Spark The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Spark is basically about how exercise is good for your brain as well as your body. Most of the book tells in allegories how exercise helps people become more focused and that by stopping exercising we are losing out on important functions for the brain as well as the body.

🎨 Impressions

It was an okay book, I liked that there were a lot of interesting new phenomena regarding the book and how we are built to move. If we don't move and work out, we don't get the necessary inputs to work properly either.

The book was good, I think most of the things related to it were interesting but not revolutionary.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that the way we have set up the school system is insane. We neglect basic reason and research because this is how we have always done it. It seems totally stupid. Why can't we do the most basic things to make the people who are not nerds succeed?

✍️ My Top Quotes

• To illustrate, he uses the example of a tiny jellyfish-like animal called a sea squirt: Born with a simple spinal cord and a three hundred–neuron “brain,” the larva motors around in the shallows until it finds a nice patch of coral on which to put down its roots. It has about twelve hours to do so, or it will die. Once safely attached, however, the sea squirt simply eats its brain. For most of its life, it looks much more like a plant than an animal, and since it’s not moving, it has no use for its brain. Llinás’s interpretation: “That which we call thinking is the evolutionary - “My adviser essentially said, If you pick that as your thesis, you’ll be in Vietnam for sure,”
• health impacts of sustained radiation exposure. They compared two groups of nuclear shipyard workers from Baltimore who had similar jobs except for a single key difference: one group was exposed to very low levels of radiation from the materials they handled, and the other was not. The DOE tracked the workers between 1980 and 1988, and what they found shocked everyone involved. Radiation made them healthier. The twenty-eight thousand workers exposed to radiation had a 24 percent lower mortality rate than their thirty-two thousand counterparts who were not exposed to radiation. - Our average energy expenditure per unit of body mass is less than 38 percent of that of our Stone Age ancestors.
• “Exercise training has been shown to lead to reductions of more than 50 percent in the prevalence of the symptoms of anxiety. This supports exercise training as an additional method to reduce chronic anxiety.”
• was dedicated and worked hard with the exercise program; it wasn’t easy, but I beat this depression,’ patients might incorporate the belief ‘I took an antidepressant and got better.’
• shadow syndrome of depression. These are people who aren’t clinically depressed but who tend to look at life with a primarily pessimistic attitude, or who have the impression that nobody in the world, themselves included, meets their high standards.
• Experts estimate that just over 4 percent of American adults — that’s thirteen million people — have ADHD, which is not to say that the remaining 96 percent of the population is completely free of attention problems.
• School is an excruciating environment for a child with ADHD, given the need to sit still, face forward, and listen intently to a teacher for the better part of an hour.
• “Exercise is directly antithetical to drug-addictive behavior. Because you need lung strength, muscle strength, and mental acuity to engage in physical exercise — lots of things that drugs deprive you of
• As an illustration of the power of drugs, consider that while sex increases dopamine levels 50 to 100 percent, cocaine sends dopamine skyrocketing 300 to 800 percent beyond normal levels.
• the overload of dopamine has tricked the brain into thinking that paying attention to the drug is a matter of life or death.
• In smokers, just five minutes of intense exercise can be beneficial. Nicotine is an oddball among addictive substances as it works as a stimulant and a relaxant at the same time.
• Some would debate whether Zoe was addicted to marijuana, but there’s no question she was dependent on it. She had all the signs of chemical dependency, including the physical and emotional irritability of withdrawal.
• The fact that exercise counteracts anxiety and depression directly can have a huge impact on any form of addiction, as both of these mood states undermine treatment. A recovering addict who is feeling anxious or hopeless is much more likely to slip in her determination and ability to quit. People are more impulsive when they feel lousy. Both strength training and aerobic exercise decrease symptoms of depression in recovering alcoholics and smokers who have quit.
• If you haven’t been in the habit of exercising, it can be helpful to join a gym or hire a personal trainer, because spending the money is a strong motivator. If you have an addiction to food, try a quick walk around the block or a few minutes with a jump rope or even a set of thirty jumping jacks — anything to snap your mind out of the cycle of thinking about the reward.
• The average woman has four hundred to five hundred menstrual cycles in her lifetime, each one lasting four to seven days.
• About 20 percent of older adults who break a hip die within a year.
• Starting at about age forty, we lose on average 5 percent of our overall brain volume per decade, up until about age seventy, when any number of conditions can accelerate the process.
• “it’s good that cells be periodically subjected to mild stress because it improves their ability to cope with more severe stress.”
• Charles Hillman proved that fit children score better than unfit children on cognitive tests of executive function; Arthur Kramer showed that getting in shape increases brain volume of older adults; and population studies including tens of thousands of people of every age show that higher fitness levels relate directly to positive mood and lower levels of anxiety and stress.
• human species as an endurance predator. The genes that govern our bodies today evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, when we were in constant motion, either foraging for food or chasing antelope for hours and days across the plains. Heinrich describes how, even though antelope are among the fastest mammals, our ancestors were able to hunt them down by driving them to exhaustion — keeping on their tails until they had no energy left to escape. Antelope are sprinters, but their metabolism doesn’t allow them to go and go and go. Ours does. And we have a fairly balanced distribution of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers, so even after ranging miles over the landscape we retain the metabolic capacity to sprint in short bursts to make the kill.
• One of the key differences between moderate and high-intensity exercise is that once you get closer to your maximum, and especially when you get into the anaerobic range, the pituitary gland in your brain unleashes human growth hormone (HGH). This is what life-extension groups call the fountain of youth. The levels of HGH naturally secreted into the bloodstream decrease over your life span, so that by middle age they dwindle to a tenth of what they were during childhood, for both women and men.
• High-intensity exercise toughens you up, both physiologically and psychologically. It’s the reason why we climb mountains and sign up for fitness boot camps and go on Outward Bound trips.
• Accordingly, in cognitive tests immediately following the run, the sprinters learned vocabulary words 20 percent faster. So even a small dose of pushing yourself to the limit has profound effects on your brain.
• One factor clearly affected by strength training is HGH. A recent study looked at the hormone levels during weight training versus aerobic activity in well-trained men. Doing squats doubled HGH levels compared with running at high intensity for
• He came to a number of telling conclusions. First of all, daily exercise ramps up BDNF more rapidly than alternate days — at a rate of 150 percent versus 124 percent after two weeks. Curiously, after a month, the alternate-day exercisers had caught up with the daily group.
• Cotman concluded that every day is best but that even intermittent exercise works wonders. And I think it’s important for people to recognize that exercise isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition.
• From your genes to your emotions, your body and brain are dying to embrace the physical life. You are built to move. When you do, you’ll be on fire.