Optimizing your Brain through Exercise

Yeah, actually, my story starts with someone at MIT, a long time ago, a professor here who won the MacArthur Award and a whole variety of other things came to me and said, Look, I had to stop running training. marathon because of the marathon he was one of the first marathoners because he hurt his ankle, then his knee and he came in and said look, I have adult onset attention deficit disorder, he said I've never had problems with attention because I always I've been running and that's what stimulated me to pay more attention to my patients and Ned was, hell, the job, it was my, I was chief resident, he was a resident, so we started working together and that's how we added 15 years or so and then I came back to the idea of ​​

exercise

and its effect on the

brain

and I brought my dog, which is a Jack Russell, and when I bought this dog I took him to the vet, the vet told me you have to put him in Ridin, that's my website and on Facebook, that's me and so I'm happy to be partially funded by rebok.

I was previously funded by Johnson and Johnson, which allows me to do things like this, it's wonderful, anyway, that's how I understand it. I think our understanding in Neuroscience is that we need to move, we were born moving, it was only 10,000 years ago that we were hunters and we moved between 10 and 14 miles a day, looking for food, moving from place to place, running, climbing, swimming, no. one was training for triathlons or marathons, everyone was fit or you died, so what we know and what happened over the half a million years that we were, according to Hunter, is that our

brain

s grew and our brains grew from the cortex motor, the red area there.

Up front, a frontal cortex was added piece by piece over that half a million years and they essentially added, we essentially added those pieces to help us be the best engines for thinking, planning, predicting and doing all those beautiful things that We humans , we evolved to do it, but those same nerve cells that we use and are stimulated when we move, so that's one of the key concepts a very tough scientist at New York University, Rudolph Al Lenas said that in a great book. What we call thinking is actually an evolutionary internalization of movement, meaning that if we didn't move we wouldn't be thinkers.

If we weren't the queens and kings of the movement, we wouldn't be the type of thinkers. and have an MIT media lab now, if you read the New York Times, you'll see these warnings all the time, don't sit back, it's news, okay, and that's a fancy phrase that sums it up and everyone's talking of this and study. Seeing how much mortality and morbidity increases when we sit well, we know from studies that when we're standing, our brains are a little bit better, maybe 7% better than when we're sitting, so as a lecturer. It is very difficult to sit down and lecture with me or even with me.

I have to move, so that keeps me focused and what it does is that because we use muscles to stand up using the large skeletal muscles, the core muscles, all of that. it feeds back to the brain it changes the brain that feeds to the prefrontal cortex which is where we generate our thoughts this talk and where we learn and act now we are obtaining more and more data more and more Laboratories We are perceiving the effect of movement on the brain. The decisive event was in 1995, when we were becoming concerned about the growing problem in the future with us Boomers of Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline.

There was a large MacArthur study uh multiple countries that analyzed what were the things that prevented the onset of cognitive decline in aging. Well, there are three, one was optimal weight, two was continuous learning, three was

exercise

now, even when they excluded the effect on the cardiovascular system. Exercise prevention of stroke was really the strongest prevention for cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease, so this started a whole series of reports that were really flourishing right in the middle of when neuroscience was starting to take off. and so we have before that, I had to scan Medline, there would be 10 to 14 new articles a month.

Now they send me 40 to 60 new abstracts every week from the med lab, so now we're all interested because we know that the main effector in our brain is, in fact, probably the most effective thing we can do, because when we evolve, we evolve all those brain cells and when we move, we activate those brain cells and now we look at our brain as if it were not a you. We know we see it as a muscle, so the more we use it, the better it is, the better it grows. So when we exercise, we use those nerve cells that we use to think and learn and everything. from that now this year uh last year there have been a lot of good events about exercise f finally the American Psychiatric Association said that exercise is in fact a treatment for depression even though we already knew it with Hippocrates uh The Institute of Medicine has said he did a big study and said look at physical education, fitness-based physical education should be a core subject for all of our children, not because it makes them healthier, but because it improves test scores and that data They are there and they came to that. conclusion, the director of the CDC said that exercise is the best medicine for almost everything, people with cancer are now using exercise as a treatment to improve, in or in, you know, our killer cells improve the effects of drugs. and I started to focus on this topic when I heard about this school in the Naville School District, Illinois, 19,000 kids where they were, uh, uh, they enlarged the film for me, they interviewed the real revolutionary physical educator who had changed the education program physics in neille for a gym. based on one, they had the kids every day, they had been traditional physical education, but he felt that the kids were still not in shape, they were still overweight, they were getting depressed, all the things that that, uh, you know he wanted change and achieve, so he made a big change in the physical education program and got the kids moving, all the kids were moving, he had them every day for 40 minutes in a high school, he convinced his other teachers, everyone They started moving, they threw the balls and they did it. running games, they did calisthenics and a couple of years later he realized he was still giving athletes top marks, so he said aha, portable measurement, so he was the first to use heart rate monitors in the class gymnastics and you got

your

grade being in their cardiac training zone, the reason the movie about our obesity crisis here appeared in Switzerland is because in 2003, out of 19,000 children, 3% of them were overweight.

The 3% overweight observed 7,500 children in high school, not one. I wasn't obese, and the average back then was 33% of our kids were overweight, now it's 37%, so something was happening and this was a big part of it, it was this daily fitness-based exercise. um, two years before they did this. measures that 99% of children took the international science and math test, a Tims H test, you can do it as a country, we take it every 3 years, every country in the world we qualify and usually the US is in their teens in math, so Not only were they fit, these kids were smart and smart, so I got on a plane to go out and see what was happening now that we knew about the power of exercise in my field of psychiatry.

For a long time, Hippocrates. I wrote about it 300 years BC, however, it was never science, it was never proven, and then in the late '70s and early '80s, Duke University School of Medicine was very interested in exercises and treatment for heart problems, so they were getting all these posts, uh My and The patients exercised on treadmills and the psychologists were seeing if they could change them from type A to type B. What they found was remarkable: not only were they less aggressive, less anxious, less stressed, but their mood was better. less depressed, so they started a love affair with exercise and depression, anxiety and aggression in the psychology department and they were going down well and then they did a whole series of studies throughout the '80s and '90s and this article, the data from this paper and just these are Q cards to me, so, but the data showed that they took a hundred people who came to Duke over a 4-year period wanting treatment for depression and they put a third of those patients on zolof in increasing doses. of Zoloft they put another third into an exercise regimen and they put the last third into both and what they found after four weeks is that all of their depression scores dropped to the same level, they stopped being depressed in four weeks and at the end of four months . what was the level at the time of the study, so this was a treatment, well, this wasn't big news, because this was the first time we had really valid scientific validity comparing it to a medication, saying: Look, this is as good as medicine, all the people, those hundred people that came, they were sedentary, they hadn't moved at all, so it was really changing the way they led their life and it really had a big impact for a few three days, you know.

It was in the news, it was in Newsweek, uh, Jane Brody wrote about it, but we forget that most people in my profession had never heard of it, so psychiatrists who had depression groups, now they're hearing about it. So we knew this and this happened in 1999 and they were criticized because they didn't have a placebo group, so 10 years later they did another larger study with a placebo group so that the randomized control controlled for all those things that we have to do. and I found the same effect which was as good as our antidepressants. We also know that it has an effect on anxiety and stress.

The fitter you are, the more stress it takes to stress you out and activate that. sympathetic nervous system and then fighting ORF leak syndrome and now we know we're learning why we know we change the dynamics of the arzal centers in the midbrain uh when we exercise, TR we change the dynamics of norepinephrine that starts the whole process , but we also have an effect on the hippocampus, which is a great center for our work in exercise. The hippocampus is a memory center for the brain, a kind of Grand Central Station, but also, and we have learned in the last 10 to 15 years, that it is also a controller of anxiety and panic this is where they are found most of the cortisol binding sites on the Epic campus, so when we're stressed we can learn faster for a while until we run out and that's what happens, if you're chronically stressed you start to erode nerve cells it's also the area of ​​the brain where we have this wonderful evolutionary process called neurogenesis that occurs neurogenesis that we discovered happened in humans in 1999 uh we didn't know it happened before uh it was difficult for many A lot of people trick it into understanding it, but we actually cultivate new nerve cells all the time, that's what neurogenesis is and we have stem cells and we grow them in this memory area of ​​the brain every day and activities like learning to meditate, enjoying laughter.

Being with someone increases the number of new stem cells we transform into new nerve cells, but nothing does this better than exercise. Elizabeth G from Princeton, this year her group looked at what these new brain cells were, what kind of new brain cells. We were growing, so they looked at the rats like we always do and found that the fit rats grew more of these cells that contain Gaba, which is the main inhibitor of the brain, so it disrupts excitatory nerve cells, which could be responding to stress. or a threat or something like that, it takes more threat to activate our defensive system and our sympathetic nervous system because we have more Gabis cells in our hippocampus.

Interesting now, as I say, one of the aspects of my entire working and professional life. We have been involved in understanding the brain and how we can affect it and we can affect it with exercise or we can use our extensive drugs that we have and we have many of them, many of them, I am also drugs. There hasn't been a really new breakthrough for a long time that affects the brain, but exercise does the same kinds of things that many of our medications do. I've always said that a workout is like taking a little Prozac and a little Rlin because it does the same thing: it increases our neurotransmitters and the three that we've been addicted to in psychiatry are dopamine, norrin and serotonin.

Well, exercise immediately increases the concentration of these neurotransmitters, so it's like getting a little bit of uh psychopharmacology.there uh so all these uh drugs and these neurotransmitters modulate uh many and many of our important human systems uh brain systems attention to uh aggression uh motivation uh concentration alertness and with exercise you can change the level of uh concentration of these neurotransmitters and there '95, the great study that showed that rats, when there were mice running and then rats, grew thicker brains, thicker cortices grew, and so did they. Al also discovered that his hippo campuses were larger, well, we had learned about this substance from brain-derived neurotropic factor a few years earlier and considered it a useful fertilizer for the brain.

In the mice, Boo's brain grew due to exercise compared to those who didn't, not only did they have a smarter IQ. SAT scores increased 20%, from 7 days to four weeks of daily exercise, but brains were thicker, better, bigger, and this led to this revolution that we see around us and bdnf long ago. of things in the brain helps our brain cells survive, trains our cells to migrate properly at birth and throughout the process helps with plasticity and that isThis, the basis of our learning is that our brain cells have to grow and bdnf and other factors support the growth of our brain cells right at the tip, causing us to have more receptors on the postsynaptic side and pressing synaptically increases the amount. of neurotransmitters that we have there triggering, so it's an important element and it's become important in psychiatry, in fact, starting in 2002, when we started looking at depression as if the brain shuts down and really erodes, so that bdnf became an important measure. and something the biotech company said oh we have to learn to produce more bdnf and then we will make a lot of money well they could never do that and in no way useful but and all the drugs we have to treat depression positively affects the bdnf, we increased our bdnf levels, so it became the signal factor um uh to look and see if the medication was going to be an antidepressant if it increased our bdnf, well, nothing increases our bdnf like exercise does. trumps everything, all drugs, learning meditation, everything else, exercise increases our bdnf because, in the last two years, someone at MIT showed that we produce more bdnf when we activate our brain cells, there is a feedback loop that goes back to blaze up. the genes to produce more bdnf, which then self-fertilizes, and the point is that when you exercise you are using more brain cells than in any other activity, you are using a larger sample of those 100 billion nerve cells that are activated.

We also learned to increase our endorphin levels and most people have heard of that, certainly connected to marathon runners who can, you know, can run up Heartbreak Hill. because they are in this state of Nirvana, because we thought that just because they were releasing all these endorphins, we could measure this in the '80s, and it is true that we increased our endorphin levels, but lately we have also focused on another substance that we do not we knew a lot back then called endoc canabo. Most people are well aware of what cannabis is. You know it was a big deal in neuroscience when we realized that we make our own marijuana receptors and we have two or three marijuana receptors. kind of uh uh neurotransmitters or neurohormones that are released when we injure our body and parts of our body and they have an effect not only on a body level but also on our brain, um and that's one of the areas that has been so interesting to I that that uh uh our body has uh by exercising our body through weight training through uh movement of all kinds uh we have a feedback loop to our brain and we guide the brain, we have all these factors that occur when we exercise in our bodies that travel to the brain to have an effect, and there is an interesting factor in the heart called nutritive n atrial A&P protein that is produced when our atria beat faster and this improves our cardiovascular system, but it also increases from the brain to the hypothalamus to reject the Central Command of our uh, fighting ORF flight syndrome or rejecting the effect of the rapid heartbeat, so there have been studies in Germany where they blocked A&P from entering the brain and 100 percent of people who have this blocked develop an episode of panic, so this is a type of anti-panic medication, if you will, or a factor that when we exercise we produce more of these things as our heart beats faster, and it will have another effect on slowing down our sympathetic nervous system or anxiety and panic.

Now we know what happens on the periphery. When we exercise, we tear muscle fibers and the next phase is recovery and repair and we send all these factors to help. repair our muscles uh igf to bring in more insulin receptors to feed the area that is injured uh fgf2 to produce more muscle fibers uh vegf to produce more claris to bring in more blood supply other types of cytocytes that activate the inflammation system or tune it lower or bring in the killer cells and then we have the endorphins and the endoc canabo that are produced right at the site of the damage in our muscle and we all damage our muscle when we use them, it is inevitable and that is why we are always creating this.

These are substances that have a direct effect on the body for repair, but also have an effect on the brain to activate brain cells to help consolidate our learning. Several of them go up to do that and others have to do it. We have to activate them from the periphery to activate our stem cells so that they become new brain cells. There have now been many studies that looked at exercise and its effect on cognition and especially the prevention of Alzheimer's disease and the men's clinic reviewed over 1600. Articles from two years ago show a positive feeling from exercise that prevents the onset of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease.

Very big. The Watershed study grew out of that because a big push in Neuroscience was to say, "Okay, let's actually show that exercise is good." It's kind of helpful in preventing the onset of Alzheimer's disease, so a lot of groups have looked at this. This very important study from the University of Illinois took 169-year-old people and divided them into two, one group, they're all sedentary. They started exercising, the other group did stretching and toning, but they didn't increase their heart rate. The other group increased their heart rate to about 75% max and lasted 30 to 40 minutes four times a week and what happened after 6 months, they looked at their fence on their MRIs and found that they were exercising those areas that are blue and yellow, those are areas of brain growth in the 69 year olds, their brains actually grew, so they didn't erode, they grew and by the way, they scored 11% better on their SAT scores after exercising for six months.

One of the slides that I love to show to the public is that Evolution has built our ability to change and to change at any time, uh, yes ahead Ernestine Shephard on our left here at the age of 56 had been obese all her life and was a couch potato decided she was going to get in shape she started running she started going to the gym there she is 74 years old Mr. Singh some of you may have heard because she was on ESPN Mr. Sing had never exercised before At the age of 80 his wife died at the age of 81 his son died he became depressed he went to the doctor and said he started running, so he told him that there he is at the age of 100 finishing the Toronto Marathon.

He retired last year finishing the Hong Kong Marathon at the age of 101 and I have this vision of him being like four bastards saying, "I'm tired." I won't do it anymore, but you can do it and the point is that you can turn on the machinery, the epigenetic forces to change

your

body, your brain, your abilities to exercise, to do it, so there's really no excuse. Now, one of the areas that is very important to me and one of the reasons I'm here and reviewing it is that I've been trying to get exercise back into our schools and as you know what happened, everyone is teaching the evidence. it's all about test scores, it's all about you know what I call, no kids helped at all and uh uh and running to the top and you know, they're eliminating recess, they're eliminating physical education, uh too. like music and art, but they certainly have eliminated physical education, um, so what we're trying to show is that we're actually that physical education based on physical fitness for physical education is really a way to improve the test scores because no one cares what you do. healthier or less depressed kids there's no measurement for that yet, but they do care about test scores, so this is one of these groups again at the University of Illinois that looked at 20 kids, I think there were in sixth grade. grade just sitting there's a slide to your left and it's a qeg which is just a measure of brain activity the colors mean more brain activity so they were just sitting there and their brains were so active they walked for an hour or Sorry , after a 20 minute walk they came back, got situated, retested their EEGs and found that they had all this activity in their brain, the brains were on, which is what we see, what we think and what we know.

Talking about exercise and its effect on cognition is that it affects our brain in three ways. The first is that it helps with our brain systems that I talked about before, our attention system, especially the memory system, the motivation system, and it also works at the right level. creating the right soup so that our swimming nerve cells are more likely to grow and change and that's what we want to do if we're going to record any kind of information and thirdly, it promotes neurogenesis like nothing else, which is a new cell. growth now I mentioned Jack and I thought I'd bring him back um like I say I made him run every day um to treat his 8 DD um and U after a good run he would come in and have what I call the Jack effect uh Could you take notes by me because they are also very intelligent dogs, however, there are times when there is no recess and he goes back to his old ways of adding and by the way, every time I give a lecture everyone wants this slide, but anyway, that's how it is.

That's what we see now, studies have shown that exercise is a good way to treat ADD with or without medication. Then your attention system is activated, you are more focused, you are better able to withstand frustration. more able to overcome the problem at hand and not get so frustrated. We know. We know that the fitter you are, the better student you will be for a long time. This is a slide from 2001, I think 2002. uh, from California, where they've been testing kids, they've been testing a million kids a year for their fitness levels for the past since 2001 and you see graphs like this each year in grades 5, 7, and N, which is the more The fitness standards you meet in this, the fitness gram, the higher your test scores in both math and English, and this has been repeated Now every year, this is what you see, so we know this happens.

Ken Cooper, who came up with the word aerobics around '41. Years ago, he raised the money to do a big study in Texas, where they looked at 2.6 million kids in one year, evaluated their fitness scores, and observed all kinds of other parameters, they looked at their test scores, they looked at their grades. they looked at their treny, they looked at their trend, they looked at aggression and impulsivity and they found a direct correlation with increasing test scores, increasing grades, increasing school attendance, decreasing direct correlation and the decrease with outburst and impulsivity in the In the classroom, the fitter the person was, the higher their test scores, the better students they were and the less disruptive, so the important thing about their study is that they also analyzed the demographics and there was no sexual difference. racial ethnic gender uh uh sces of your parents uh and even the school you went to, so the fitter you were, the better student you were now this study uh kind of reassured us in this area came out of Sweden a couple of ago.

Now, the epidemiologist looked at 1.2 million children in Sweden, who had all been tested at age 15 for their aerobic fitness levels and strength and all those other types of measures, as well as their IQ and performance. cognitive in tests. The children were tested again at the age of 18 years.because they entered mandatory military service and took the same test. What they found is that if their aerobic fitness improved in their high school years, so did their IQ, as did their cognitive performance on tests, and this stayed the same. uh with 650 pairs of identical twins, so if one twin improved cardiovascularly, their IQ was higher than their other twin who didn't exercise, so it really led to a lot of changes and if you look at the science and pay attention to It is that we know that exercise improves our ability to think and act, in addition to having an effect on the regulation of our stress levels and our mood and all the things that concern me as a psychiatrist and there we are at Harvard, we begin . a project called Harvard on the Move there's the president uh and Dan Liberman and Chris McDougall and I um and it's been going on for three years it's a daily movement activity of all Harvard students are as many as we can get running walking U moving for lunch or in the mornings um and it's still going on it's actually funded um that's why it's going on um and um who really listens to this are these uh moving around and agitators from uh Taiwan in the bottom panel here's my meeting President Ma of Taiwan that I had read the book and said, I'll bring you, so I became kind of a rock star in Taiwan.

President Ma graduated from Harvard Law School and was also a triathlete, so when he read the book he said: "We are changing, we are making a sports island out of Taiwan and that is why the occurrence of physical education of twice a week to three times a week in all schools. He just said boop. I'm doing this of the advantage of a centralized government there are many disadvantages so uh up a Pano uh up is me meeting with the Minister of Education, Science and Technology. in South Korea uh who also read the book and changed the school system, increased school time by one hour per day, half was dedicated to returning physical education and sports, half to mathematics, music and art, before there was been removed from the South Korean curriculum over the years, because everyone was interested in the exam results test results, they were also more concerned about the increasing level of suicide among them, they led the. world in teenage suicide, so they were trying to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, it keeps test scores up, it makes kids less stressed.

At that time I am with Dr. C. from J Japan, who was assistant, Deputy for Education, who also designed some changes in the curriculum for all Japanese. students, uh, increasing the amount of exercise they did in their week. There's a new book coming out in June, which is what everyone's hearing about here, wellness and I call it Call It Go Wild um and looking at diet, exercise, Play Sleep, nature um. mindfulness and connecting in small groups, now some things to do, um, this is all from an article that appeared in Harvard Business Review in 2008 from this cartoon that's about the boardroom of the future, uh, which was kind of of seemingly something out of this world, but I presented this part of the talk at Google University a few years ago and then one of the Google employees came up and said, "You know, this is what our boardroom looks like from the principle".

I know some of you have probably toyed with the idea of ​​having these treadmills with a desk on top of them, you know the rolling desks, but they have them in a lot of places in Silicon Valley and now they have standing desks as well. because it's gotten into schools, but it's also gotten into a lot of businesses to get out of our nonsense because we think better, we do better, we pay more attention, this is a group of schools in Minnesota that started it some time ago. Years ago, now it was tested and it was found that children had better attention, better retention, better performance, they felt better, um, it wasn't about well-being per se, but they were better students, so all these things that are happening around of the country and one of them is something called the shaped desk, those people in the back are at a shaped desk versus the kids in the standard chairs and the kids who were at the shaped desk, which is really elaborate and stable. uh, bike under your desk, uh, they did better than the kids in regular seats, uh, so that's something new to think about, they're pretty inexpensive, uh, then there's the U, the exercise balls sitting on them , uh, improving, uh, attention, it started. by a teacher for extra kids in paloalto a long time ago now she brought her exercise ball she had our kids sit on it and they found that they could pay attention better they could do it better um and U now several universities have looked at it and see that the kids sitting on the exercise arch in a class do better than children who don't.

Another useful option that I will recommend is something called a seven-minute exercise. You can get and download it for free. It's developed in Orlando at the Human Performance lab, and it's a fun seven minutes of exercise to get you going when you can't, when you need to take a break, when you need to clear your mind, this will do it, so, it's something that everyone can do. use so we have some time, I think for questions, are there any? Yeah, hello, yeah, so I'm curious when you say exercise, do you mean getting your heart rate up or is it also okay to go for a walk or okay? when you go for a walk you will increase your heart rate, there is no doubt that you will increase your heart rate, but it really depends on the heart rate, that is what it means to exercise, increase your heart rate to 75% of its maximum from 75 to 85% is where most people who exercise actually exercise and that's where all the studies that I've talked about in terms of depression, anxiety but also in terms of improving our ability to assimilate information and perform on a test, are there an optimal amount of time you would like to exercise and then?

Well, it's always a question that you know, usually people ask that because they don't think about what is the shortest time in which I can exercise exactly. uh and it's true, it's duration versus intensity, so the more intense and that's the most important thing if you follow exercise these days, is high intensity interval training. There was another article in the New York Times last week about high intensity interval training that You get a bang for your buck if you just do 30 seconds of max heart rate for 30 seconds. You change a lot of your hormones in a lot of your neurotransmitters and they and actually the cardiologist are the ones that are doing this now and seeing that this has as much effect as spending 30 minutes on the treadmill every day, so just switching and doing those Sprints and getting your ex to get your heart rate up and that's what Have you heard of Tabata?

Dr. Tabata from Japan. These four-minute exercises. I usually have the audience perform them when I have a lot of time, but it was actually developed for the Olympic team, but it's very popular and will catch on. you go, it's 30 seconds and 10 seconds rest, 30 seconds and 10 seconds rest and you go as fast as you can, whatever it is, it can be weights, it can be push-ups, it can be squats, it can be jumping jacks, you can run in the place, eh, but. is doing six sets of uh 30 minutes oh 30 seconds, sorry, that's extreme for a short period of time, yeah, and then there's what we were all taught, the 30 minutes or 40 minutes, you know, 75%, What about what I heard? something about this too if you could do, you know, a nice brisk brisk walk or something like that for 10 minutes three times a day or something that might equal the three or 30 minutes, yeah, you know, that's been studied and we looked at it.

People who put three, actually three, 10-minute blocks together have the same effect as one 30-minute block: they increase their heart rate. Four things like EX, four things like depression, anxiety and cognition, so the important ones are affected and it doesn't matter if you're breaking it up or not to take the stairs instead of taking the elevator is one way to break up the day and a way to improve your brain and get a Jag to use your body better. Yes, defend this question. So I'm a pianist and I play the piano. Can you hear? So I'm a pianist and playing the piano is actually an incredibly intellectually demanding activity.

Because you often have to juggle multiple melodies in your head and especially when you're improvising you have to think on the fly and playing the piano is a sitting activity, but there's a big difference between just sitting like at a normal desk and sitting at the piano where your abs and back are engaged and you're moving like that, so it goes with your point about sitting on exercise balls, it's good, but the other point I wanted to mention is that in addition to just sitting straight basic. correctly at the piano, what really makes your mind go faster when you are playing music is actually following a rhythm that occupies your entire body and I was wondering if some of the positive effects of going for a walk could perhaps also be Your contribution Attribute it to the fact that walking is very rhythmic and somehow puts your body in rhythm.

I'm sure rhythm plays an important role. The longest-standing profession is that of symphony orchestra conductors, because what do they come for? They practice every day, what do they go on stage with their cane and a towel because they are jumping, they are in a high aerobic state all the time and they also think like you think when you play the piano all the time? They have to remember, move and be in control of their orchestra, which is why they have the least incidents of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease. They live longer, because they are surely happily engaged and moving all the time.

A friend of mine started a whole process called driver sizing, to get people to lead, you know, just by tapping, yeah, just jumping like he does, especially in nursing homes and also in schools to get people moving. again, and I guess. just a little nugget, um and I wonder if um, so the way we think about it now is that we live really sedentary intellectual lives and then we share another part of our life dedicated to very, very physical activities I wonder if maybe the benefits could be amplified if at all times we are not only intellectually but also physically and maybe even emotionally engaged and try to combine multiple aspects because I think that's what this whole course is about and well. -Being is really achieving optimal engagement, uh, and you're right, I think we know from studies that you can increase your heart rate, but at the same time you have coordination or thinking challenges. you do it better, you do it better because you're using more brain cells more intensely, and we've done studies to show that it's okay, I mean, that's for sure, so really one of the best exercises you can do is dancing because it demands a lot, I mean aerobic activity and thoughtfulness, and doing the dance steps correctly, then you add a partner, that's even more complicated, then your brain really burns with the dance and then you get into the rhythm and it's you.

Are you really using a lot of your brain and stressing it and that's helping it grow and stay with you? Question yes yes, okay, she had a question: how do you properly explain the fact that athletes are generally not the smartest people in school? This is what I always say, just think about how dumb dumb exercisers would really be if they didn't exercise. The problem is that they don't care much about the high-level athletes you know in basketball and football. I know they're going to college, you know, and March Madness is coming up and all that you know they're not that interested in learning that it's not their in front of them, they don't care now, the other.

The side of that is that a lot of people who are really bright and really committed to learning had a horrible experience in PE, it was a moment of shame and humiliation and that's why there are so many, that's why it's hard to get them together. schoolchildren change their minds. You know, it's because these people have been hurt by their PE experience because they were nerds or they were uncoordinated or whatever and they couldn't do it, so they felt horrible and that's why they have bad memories about PE. um because it was just about who was the best and all that kind of stuff and they weren't and they remember yeah yeah.

I'm thinking about this. I'm thinking about tools that would force that kind of um uh, AC activity and all the antagonists in our lives to tools that are antagonists of that, like, you know, the computer works with a mouse and a keyboard and when I think, for for example, in video games, and in seeing children, for example, in video games. they find the least activity, the least movement that will get the result in the game, soyou know how there can be ways to push people towards this if you know if you just know and you know we're lucky to be.

I'm here to listen to your lecture, but you know you can't force large populations of people trapped in sedentary lives, no, no, you have to change it from the bottom up and the top down, there's no doubt about it unless you live in a centralized government. the guy may say okay, we're going to change, you know we're going to do this, it's going to be different, but, no, we actually use video games to increase activity, not sedentary video games, but things like Dan sense Revolution and Wii Fitness and Xbox have their own version of a fitness trainer so you can get kids moving, but they don't play those video games.

They're usually war games or you know W or something like that. Yes, last question. because we're running out of time and, um, John has something to catch. Oh, I just want to say that, um, I'm a little disappointed because this is the first time I'm hearing about this today and, uh, you've written. books and so have you ever gone to Michelle Obama and said hey, you're talking about my ex all the time, she's talking about five of my books? Yes, I've been there and said these things and thought about when Obama first won. because she is someone in the White House who did a great job at that time when she took over his first term.

Anyway, I don't know now, but I knew that both he and Michelle had a great workout and I thought it was going to be an easy task. It's something that needs to be pushed, but there are 50,000 school boards in our country and the central Department of Education may want to change things, but they have to be changed 50,000 times, so that's the way it is, and there's resistance all the time because teachers think that it's about seat time drill baby drill and that's the way we're going to improve education and not by adding a fitness based physical education back to our schools and that's been my mission is to get people moving to schools but also for Wellness, I mean, there is no better medicine than exercise.

Now you will be healthier if you add exercise, you will sleep better, you will go slower, you will sleep faster, but it is something that both Wellbeing is a multifaceted topic and you have to pay attention to all of them, but anyway, thank you all for coming and be so nice, thank you, thank you very much, John, maybe we'll disable the elevators in the building or something. uh for all those people who weren't here today um so uh for those of you who are in the class who are registered for the class we will meet at 244 um in a couple of minutes so and everyone else thank you for coming.