Notes from John Medina’s New York Times Bestseller Brain Rules
All of us at Crossfit understand the benefits of the paleo-diet on our overall health. It’s quite simple—we eat like hunter-gatherers because that’s how bodies are designed. But the Paleo-existence goes deeper than just the diet. It speaks to how our brain has developed—through exercise. Through the advancements in neuroscience we can say with certainty that exercise does in fact keep us mentally sharp. The body was built to move. Over 2 million years ago, Homo erectus was moving about 12 miles a day trying to look for food and avoiding being food for paleo-predators. When Homo erectus (our ancestor) was born, groups of people settled new areas of the world at an impressive clip of “25 miles per year.” What that means to us is that the evolution of mankind and our brain have developed over millions of years “under conditions where motion was a constant presence.” On an evolutionary scale, it took seconds to invent mass communication and fast food. People say that money is the root of all evil but it just might be the television, internet, and burger king as they are killing the hunter-gatherer body that we still inhabit. The point being is that exercise is just as “paleo” as the diet itself.
Exercise and the Brain
What’s going in the brain when you exercise? Well, a number of things with long-term benefits, but first, let’s talk about energy. The human brain accounts for “2 percent body weight, yet it accounts for about 20 percent of the body’s total energy.” Put more simply, “When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than a fully exercising quadriceps.” The brain can live within reason without food or water, but not oxygen. The key to the whole system is blood flow. When you are exercising, you are increasing oxygen enriched blood flowing through your body. The blood flow will cause the body to make more blood vessels, “which penetrate deeper and deeper into the tissues of the body…allowing more access to the bloodstream’s goods and services” including “food distribution and waste disposal.” In terms of cognitive function, the increased blood flow increases blood being delivered to the dentate gyrus region of the brain. The dentate gyrus region is “a friend” of the hippocampus—a part of the brain that is critical in memory formation. This works in conjunction with the Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, which acts as “miracle grow” for brain neurons because it fertilizes the brain with a protein that, “keeps existing neurons young and healthy, making them much more willing to connect with one another.” In addition, “It also encourages neurogenesis, the formation of new cells in the brain.” What part of the brain benefits the most from this? The hippocampus.
The Results
“Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so called fluid-intelligence tasks. These tasks test the ability to reason quickly and think abstractly, improvising on previously learned material in order to solve a new problem. Essentially, exercise improves a whole host of abilities prized in the classroom and at work.” Furthermore, in addition to reducing the chance of heart disease, exercising reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s by 60 percent. Finally, exercising reduces strokes, the number one culprit of mental disability of the elderly, by 57 percent.
The brain runs the show and is the gateway to everything that we do. The good news is that by exercising, you’re keeping your cognitive functions sharp. The bad news is that exercising will not make us smarter, it will only make us normal. This means I’m pretty much screwed.
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