Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey
My friend recommended this to me as good solid research for how exercise improves your brain. Not only does exercise make you think faster, it also improves your mood, makes you live longer, and can reverse soem of the effects of aging. Ratey’s book makes aerobic exercise sound like a snake-oil panacea, except that he backs it up with evidence as to what it’s doing at a chemical level.
Even though I’ve read more than one book on neurology, some of the biochemistry in this went over my head. I would have had to read it several times to remember what chemical does what. If you have more of a scientific background, the chemical/neurology might be easier to understand. However, he does describe what each thing means for the layman.
Basically, the premise of this book is that aerobic exercise makes you better in just about every way, shape, and form. He briefly touches on balance and weight-bearing exercise, but mostly, he talks about aerobic exercise, and it gets to the point where you can see he’s pretty particular about running.
From the standpoint of a reader who likes science, this was a pretty good book. A little hard to understand at parts, but not more than the book BUZZ or some other pop-science books I’ve read. It describes exactly what chemicals are released in your blood when you exercise, and what those chemicals do to other chemicals in your brain, and what the underlying result is.
From the standpoint of a woman who would like to be healthier, I found it a little daunting. First of all, because Ratey holds running up as the ideal exercise. I’m a big fan of exercise. I love aerobics, dance, swimming, gardening, walking, weight lifting, rock climbing, martial arts, and pilates and do them whenever the opportunity presents itself without any problem. Running causesme excruciating pain, itching, and depression. So it’s hard to read a treatise on exercise that hints strongly that running is really the best type of exercise, that all others are inferior. It’s like a vegan reading a treatise that insists that dairy products are really the only decent source of calcium. At one point Ratey gives a hagiographic description of a man who’s an expert marathoner. He suggests that despite the runner’s 3-4 hours a day of running training, he still has enough time for his job and family. The catch? He only sleeps 5 hours a night. Ugh.
I suppose you can’t have a book that talks about exercise that doesn’t at some point suggest the ideal amount of exercise. The good news, a little exercise will help you more than you think. More exercise will help you a lot. The bad news, his “ideal” amount of exercise is 45 minutes to an hour of “high” exertion (where jogging is “moderate” and walking is “mild”) every day, along with two or three days of interval training. This disincludes the weight-bearing or stretching or balance exercise that one might presumably also want. I’m not sure what sort of lifestyle has room for the “ideal” amount of exercise. Hunter-gatherer maybe. Single guy without a girlfriend. I’ve read a lot of characters in novels who run an hour every morning, but they’re also usually heiresses with violet eyes, who do their taxes early and actually clean behind the refrigerator. Regular schmoes will have to make do with gardening or walking the dog or an occasional game of tennis.
Rainey also discusses how exercise can help children do well at school, and this is something that parents might want to read about. I won’t get into specifics, but the results are startling, if true, and make the elimination of PE classes from cash-strapped schools even more of an atrocity.
I recommend this book for pop-science buffs and people who like to obsess about their health.
