Sometimes it seems we go round and round on an issue just to discover answers go back to basics that were intuitive all along. John Ratey, M.D. is a Harvard Medical school professor and best-selling author who specializes in brain health.
Landmark research published in the 1990’s looked at thousands of people across the world to learn about conditions related to high cognitive functioning and delay of cognitive decline. Research findings on factors contributing to higher brain functioning included: optimal weight, continuous learning and exercise. The results were game changing. So much of health, an estimated seventy-five percent, is considered within our control and attributed to lifestyle.
Ratey, now a leading authority on brain fitness, sees his mission to “reengineer…individual lifestyle practices by incorporating exercise to achieve peak performance and optimum mental health.” Published in 2008, his hit book Spark is noted as a readable, fun book that combines the physical evolution of the brain to real-life stories of success and struggle when dealing with mental health and aging issues.
Research shows when we move, we fire off more nerve cells than any other human activity. Ratey points out that it’s helpful to think of the brain much like a muscle, and the firing of nerve cells as keeping the brain young and healthy. Movement “liberates” two different elements that have direct impact on the brain: “The first prevents us getting depressed; the second promotes the actual knitting together of nerve cells, which is the basis for learning and memory”. Both are critical to brain health.
As Ratey’s work progressed, he focused on important ways to fire up the brain; key among them are meditation and being social. Studies have come out that meditation works on the brain much the same as exercise; you must use your brain intensely to meditate.
Lawrence Biscontini, a contributing author to the Journal on Active Aging , IDEA Fitness Journal and others, equates meditation to mindfulness and gives practical advice to starters. To start he recommends focusing on one’s breath, a simple exercise requiring all important concentration. He clarifies that “When we focus on our breath, we free ourselves from being connected to other parts of time.”
By focusing all attention slowly inhaling and exhaling, being mindful of the impact breathing has on all parts of the body, we anchor ourselves in the present. Past or future stresses disappear. The brain intensity of this exercise is the point and the value to brain health. Biscontini recommends starting to practice mindfulness for five minutes at a regular time each day and reassures that it will make a difference.
Ratey’s second focus on being social targets doing things with other people, a type of “groupiness that can pull people out of their cocoons or from in front of their televisions or computers.” Taking many forms, being social fires both the brain and body. The impact on brain health is impressive. Conversely, he found the way to encourage people to be social is to get them interested in their brain health. We have a tendency towards seclusion that needs to be overcome.
There are so many fields focusing research on brain health it’s exciting. For example, research has shown significant improvement in cognitive function by following special diets like the mediterranean diet, or pursuing the arts, or de-stressing through ecotherapy. UoM recently concluded a study recommending a personal “nature pill” of 10 minutes or more in nature three times a week without social media, phone calls, conversation, reading or aerobic exercise. Impressive results.
Want to know more? Read Spark or check out John Ratey and his colleague Richard Manning’s 2014 book – Go Wild: Free Your Mind and Body from the Afflictions of Civilization.
I guess a lot of progress is up to us.