Quotes from John J. Ratey

Movement places demands on the brain, just as it does on muscle, and so the brain releases BDNF, which triggers the growth of cells to meet the increased mental demands of movement. But BDNF floods throughout the brain, not just to the parts engaged in movement. Thus, the whole brain flourishes as a result of movement. It provides the environment that brain cells need to grow and function well. Chemically, there is more to this story—lots

Sedentary behavior causes brain impairment, and we know how: by depriving your brain of the flood of neurochemistry that evolution developed in order to grow brains and keep them healthy.

One of Bob's aphorisms," says Stickgold, "is that for every two hours your brain spends taking in information during the day, it needs an hour of sleep to figure out what it means. If you don't get that hour, you don't figure it out. The difference between smart and wise is two hours more sleep a night." This idea takes on a new dimension

With meditation, the misinformed assumption is that the practice is aimed at relaxation and bliss. It is not. It is about attention and awareness of the here and now, which is precisely what wild people need in order to survive in a state of nature.

What the adventuring doctors noticed on virtually every one of those frontiers was that the so-called primitive people were in many ways healthier and more robust than Europeans. Cancer was absent in many populations around the world.

Further, researchers began compiling a list of diseases absent in indigenous populations, no matter where they lived on the planet, including and especially cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, psoriasis, dental cavities, and acne. Note that this list includes some of the very diseases that constitute our worst problems today.

Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease that results from eating sugar and refined carbohydrates. It appeared among the earliest recorded diseases of civilization, coincident with sugar and flour appearing in people's diets in places as distinct as Africa and Arizona, and has been with us for more than a century. But this is not a static story.

Native American farmers revealed all of these problems. Native Americans showed evidence of suffering diseases of civilization long before Western civilization arrived, which is why we need to define civilization as the arrival of domestication, of agriculture. We are really talking about diseases of agriculture and adoption of the sedentary way of life.

In fact, through deep history, through tens of thousands of years, everyone was a wild human. The very same forces that tamed wolves and made them dogs tamed humans. Call these forces civilization, and yes, obvious and abundant benefits came with the deal. We're not here to dispute those blessings. Our bedrock point has more to do with genes

Dense packages of storable starch allowed sedentary lives. That is, we no longer needed to range far and

The result is that any girl who starts early and has a lifetime of menstrual regularity with few pregnancies (lean, athletic girls and women often do not menstruate regularly) has approximately twice as many periods and so twice as many bouts of hormone cycling as hunter-gatherer girls.

But for at least fifty thousand years, all humans have been connected to one another through travel, trade networks, and migration. The result is a genetically homogeneous population. As a practical matter, this means when we speak of human nature, we speak of all humans, both through the time span of fifty thousand years and across the planet. Our long-standing networks of connection mean there is no pressure to drift toward a new species, no pressure to evolve.

Evolution has hard-wired health to happiness

The evolution of our unique brains was locked into the evolution of our wide range of movement. Mental and physical agility run on the same track.

Public health recommendations, from the Centers for Disease Control to the American College of Sports Medicine, suggest doing some form of moderate aerobic exercise for thirty minutes at least five days a week.

perhaps because of the way he dressed, I thought of a goth girl named Rachel who had really transformed herself by playing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR)

The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too. Learning and memory evolved in concert with the motor functions that allowed our ancestors to track down food, so as far as our brains are concerned, if we're not moving, there's no real need to learn anything.

our short guts mean we can't eat grass, and this is no small thing, especially if you consider that two million years of evolutionary history occurred in savannas and grasslands. Grasslands are enormously productive in biological terms; that is, they efficiently convert solar energy into carbohydrates. But that energy is wrapped in the building block of all grasses, cellulose, and humans cannot digest it, not at all. Our primary method for overcoming our

The paradox is that our wonderful ability to adapt and grow doesn't happen without stress—we can't have the good without a bit of the bad.

If you're not eating, not caring about your body, letting it waste away, having your mind distorted by being constantly intoxicated, you can't be a serious exerciser. You can't do it.

so as far as our brains are concerned, if we're not moving, there's no real need to learn anything.

In order to cope with anxiousness, for instance, you need to let certain well-worn paths grow over while you blaze alternate trails.

If you can get to the point where you're consistently saying to yourself exercise is something you want to do, then you're charting a course to a different future—one that's less about surviving and more about thriving.

The activities associated with spindle and mirror neurons are characterized not by the firing of a few cells but by the assembly of networks of cells all firing in concert, a glow of energy humming around the entire brain. These, unlike many of our more mundane tasks, are whole-brain activities, heavy calculation loads. This load translates into a requirement for even more calories to support it.