This is your brain
This is your brain on Exercise.
Any Questions?
Yes…When do we eat?
Excerpt from The Ice Cream Cone of Learning (S3 Edition)
There is one hugely important element not directly covered by the Ice Cream Cone of Learning enrichment model. An element which has the power to increase all learning on all levels. The ultimate supplement stack, like a shot of protein in a smoothie, or a dollop of ketchup which goes with just about everything because it contains generous amounts of the 5th taste, Umami (/uˈmɑːmi/), a savory taste, the all-taste, a textured wholesomeness sensed in the back of the tongue. This secret ingredient, the super-hot “sluracha” sauce of learning, which can turn ordinary ice cream into a Super Sunday Surprise!!??
….is Exercise.
The Sea Squirt
To properly understand how physical movement effects the brain and why more time spent moving can boost learning consider the sea squirt, which is a small “jellyfish-like animal” born with a brain made of 300 neurons, which it maintains only until it finds an appropriate place to plant its roots. Once planted, no longer having any “use for its brain” the sea squirt consumes the brains (Ratey, 2008, p. 40). Movement is extremely complex, requiring the expensive neurological equipment of a brain. If an animal does not need to move, then there is no biological reason to spend resources growing, and maintaining a brain.
Operating a brain requires immense resources. The human brain for example, contributes only 2 percent to a person’s total body weight, but consumes over 20 percent of total resources (Medina, 2008). Neuro-educational specialist Jessie Cruickshank and brain learning expert Jeb Schenck (2015), researching the neuroscientific effects behind experiential learning, or learning-by-doing, state that to understand processes of the brain the rule is “energy efficiency” (p. 83). Anytime the body can power this expensive machine down, it will do so. 
This biological drive to conserve energy is so aptly demonstrated by the drowsy eyes and bobbing heads of brains powering down into sleep mode, thanks to an early morning class with a long winder lecturer. In an interview on the Brain Science Podcast with Dr. Ginger Campbell, summarizing two decades of research on the effects of exercise on learning, Dr. John Ratey (Sep, 2014) states, “Thought is the internalization of movement”. Thinking, like moving, comes with a biological cost, and must return a profit on investment.
The brain is similar in many ways to the skeletal muscles. Both are lazy by design, in response to the endless war of attrition raging against entropy. The brain, in all its layered complexity, evolved in combination with the physical abilities of the human body, such as the opposable thumb, to more effectively and efficiently find sources of food.
From the brain’s perspective if the body is not moving then there is nothing going on that would justify using the resources required to operate the brain (Ratey, 2008). Muscles don’t want to work hard, which is why a lot of people do not exercise. The brain is not actually made for thinking, rather it is designed to save excessive thinking. (Willingham, 2008). Like the big cats on the savanna, the brain is strategically and effectively lazy. This is why habits and routines play such a large role in the quality of everyday 
life. People who exercise regularly usually develop a habit of exercise, they do not rely on willpower.
Unlike the sea squirt, and even though the average student stuck behind a desk does bear a striking resemblance to a planted tuber, the human brain has dramatically increased in size due both to increased external movement of our hominid ancestors, and the internal movement of thinking.
Thus, today instead of climbing the stairs, humans invent the escalator. Absent the strenuous movement of the fight for daily survival, the human body degrades. The classrooms and schools of mass education systems with their admonishments against movement as disruptive, for example those that do not like to sit still are label as “hyper” active, and assumptions that learning is movement free creates an environment that causes the brain to atrophy, like muscles when a broken bone puts an arm in a cast.
Stress
Thoughts can be lovely, externalized they can become objects of incredible beauty worth of adoration, they can become the words that create entire worlds, they can even source the generation of movement through disciplines such as karate or gymnastics. But what about those equally creative, but improbably ugly and destructive thoughts that manifest not works of art, but as stress. Stress sends a signal to the entire body and brain to get ready, to fight, or in the case of a student confined in a classroom, think of Calvin and Hobbes, for flight. The stress signal does this by activating a release of hormones throughout tissues of the body causing them to wind up like coils in anticipation for intense action. Imagine a student in a classroom struggling to understand a complex task, such as physics.
The strain of trying to turn the movements of physics into thoughts generates stress, as reliably as movement in the physical world generates friction. As the length of time without physical movement increases, the intensifying tension in the muscles of the body constricts blood flood, and a cascading cycle of negative side effects increasingly disrupts cognition. In parallel to the body’s tightening, so to a constriction of creativity and cognition (Liu, Lin, Jian, and Liou, 2012).
Stress manifests physically and mentally as though a predator were on the student’s trail and resources for frivolous activities like thinking about Newton’s Laws of Motion and the digesting of food are diverted to more important tasks.
When the flight or fight response is triggered, blood is shunted inward to vital organs which fuel either the impending flight or fight, neither of which involves a lot of deep thinking. By this process blood is also shunted away from the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in many of the higher level cognitive functions, including planning, sequencing, rehearsing, evaluating and understanding, among others, basically all the cognitive tasks involved in literacy (Ratey, 2008).
For students that struggle with reading text being asked to read aloud, in front of a classroom of peers, causes a great deal of stress and does very little to support the development of literacy.
Stress also releases the destructive hormone cortisol, which through the steady destruction of cells in the hippocampus disrupts memory, and contributes to the degradation of the brain’s plasticity and health of the body (Jenson, 2008). Stress wears the gentle tissue of the body like plastic exposed to the sun.
This silent, but relentless damage intensifies as the stress in the body builds, and the price of thinking increases with ever lower quality results. Feeling the stress of being stressed? There is good news. This stress induced cycle of decline, or circling of the drain, can not only be halted, but reversed and harnessed for greater health and cognitive performance.
When built up tension is released through physical exertion the body is freed from the starter blocks! On a mechanical level exercise allows the tightened coils to unwind, and as the stored up energy is release the self-stroking stress cycle is broken (Ratey, 2008). After a thirty-minute bout of physical training, blood flow to the skeletal muscles has increased many times over, with the entirety of the body benefiting equally from this increased blood circulation, though most equally the brain.
Aside from the increased supply of oxygen and glucose, beneficial hormones, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which spurs growth, and epinephrine, insulin, and glucagon, which support growth in the brain and body.
Research suggests that Paleolithic man had to walk up to 10 miles per day just to find enough food to eat (Medina 2008; Jensen 2005). Although there is research that shows the amount of beneficial neurochemicals released during exercise is directly proportional to the difficulty level and duration of the exercise performed, even just a small amount of exercise will relieve stress and improve cognition, (Westfall, 2007).
During exercise muscles are literally pumping blood and the brain is pumping neurochemicals, and the
intensity of this action depends on the demands created through movement. Driving the body through exercise in turn drives the brain, and both processes provide the resources the other needs to function optimally, in a regenerative cycle of growth.
Students in an early morning exercise class showed improvements in reading comprehension that were nearly 70% greater than non-exercising students (Ratey, 2008). However, as explained previously, pushing the body and enjoying the benefits of exercise is difficult, and getting young students to exercise may seem more difficult still. Luckily, there is a secret to developing the habit of exercise.
Aside from all the physical and cognitive benefits, exercise improves a person’s sense of well-being (Brown and Neporent, 2015; Walter, 2009). The emotional well-being experienced during a “runner’s high” is a rather enticing reason to exercise, especially when combined with all the other benefits. The “mental health benefits” is the reason most often given by those people able to establish a long standing routine of regular exercise.
Just 20 minutes of moderately intense exercise three times a week is enough to break the stress cycle and initiate the regenerative growth cycle (Walter, 2009). Perhaps the simplest, and thereby the most resource leveraged, means of accomplishing this is with a walk. Taking a brisk walk, rather than being a distinct session of exercise can be approached as a way to refresh the brain and body. The walk and the fresh air fully wakes up the cognitive computer, sending a strong signal that it is time to learn, while simultaneously ensuring that the resources required for learning are readily available.
A walk, or an equivalent session of exercise, will improve the functioning of the body and brain, creating a uniquely advantageous state in which the brain is, “ready, willing, and able to learn” (Ratey, 2008, p.10). Exercise is the ultimate learning aid, playing as dramatic a role as hunger in the taste of food. Sufficient hunger can cause people to be uniquely ready, willing, and able to eat a wide variety of meals. Hunger is the best spice, and exercise is the sprinkles, or cherry, or whipped cream, or hot fudge, on top of an ice cream cone of learning.
Journey into another world
While a regular practice of walking will increase the density of capillaries in the cerebellar cortex, adding complex movements to this exercise will also increase the quantity of synapses (Dong and Greenough, 2004; Ratey, 2008). The relationship between movement and the brain works in both directions, thus, rather than introduce complexity to the motion of walking, listening to an audiobook adds the complex movement of cognition. Ushioda et al, were able to observe activation of mirror neurons through visual and auditory stimuli, thus listening to a quality description of an action, such as A Walk in the Woods, written and read by Bill Bryson can activate neurons in the brain (p. 504).
Indeed, combine the effects of activated mirror neurons with the effects of exercise and activity in the hippocampus, which plays a critical role in the formation of new memories, is greatly increased (Dong and Greenough, 2004). In terms of the fully interconnected functioning of the brain and body, the movement of a simple exercise, such as walking, generates a spatial representation of the cognition caused by listening to audio content.
A person listening to an audio book on a treadmill, closing their eyes to get an even deeper immersion into the language, can find themselves walking through a virtual reality geography, with “real” spatial dimensions in the brain.
There is also the opportunity to make the exercise slightly more complex, such as walking along an uneven or unfamiliar path. The movement remains simple enough to allow for full cognition of the audio book playing, and the increased sensory inputs’ relevance is a great enrichment for the content.
For example, taking a long walk down an uneven and unfamiliar wooded path greatly enriches listening to the audio book, Bill Bryson’s hilarious account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Such enrichment transforms exercise and reading, two activities not always fully embraced, into an amazing journey into another world.
Call to action!
Find an audiobook and a path, and experience the power of learning on exercise.
In case it wasn’t clear, I suggest Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, and a path in Colorado, but I suppose a different audio book will probably work.
Theodore
Mind Tree Exponential 