This Is Your Brain on Exercise
I've talked about how different I feel after yoga or a long walk things become clearer and I become calmer. The fascinating book Spark The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by John Ratey, explains biologically what accounts for these significant changes in our mind and body. This is your brain on exercise. Exercise can have a dramatic affect on our ability to learn. Exercise affects how primed our brain is to take on this new information and create these new connections. If you think of your mind as a garden, the more you move, the more you enrich the soil with positive neurotransmitters like dopamine attention, motivation, pleasure, serotonin mood, self-esteem, learning, and norepinephrine arousal, alertness, attention, mood. More importantly you sprinkle the ground with something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor BDNF, a protein produced inside nerve cells which Ratey has dubbed Miracle-Gro for the brain.', Spark goes into detail regarding the types of exercise that best produce this cocktail of neurotransmitters and proteins for your brain to sip on but at the end of the day any movement is good, especially if it's something you want to do. So next time you get in a bit of a rut or you simply want to maximize your potential, get up and get moving. Join over 60,000 readers and get a free weekly update via email here. , Download TIME's mobile app for iOS to have your world explained wherever you go