Activating Your Brain: The Role of Exercise and Growth

The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too. Learning and memory evolved in concert with the motor functions that allowed our ancestors to track down food, so as far as our brains are concerned, if we’re not moving, there’s no real need to learn anything.

Learning the asanas of yoga, the positions of ballet, the skills of gymnastics, the elements of figure skating, the contortions of Pilates, the forms of karate -all these practices engage nerve cells throughout the brain. Studies of dancers, for example, show that moving to an irregular rhythm versus a regular one improves brain plasticity. Because the skills involved in these activities are unnatural forms of movement.

Any motor skill more complicated than walking has to be learned, and thus it challenges the brain. At first you’re awkward and flail a little bit, but then as the circuits linking the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and prefrontal cortex get humming, your movements become more precise. With the repetition, you’re also creating thicker myelin around the nerve fibers, which improves the quality and the speed of the signals and, in turn, the circuit’s efficiency. To take the example of karate, as you perfect certain forms, you can incorporate them into more complicated movements, and before long you have new responses to new situations. The same would hold true for learning tango. The fact that you have to react to another person puts further demands on your attention, judgment, and precision of movement, exponentially increasing the complex ity of the situation. Add in the fun and social aspect, and you’re activating the brain and the muscles all the way down through the system. And then you’re primed and ready to move on to the next challenge, which is what it’s all about.

Stress comes in many shapes and sizes, acute and chronic – social stress, physical stress, metabolic stress, to name a few. Most people use the word indiscriminately for both cause and effect. That is, the stress the world exerts upon us – “There is a lot of stress at work right now” -as well as the feeling we get inside when everything seems like too much: “I’m so stressed, I can’t think straight.”

Stress is such a malleable term partly because the feeling can span a wide emotional range, from a mild state of alertness to a sense of being completely overwhelmed by the push and pull of life.

At the far end of the spectrum is what you know as being stressed out–a lonely place where issues that might ordinarily seem like challenges take on the proportions of insurmountable problems. Stay there too long, and we’re talking about chronic stress, which translates emotional strain into physical strain. This is where the ripple effects of the body’s stress response can lead to full-blown mental disorders such as anxiety and depression, as well as high blood pressure, heart problems, and cancer. Chronic stress can even tear at the architecture of the brain.

Above all, stress is a threat to the body’s equilibrium. It’s a challenge to react, a call to adapt. In the brain, anything that causes cellular activity is a form of stress. For a neuron to fire, it requires energy, and the process of burning fuel creates wear and tear on the cell. The feeling of stress is essentially an emotional echo of the underlying stress on your brain cells.

You probably wouldn’t think of getting out of a chair as stressful – it doesn’t feel stressful – but, biologically speaking, it most definitely is. It doesn’t compare with, say, losing a job, but here’s the thing: Both events activate parts of the same pathways in the body and the brain. Standing up triggers neurons needed to coordinate the movement, and dreading unemployment generates plenty of activity, since emotions are a product of neurons signaling one another. Likewise, learning French, meeting new people, and moving your muscles all make demands on your brain; all are forms of stress. As far as your brain is concerned, stress is stress – the difference is in degree.

Exercise controls the emotional and physical feelings of stress, and it also works at the cellular level. But how can that be, if exercise itself is a form of stress? The brain activity caused by exercise generates molecular by-products that can damage cells, but under normal circumstances, repair mechanisms leave cells hardier for future challenges. Neurons get broken down and built up just like muscles -stressing them makes them more resilient. This is how exercise forces the body and mind to adapt.

Triggered by a primitive call to survive, the body’s stress response is a built-in gift of evolution without which we wouldn’t be here today. The response ranges from mild to intense depending on the cause. Severe stress activates the emergency phase, commonly known as the fight-or-flight response. It’s a complex physiological reaction that marshals resources to mobilize body and brain, and engraves a memory of what happened, so we can avoid it next time.

The fight-or flight response calls into action several of the body’s most powerful hormones and scores of neurochemicals in the brain. The brain’s panic button, called the amygdala, sets off the chain reaction on receiving sensory input about a possible threat to the body’s natural equilibrium. Being hunted would certainly qualify, but so would being the hunter. The amygdala’s job is to assign intensity to the incoming information, which may or may not be obviously survival related. It’s not just about fear, but any intense emotional state, including, for example, euphoria or sexual arousal. Winning the lottery or dining with a supermodel can trigger the amygdala. These events may not seem stressful, but remember, our brains don’t distinguish between “good” and “bad” demands on the system. And in an evolutionary light, good fortune and a good date are related to survival – prospering and procreating.

Source : Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey, Eric Hagerman

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/721609.Spark

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