Born Movers

     👲Yes, actually  my story starts with somebody I met. It was a  professor who won a prize and a whole variety of other things. He came to me  said to me, "look I had to stop running a marathon training for the marathon." He was one of the early marathoners because he hurt his ankle and then his  knee and he said, "I have attention deficit disorder and I have never had any problem with attention because I've always been running." That stimulated me to get more attention with his problem. 

 

I came back to the whole idea  about exercise and its effect on the brain.  So my understanding, I think our understanding and the scientists observed we need to move because  we're born movers.  So that's one of the key concepts meaning if we didn't move we wouldn't be thinkers, If  we weren't the king and queens of movement  we won't be the kinds of thinkers. Now if you read a number of times you'll  see the warnings all the time  "don't sit. Sitting is a new smoking, okay.  That's a neat phrase, it encapsulates it. And everybody is talking about this and  studying it  seeing how much mortality morbidity is increased as we sit. Then we know from studies that  when we stand that our brains are that a little bit better than we are almost sitting so that's why as a teacher it is very hard to sit and lecture.

 

For me I have to move around so that it keeps me focused and what it does is because we're using  muscles to stand  using a lot of it feeds back to the brain then switches the brain on which feeds forward to the prefrontal cortex where we generate our thoughts, talk and anywhere we learn as well as perform. Now we are getting more and more data more and more laboratories are picking up on the effect of movement on the brain. Its watershed event was 1995 coming from worrying about the growing problem down the road with boomers with Alzeimer diseases and cognitive decline. There was a big Marcathy study, countries looking at what were the things that prevented the onset of cognitive decline and aging and they were three. One was more weight, two was continuous learning and three was exercise.

 

Now, even when they factored out the effect on the cardiovascular system and prevention of stroke, exercise was really the most robust prevention for cognitive decline and Alzeiner disease. So this started the whole series of.reports that really was flowering right in the midst of Neuroscience, it was beginning to really take off. Everyone is interested in it now because we know a major effect on our brain, probably the most effective thing we can do is now we look at our brain as a muscle. So the more we use it the better it grows. So when we exercise we're using those nerve cells that we use to thimk and learn and all of that.