrates is strongly associated with high triglycerides, low HDL, and the damaging particles of LDL, which is the killer profile.

Those substitutes had in common a type of fat that is manufactured and has no precedent in evolutionary history: what we call "trans fats," which is a truncation of their technical chemical name, trans-isomer fatty acids. These are also labeled "unsaturated fats," but the better way to think of them is as not existing in nature. These are the fats that harm you, and together with sugar they are the foundation of the industrial foods system.

The elements align nicely with what we are learning about emotional trauma and the intricacies of our visceral nervous system. Breath control, rhythm, whole-body movement, narrative, social ties and cues—all of these are physical impulses that travel at the literal core of our being. Besides, he says, "people cannot rhythmically

study shows that exercise—or at least the resulting fitness levels—can have a powerful impact on that fundamental skill.

A newer model, "allostasis," proposes that efficient regulation requires anticipating needs and preparing to satisfy them before they arise.

The Zen Buddhists have another way of saying pretty much the same thing: meditation is not something you think about; meditation is something you do. Same with well-being. No matter what ails you, you are not going to think your way out of it or read your way out of it. Living well is something you do. So then it's not something we

Frank Forencich, who lives in Portland, Oregon, and writes and thinks about the role of movement and play in people's lives;

This is because even the simplest of motions—a flick of a finger or a turn of the hand to pick up a pencil—is maddeningly complex and requires coordination and computational power beyond electronic abilities. For this you need a brain. One of our favorite quotes on this matter comes from the neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás: "That which we call thinking is the evolutionary internalization of movement.

Go Wild reveals the depth of our current evolutionary discordance, awakening us to how our lifestyle choices foster maladaptive gene expression and thus pave the way for disease.

Edward M. Hallowell, MD, author of Shine

Hormesis is a biological response to low doses of a stressor, such as a toxin, that improves the ability of the body to handle that toxin. It can be applied to exercise. Unlike homeostasis, hormesis does not return the body to a normal state. It returns it to a better-than-normal state. When a bodybuilder lifts weights, he is placing