Quotes About Brain

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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