Quotes from John J. Ratey

How do they feel about being Mr. Duncan's guinea pigs? "I guess it's OK," says Michelle. "Besides getting up early and being all sweaty and gross, I'm more awake during the day. I mean, I was cranky all the time last year." Beyond improving her mood, it will turn out, Michelle is also doing much better with her reading.

There's certainly nothing wrong with taking medicine, but if you can achieve the same results through exercise, you build confidence in your own ability to cope.

Patterns of thinking and movement that are automatic get stored in the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and brain stem—primitive areas that until recently scientists thought related only to movement.

Unlike humans, rodents seem to inherently enjoy physical activity, and Cotman's mice ran several kilometers a night. They were divided into four groups: mice running for two, four, or seven nights, and one control group with no running wheel. When their brains were injected with a molecule that binds to BDNF and scanned, not only did the scans of the running rodents show an increase in BDNF over controls, but the farther each mouse ran, the higher the levels were.

One of the prominent features of exercise, which is sometimes not appreciated in studies, is an improvement in the rate of learning, and I think that's a really cool take-home message," Cotman says. "Because it suggests that if you're in good shape, you may be able to learn and function more efficiently.

In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man can attain perfection. —Plato

you are born to move with grace, born to embrace novelty and variety, born to crave wide-open spaces, and, above all, born to love. But one of the more profound facts that will emerge is that you are born to heal. Your body fixes itself. A big part of this is an idea called homeostasis, which is a wonderfully intricate array of functions that repair the wear and tear and stress of living.

exercise is as effective as certain medications for treating anxiety and depression.

What makes aerobic exercise so powerful is that it's our evolutionary method of generating that spark. It lights a fire on every level of your brain, from stoking up the neurons' metabolic furnaces to forging the very structures that transmit information from one synapse to the next.

It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes.

Getting older is unavoidable, but falling apart is not.

What it means is that you have the power to change your brain. All you have to do is lace up your running shoes.

Exercise Is Medicine," so

A little is good, and more is better." 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 intensity.

Just as anxiety can feed on itself, so can courage.

One of the prominent features of exercise, which is sometimes not appreciated in studies, is an improvement in the rate of learning

Cognitive flexibility is an important executive function that reflects our ability to shift thinking and to produce a steady flow of creative thoughts and answers as opposed to a regurgitation of the usual responses. The trait correlates with high-performance levels in intellectually demanding jobs. So if you have an important afternoon brainstorming session scheduled, going for a short, intense run during lunchtime is a smart idea.

In the context of stress, the great paradox of the modern age may be that there is not more hardship, just more news—and too much of it. The 24/7 streaming torrent of tragedy and demands flashing at us from an array of digital displays keeps the amygdala flying.

From an evolutionary perspective, exercise tricks the brain into trying to maintain itself for survival despite the hormonal cues that it is aging.

like every other aspect of our psychology, motivation is biological.

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

physical activity counts as novel experience, at least as far as the brain is concerned.

Hippocrates, who recommended that all people in a bad mood should go for a walk—and if it did not improve, walk again.

Exercise is another tool at your disposal, and it's handy because it's something you can prescribe for yourself