Spark

Product Information

Caution - don't read this book if you don't like to move. Because this book will motivate you get moving and hit gym consistently. Book is written in most convincing form that we will never think about impact of exercise on our body and brain in same way again. It regulates fuel. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute conducted a nineyear study of 1,173 people over age seventy-five. None of them had diabetes, butthose with high glucose levels were 77 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer’s.

As a gym teacher, I am all about movement. I want my kids to be active and engaged for as much of class as possible. But even though I was already on the exercise bandwagon, I had no idea how extensive the benefits of exercise really are. In Spark, John Ratey explains why the benefits of exercise to the heart, lungs, and muscles, are secondary to the benefits of exercise to the brain. The first chapter is the most engaging, where he shows how a few rogue school systems boosted test scores and lowered behavioral issues by introducing morning exercise programs. One school scored in the top 5 in the world in math and science. We all know that exercise makes us feel better, but most of us have no idea why. We assume it’s because we’re burning off stress or reducing muscle tension or boosting endorphins, and we leave it at that. But the real reason we feel so good when we get our blood pumping is that it makes the brain function at its best, and in my view, this benefit of physical activity is far more important—and fascinating—than what it does for the body.What I love about this book is the way he explains everything in scientific detail--no oversimplification or handwaving. The explanation of the stress response really brought together and cleared up a few other things I had read about how stress affects your body. Now I feel like I really understand it. He gives the full story, yet the style is engaging and never obfuscated. This is the best thing I've read in months.

It’s important to have plans and goals and appointments, and this is why sports such as golf and tennis are great. They require constant self-monitoring and the motivation to improve. This books explains why it is good to maintain health as it helps us to stay away from disease and helps us to recover fast when affected with disease. The author changed from laymens terms and delightful stories to prove his points to writing as if the book were an academic paper to be published in a neurological journal, and it got very tedious very fast. Being well schooled in neurology I forced myself to continue reading to the end but I am certain most readers would not understand half of what is said in the last half of the book.

Oh my god. According to this book I am a walking recipe for Alzheimer's disease. This is a book by a Harvard psychiatrist about the link between mental health and exercise. As life-long depression sufferer with not one, but two parents who suffer/ed from Alzheimer's, I'm pretty much in the exponentially high risk category for dementia. But there is hope, if I get off my ass and start exercising. We assume it’s because we’re burning off stress or reducing muscle tension or boosting endorphins, and we leave it at that. But the real reason we feel so good when we get our blood pumping is that it makes the brain function at its best, and in my view, this benefit of physical activity is far more important — and fascinating — than what it does for the body. Building muscles and conditioning the heart and lungs are essentially side effects. I often tell my patients that the point of exercise is to build and condition the brain." People who are addicted to bad habits get addicted to it because they need the pleasure to overcome depression, anger, stress and pain. This book tells us how to avoid bad habits and start exercising. People who thinks that exercise is an additional work or burden should read this book and understand the importance of exercise and how it can change their life. Physical activities change biological reaction in the body. People who do regular exercise stay on top on a country level - which includes technology, sports, etc. The author attempts to explain for the layman, but ends up using masses of neurological jargon and acronyms, about the role exercise plays in sharpening our mental processes. Boiling it down to the basics: moving our muscles produces proteins that play roles in neurogenesis and the repair of synapses. It also helps the production of hormones such as serotonin and norepinephrine that regulate mood. Therefore, Ratey argues, daily sustained aerobic exercise is a sure cure-all for depression, ADHD, the ravages of aging, raging hormones in menopausal women, addiction, phobias, etc. I love the research based evidence presented throughout the book which not only convince us that exercise is beneficial but also explains how it's beneficial.

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." What I aim to do here is to deliver in plain English the inspiring science connecting exercise and the brain and to demonstrate how it plays out in the lives of real people. I want to cement the idea that exercise has a profound impact on cognitive abilities and mental health. It is simply one of the best treatments we have for most psychiatric problems..." This book gets a bit repetitive after awhile (I quit after reading about 3/4 of it), and the conclusions he drew from some of the research studies seemed to really be stretching what you could reasonably conclude from the actual results. It fosters neuroplasticity. The best way to guard against neurodegenerative diseases is to build a strong brain. Aerobic exercise accomplishes this by strengthening connections between your brain cells, creating more synapses to expand the web of connections, and spurring newly born stem cells to divide and become functional neurons in the hippocampus. Exercise is another tool at your disposal, and it's handy because it's something you can prescribe for yourself."

I also was irked by the overly optimistic tone. One would think that half the world’s problems would be solved in the course of a short jog. Yet there are many people, I am sure, for whom exercise is a form of self-punishment, or spurred by unhealthy body images, or a way to puff up the ego, or merely a form of escapism—channeling unresolved emotional issues into physical pain. I do not point this out to discourage exercise, you understand, only to make the obvious point that it is no cure-all. I have been evangelizing the widespread benefits of regular vigorous exercise for years. Sadly, most people are still reluctant to begin a therapy that could provide them with profound life-changing results unobtainable via any other means... The last couple of years has had an explosion of Neuroscience books. What is even more unbelievable is that the researchers have actually decided to share what they are discovering in a way anyone can understand instead of the typical closed circle of academia.

To some extent the discoveries aren't surprising, but then it is always nice to actually have hard-evidence for something many people just intuited. With this book as well as a few others I have now adopted the paradigm of the baseline human body template being that of a stone-age hunter/gatherer. In the stages of evolution of the human body and mind we spent most of our time in that time period, with our bodies being finely tuned to that lifestyle. Now anytime we deviate too far from that active lifestyle and diet we start to experience the detrimental effects. Our sedentary easy-access-to-processed-food lifestyles are in direct contradiction to what our bodies were optimized for hence all the multitude of obvious ailments plaguing the industrialized world.I have faith that when people come to recognize how their lifestyle can improve their health span--living better, not simply longer--they will, at the very least, be more inclined to stay active. And when they come to accept that exercise is as important for the brain as it is for the heart, they’ll commit to it. Here’s how exercise keeps you going: Now, it is a universal fact that exercise is good for you. It’s been said and done so what’s so different about this book? Well, 'Spark' dives deeper and attempts to find out the effect of exercise on the brain. The book provides a detailed explanation of how different parts of the brain work on a biological level to carry out the everyday functions and what part of the brain is responsible for different tasks. We get to learn how the brain is able to function at a cellular level like how the neurons communicate with each other to carry the signal that governs our actions. It was interesting to know how the role of different neurotransmitters and how exercise helps to balance them out. Spark was an excellent look into the modern science around exercise. I would highly recommend this book to anyone reading this review. I enjoyed reading in detail about what goes on in the brain during various kinds of exercises performed regularly, as well as the overall body benefits. The preventive effects of neural degeneration have been outstanding. Exercise helps with alleviating the effects of stress, it helps with focus and with curbing withdrawal effects of addiction.