exercise
& the brain
dr
john
ratey
Kate Cracknell talks to the Harvard Medical School
What’s your background?
associate professor about his latest book, SPARK,
I’m a psychiatrist and have been at Harvard Medical
which looks at the impact of exercise on the brain School for many years, focusing on attention deficit disorder
(ADD) and aggression. I have always been fascinated, however,
by the effect of exercise on mental health – on depression and
anxiety, ADD, addictions and so on. Exercise has an impact on
mental health across the board. In almost all my books, and this
is the eighth, I mention exercise as a modality that deserves to
be somewhere in the treatment plan.
So what is SPARK?
SPARK, my latest book, pulls together the literal avalanche
of clinical and neuroscientific information that’s been published
in medical journals over the last 14 years, and weaves this
around stories and anecdotes. The studies, all of which look at
the effect of exercise on mental health, have been conducted
by hospitals, medical schools and scientists around the world.
What topics does it cover?
The first chapter is about a remarkable school in
Naperville, US. For the last 18 years, it has moved its PE
offering away from traditional ball sports to a fitness-based
daily PE programme. All the kids were included all of the time,
measuring their heart rates with cardiac monitors to ensure
they were in the correct training zone. And they’ve had
amazing success: only 3 per cent of their kids are overweight,
whereas the average in US schools is 37 per cent. Not only
that but, in 1999, 98 per cent of the kids took the TIMSS test
– the international science and maths tests – and they came top
©IST
in the world in science and sixth in maths, even though they
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were spending 45 minutes a day devoted to physical fitness.
A school in Copenhagen took up the idea, with 250 kids in
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the senior high school taking part in a very vigorous fi tness
.COM/LEIGH SCHINDLER
programme for 45 minutes each day. There was subsequently
a 40 per cent increase in attendance, a decrease in discipline
problems, and their average grade elevation for the four
months of the initiative was a whole letter grade and a half.
Are there also benefits for older people?
Yes, it applies across the board. In fact, most of our work
has been done with middle-aged and elderly people. Most of
Baby brain Pregnant women who keep moving are less the money to date has been spent on looking at preventing
depressed, and their babies tend to be more responsive cognitive decline – the impact that exercise has on keeping our
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