The softening of the body involves a serious weakening of the mind.
—SOCRATES
One of the more annoying math teachers I had in high school was fond of taunting his students by saying, “Get it through your thick skulls now, while you’re young, or you’ll never get it at all!”
Well, I am thrilled to report that this boring old fuddy-duddy was wrong—because what neuroscientists have learned in the last decade has upended long-held assumptions about brain function. Instead of reaching its full capacity when you’re too young to appreciate it and then beginning an inexorable decline down the slippery slope to senility, your amazing brain is astonishingly dynamic and adaptable. Even better, it continues to grow and form new connections based on all your experiences throughout your entire life: it constantly rewires itself in a process known as neuroplasticity.
And it’s never too late to start. I’ve seen remarkable improvement in many people who are in their seventies and eighties, even if they’re newcomers to exercise. As soon as you start learning my coordination patterns, you’ll create more, stronger, and more powerful synapses (the spaces between the neurons in your brain) and will allow your brain to become and stay more resilient. What you’ll have is a better brain–muscle connection.
How do you do that? One of the best ways to stimulate the growth of new neural connections is with the element of surprise.
Surprise your brain when you force it to think and concentrate in a powerful new way with movement, and you’ll create new neural pathways, improve your neuromuscular coordination, and stop forgetting where you put the keys. And when you surprise your muscles with new exercise patterns at the same time, they’ll become and stay long, lean, toned, and strong.
The element of surprise is also a perfect way to keep your brain running at peak efficiency. Think of how you feel when you’re driving to work on a route you’ve taken a thousand times before. It’s awfully easy to tune out, isn’t it? But if you’re driving a different route for the first time, your brain is surprised by all this new information. Your senses are on high alert. Your brain is concentrating, multitasking, focusing, and making instant decisions so you can arrive at your destination.
But if you start driving on this new route without incident every day, you’ll soon tune out again. That’s because your brain is not just clever; it’s hyperefficient. It just loves to shut off unused and unneeded circuits to conserve energy. Adding the element of surprise is what keeps it tuned up.
The same thing happens when you exercise. If the kind of movement you do is based on the element of surprise in an ever-changing, progressively challenging circuit, your brain can’t shut down. The information it receives whenever you do the Super Body, Super Brain exercises doesn’t require just any plain old kind of concentration, but a very specific type of cognitive processing that instantaneously sends information in new ways, to all parts of your brain—some of which you may not even know you’re using. Even better, it processes the sensory feedback from your muscles and joints to your brain, too. Being able to quickly take in and respond to this information is what pushes your brain into hyperdrive and gives it a challenging and satisfying workout. This can help extend your brain’s potential to keep working at full speed throughout your entire life.
So let’s take a look at how you can boost your brainpower with movement.
Plug It In and Get Supercharged: Rewire Your Brain with Movement
When I started researching brain function, one of the first books I picked up was John Ratey’s A User’s Guide to the Brain. Deep in the reading one day, I came across three momentous sentences: “What makes us move is also what makes us think,” Dr. Ratey wrote. “Our physical movements can directly influence our ability to learn, think, and remember. Evidence is mounting that each person’s capacity to master new and remember old information is improved by biological changes in the brain brought on by physical activity.”
My jaw dropped. He’d put words to what I’d already noticed, because my private clients kept telling me how much more clarity they had with their thinking, whether at work or at home, after doing the Super Body, Super Brain exercises. Not only that, but they relished the challenges of every workout, mastering each new level and preparing for the next one. The adrenaline rush was hitting not just their muscles but their brains!
These clients were living proof that exercise can truly ignite our brainpower, and that challenging exercises make us think and dig deep to find the best within ourselves.
“Use It or Lose It” Isn’t Just for Muscles: It’s What Neuroplasticity Does in Your Brain
“Use it or lose it” is a phrase you hear a lot, whether in the gym or the research lab. If you don’t use your muscles, they wither in atrophy. And if you don’t use your brain, it can wither in its own way, too. Without constant stimulation, it just can’t stay sharp.
Anytime you learn anything—mental or physical, complicated or ludicrously simple—you create new synapses as well as strengthen preexisting synapses in your brain through a process called neuroplasticity. This kind of plasticity has nothing to do with plastic food wrap or storage containers and everything to do with your brain as “plastic” in the sense of being highly adaptable to stimulus and change. Your brain is literally set up so you can keep on learning from day one to the end of your days.
But it’s all too easy to misperceive neuroplasticity as something that’s just about cognitive ability or intellectual function, believing that you can keep your brain in peak shape only through the use of words or numbers—by doing crossword puzzles or sudoku or by learning a new language. Doing so leaves out the vital importance of movement in brain stimulation.
How movement can affect brain function was proven in a well-known study by a neuroscientist, William Greenough, and others in 1991. In this study, rats that exercised in enriched environments were found to have a greater number of synaptic connections than rats that just sat around eating in their cages all day. The amount of movement that the mobile rats had while running on a wheel made their brains grow stronger and smarter.
Fortunately, the same thing happens in our brains, as I discussed with Dr. Wendy Suzuki, associate professor of neural science and psychology at New York University. Learning new movements not only increases the size of your neurons and the number of synapses in your brain’s motor cortex and cerebellum and other areas in the brain, but also creates new neural connections as the neurons in one area of the brain communicate with neurons in other parts of the brain. (Neuroscientists call this integration and projection.)
Even better, the more your brain perceives movements as complicated, even when you might not think they are, the more brain activity is stimulated. I made use of this phenomenon in structuring the progressive element in the Super Body, Super Brain exercises, so that you can reap the benefits every time you do a circuit.
Neurogenesis: Keep on Churning Out New Neurons
Whenever you learn something new or do something new, certain areas of the brain light up and create new neurons as if you’d just plugged in the cerebral Christmas tree—what’s called neurogenesis. Not only that, but these new neurons will function for much longer if you are exercising; if you’re sedentary, existing neurons begin to naturally degenerate.
Neurogenesis primarily takes place in two different areas of the brain. The first is in the olfactory bulb, which helps you smell, among other functions. This is likely a leftover from early human days when a keen sense of smell could mean the difference between catching your dinner or starving to death.
The other is the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, important for learning and forming new memories. This is one of the areas with the highest neurogenesis rates. Furthermore, according to a study done by Scott A. Small, M.D., at Columbia University, a three-month aerobic exercise program consistently brought more blood flow to the hippocampus, helping it function better. Another study, headed by Dr. Art Kramer at the University of Illinois, showed how aerobic exercise brought measurably improved blood volume to the hippocampus as well as the frontal cortex and temporal cortex of older adults’ brains. (For more on the hippocampus, see page.)
This is particularly pertinent for Super Body, Super Brain, because the hippocampus helps you learn new things and retain this new information. And what you learn can be either word-based (like Scrabble skills) or physical (like new exercises). According to Dr. John Martin, this may be similar to creating a cognitive reserve by learning a new language later in life, or learning to play a musical instrument. The exercises likely drive more neural activity in more parts of the brain, and this can strengthen neural connections in the action systems of the brain.
rory’s story
These findings were noted in the research of Dr. Scott Small at Columbia University, and by Henrietta Van Praag at the National Institutes of Health as reported in the Journal of Neurosciences in 2005 and supported by several other studies.
Neuroscientists are deep on the trail of trying to discover whether neurogenesis can also take place regularly in other areas of the brain, particularly the cerebellum. One Italian study by neuroscientist Luca Bonfanti at the University of Turin did find evidence of neurogenesis in the hippocampus and cerebellum of rabbits. This has enormously positive implications—particularly that new stimulation through exercise and specific movements could create new neurons all over the brain.
But this is all cutting-edge stuff, since neurogenesis is still such a new concept for brain researchers. We do know that, as with other cells in the body, you lose neurons and then regain them in an endless cycle of cell death and birth. Obviously, you want to minimize the losses and maximize the gains, but there are other implications to consider. Are all new neurons good cells, for example? We just don’t know yet.
The key until we better understand more from this growing area of research is to keep stimulating the brain in such a way that it will be forced not only to create new neurons but to create more, and stronger, synapses connecting all these new neurons to other preexisting and new neurons. Which is precisely what the exercises of Super Body, Super Brain do: the more complex connections are created in the brain through the stimulation of new movement, the more other areas in the brain become involved. This leads to an endless cycle of new neural connections. You can challenge these neurons with specific movements the same way you challenge them with cognitive tests, leading to lasting new connections between your brain and your muscles.
I saw this every day when I was devising this program. My clients and I were always thrilled when they learned and remembered the sequence of movements amazingly quickly. Soon, all I had to do was give them a shorthand command (such as, “Leg straight behind biceps curl”), and they would know what to do without having to visualize it. It was as if their brains were literally creating a new code to match the movements.
Believe me, your brain will create the exact same code after you’ve done these exercises only a handful of times. You’ll be able to learn and remember every single exercise in the sequence in less than a week!
Your Brain Can Use Muscles Like Words to Supercharge Itself to the Next Level
Whenever you do the Super Body, Super Brain exercises, with their precise and perfectly structured elements of balance and coordination, many different areas of your brain instantly respond. But they don’t respond merely by one area lighting up in response and then another; instead, many different areas are stimulated and constantly send out signals to each other.
Picture all these different parts of the brain as one enormous interconnected circuit sending off information as one flawlessly integrated whole. It’s an endlessly complicated and intricately structured web where, ideally, all the interconnective strands are as strong and supple as possible—so that all the neurons and synapses work in an endlessly flowing stream as well as they possibly can.
How does this happen? Well, the main reason is that your brain is a truly unique marvel. It’s one of the most complex organs in your body, weighing about three pounds. This accounts for only 2 percent of the average person’s body weight, but the brain consumes approximately 20 percent of the body’s blood supply.
The average brain contains about one hundred billion neurons. Unlike the rest of the cells in your body, they’re uniquely shaped, with a cell body, an axon, and branches called dendrites. This cell structure is needed because neurons need to communicate an immense amount of information to each other.
The transmission of this information is also unique, because it’s electrical—unlike other information signals such as those sent by hormones in your bloodstream—and because these fantastically shaped neurons have one tiny little hitch. They never touch each other. Remember the space between each of them called a synapse? So how can neurons communicate and share their information if they don’t quite touch each other?
They use a messenger service—your neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that zap around from one neuron to another. As they’re released by one neuron, this in turn stimulates other neurons, inducing a cascade of electrochemical events that produce changes in the structure of the neurons, depending on the type of neurotransmitter. This process is mind-bogglingly speedy. Synaptic connections take place in nanoseconds.
There are many different kinds of neurotransmitters in your synapses. Not only that, but your brain uses the same neurotransmitters in different areas to achieve different purposes. Take the neurotransmitter called dopamine, for example. It helps you move, and it helps you feel; in motor-function areas of the brain it’s stimulated whenever you give your body a command, and in emotion-regulating areas of the brain it’s used to help you modulate your feelings.
If dopamine levels are too low in the part of the brain called the basal ganglia, responsible for coordinated as well as automatic motion, your movements become jerky or uncontrollable, which is a symptom of Parkinson’s disease. And if dopamine levels are too low or imbalanced in the emotional sectors, you can become depressed. (There’s much more information about how neurotransmitters and exercise regulate your feelings on page in chapter 2.)
The trick to achieving maximum brainpower is to get all the disparate parts of the brain to work together in seamless synchronicity. When information easily flows all over your brain, the result is better movements, better solutions to the questions you ask yourself, and better thought processes. When the information doesn’t flow so easily, however, you have a brain that is out of sync. That, unfortunately, is a telltale sign of diseases or of aging, as you’ll see in chapter 3.
The information flow in your brain happens in three distinct directions: back to front , left to right, and through the power of your sensory system sending information from your muscles to your brain.
First You Go Back: The Cerebellum
The cerebellum may fit into only a small area at the back of your head, but it packs a huge wallop, since 50 percent of your neurons are superconcentrated there, in only 10 percent of your brain mass. No wonder cerebellum literally translates to “little brain.” It’s like a megacomputer coordinating most of your brain’s functions, especially those related to movement.
The cerebellum is responsible not just for planning and intent, but for making sure we are able to do what we’d planned and intended to do! As soon as it receives information from your cortex, the brain area responsible for voluntary movement, as well as from your sensory system (more on that on page), the cerebellum kicks into gear.
The cerebellum has three sections, each contributing something different to its overall function: one section is for posture and balance, another for coordinating movements of our arms and legs, and a third for helping us to plan our movements—what I refer to as muscle timing. It’s not just a passive receiver; it needs to figure out what it is to do that will best control these balance and coordination movements. If you suffer from any kind of trauma or damage to the cerebellum, it’s very likely that you’ll lose at least some capacity to make coordinated movements.
The cerebellum is so special that it has its own set of distinctive and extremely complex neurons, called Purkinje neurons, that can process an enormous amount of information. Dr. Martin uses a lovely analogy to describe this: Compare the Purkinje neurons to an enormous tree laden with lots of branches and leaves, in far more copious amounts than other neurons. The tree trunk is like a Purkinje neuron; the branches and leaves are the receivers of all the information sent to it from other parts of the brain and nervous system.
To give you an idea of the power of the cerebellum, consider your eyes. They send information to the frontal lobes on an astonishing circuit of about one million optic nerves. Well, the cerebellum has forty times as many nerve fibers sending information from the back of the brain to the front!
Or consider what it takes when someone is handing you a glass of water. You instinctively know how to grab it as well as how long it will take you to reach out and grab it. An immature or dysfunctional cerebellum will have trouble judging this distance and timing the movements needed. This is something you see in toddlers and even in teenagers, since the cerebellum structure isn’t finished developing until we’re fifteen to twenty years old.
As soon as the cerebellum receives information sent from all over the brain, it processes this information and sends it right back out. When you’re exercising, for example, the cerebellum fine-tunes the neural signals that determine the timing and strength of muscle contractions so your movements can be much more effective. It does this by sending specifically timed neural signals to other brain regions and making sure that the signals are the right strength.
But it does a whole lot more, too. Dr. Martin explains that as the cerebellum receives its sensory information, it doesn’t function just as a passive receiver to regulate your balance and coordination. It needs to figure out how precisely to control these movements.
In 1995, when more than eighty studies were presented at the annual conference of the Society of Neuroscience, it was shown that the cerebellum has more functions than previously thought—nonmotor functions like speech, problem solving, concentration, attention, focusing, memory, and emotions. This is an extremely important point, because the cerebellum also fine-tunes the neural signals for speech and cognition.
So while you’re exercising, you’re stimulating the area of the brain that controls not only your balance and coordination, but vital cognitive functions, too. Not only does the cerebellum take in all the sensory input from our muscles and then organize it seamlessly; it also fast-tracks this information off in all directions to all other parts of the brain, particularly parts of the frontal lobes.
Then You Go Forward: The Frontal Lobes
The frontal lobes are found in the mid-front section of your brain. That’s where your power decision making, problem solving, and language usage takes place. It’s also the source of your powers of concentration, attention, and focus.
Whenever you start thinking about what you’re doing when you exercise, you give your frontal lobes a good workout, too. If you just move your arm, for example, a specific area of the brain becomes activated. If you simultaneously move an arm and a leg, more areas of the brain become activated. Even better, when you instruct your brain to do a specific movement, far more areas of the brain become activated. So if I told you to raise your right leg and then do a biceps curl with your left arm, you’d have to think about it, then plan what to do—that’s what I call intent—and only then could you follow my instructions.
That’s precisely what the frontal lobes are meant to do. As soon as you hear my simple command, intent kicks in, and your frontal lobes instantly calculate with other sections of the brain the best way for you to do that leg raise and biceps curl.
This is where the power of concentration comes into play: through intent, planning, and perfect execution. This is what great athletes like Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant do every time they think about how to move before executing the movement (although, of course, their intent/movement is superfast, thanks to their years of practice coupled with their innate skills).
For optimal brainpower, you want all the different areas of the brain triggered into activity. That way, they’ll send the information that they’re responsible for as quickly as possible to the frontal lobes. Then the frontal lobes take over and make the superpowerful decisions you need.
Whenever we move our arm, a few specific areas of the brain become active. When we simultaneously move an arm and a leg, more areas are activated. And when we perform an intentional action, even more areas of the brain become active. In other words, intent and planning need to interact with each other. When you intend to move with precision, your frontal lobes process the information, and the planning director that is your cerebellum does the planning.
So, for example, if you want to move both arms and your left leg at the same time, your frontal lobes recognize the intent as soon as you hear or read the command “Raise both arms and your left leg.” Literally at the same time, your cerebellum will start planning as quickly as possible to convey all the information to and from your muscles via sensory feedback. Then, if the movement isn’t quite right, your cerebellum will adjust, modify, and improve its execution.
Voilà! This is how a cognitive and a physical workout interact with each other, forcing the brain to think. The more you do it, the more automatic the movement becomes, which means you’re ready for a more complex set of exercises that will be just as stimulating as the old ones were the first time you did them.
The Right Way to Multitask—and No, This Doesn’t Mean Talking on Your Cell Phone When You Exercise
The Super Body, Super Brain exercises are not difficult to do, but as you know by now, your brain perceives them as difficult, because moving so many different muscles in precisely coordinated patterns requires a lot of brain skill. What’s more, the exercises demand utter (and deeply satisfying) concentration in order to be done properly. And this isn’t just any kind of concentration, but a very specific kind of cognitive processing and integration of information, a process that happens without awareness and that instantaneously sends information in new ways, to different parts of your brain. Being able to quickly take in and respond to this information is what pushes your brain into hyperdrive and gives it a challenging and satisfying workout.
There’s a reason for that, and it’s called focused multitasking. It’s what I asked my bored client whom I mentioned in the introduction to do. He was absolutely adept at lifting weights one at a time, but as soon as I forced him to concentrate and to combine the same old easy tasks into new patterns, his brain went from “I can do this in my sleep” to “Are you kidding me!”
According to Dr. Felice Ghilardi, a researcher and neurologist at New York University, the multitasking process in the brain consists of many different areas processing all the information and then programming appropriate outputs. Your brain does this whether it’s working on a cognitive response (like solving a problem) or incorporating elements of balance and coordination with strength training to enable you to do the multitasking Super Body, Super Brain exercises.
This kind of focused multitasking is not the same as the kind you’d do if you were punching numbers into your cell phone when you’re walking down the street, or reading a book while watching TV. (You’re actually already unconsciously multitasking whenever you walk: your left arm swings when your right leg moves, and vice versa, right?) Such multitasking is actually counterproductive, as it decreases performance. This is because too much stimulation (book plus TV) interferes with different process centers in the brain, lessening your ability to fine-tune your concentration.
Good multitasking, however, takes skill. A fabulously focused multitasking waiter will have ten tables to manage yet instinctively know how to take care of each of them, being able to gauge when the food is ready, who needs a menu, or who needs the check. (This is both cognitive and physical multitasking.) A fabulously focused multitasking student will be able to listen to the teacher while taking notes and absorbing the information at the same time, skills that translate to doing the same thing in an office: when your boss is discussing vital information at a meeting, you’re writing it down and figuring out how best to use it at the same time. And a focused multitasking exerciser will be too engaged to think about anything other than the exercise at hand. Ideally, you want the focused multitasking element to be present every single time you exercise. That way, you can be assured of maximum brainpower.
Which is why Super Body, Super Brain exercises all contain brain-zinging balance and concentration moves combined with strength training. Plus, you’ll always be tweaking the movements by adding small modifications, which will activate more areas of the brain and prevent it from getting too complacent or lazy. Your brain will continuously believe that it is learning new moves, creating a spillover of activity from the motor, or muscle-controlling, centers in your brain to more diverse cognitive centers.
Stuck in the Middle with You: The Basal Ganglia, the Hippocampus, and the Striatal System
As information is flowing from the cerebellum in the back of the brain to the frontal lobes, other brain areas are stimulated as well.
THE BASAL GANGLIA
The basal ganglia, found in your brain’s midsection, consist of the corpus stratium, the subthalamic nucleus, and the substantia nigra. Their function is to regulate movement coordination and voluntary and involuntary movement—our autopilot movement functions—and to actively connect to other parts of your brain, particularly the frontal lobes. (The basal ganglia are also involved in many nonmotor functions, such as attention, memory, and energy regulation.) That makes them an essential component of dealing with and improving your basic coordination.
Take walking. When a baby learns to walk, she lurches from side to side like a tipsy sailor and seems to fall down as much as she stays upright. But remarkably quickly, the walking process goes from ungainly to smooth. A baby who could barely crawl will be running all over the playground two or three months later.
So you can think of the basal ganglia as the part of the brain that helps you function on automatic pilot. You no longer need to think about how to walk—unless you’ve just strapped on snowshoes!
Whenever you do a new exercise routine, your basal ganglia also help you learn the movements, just as you once learned how to walk. At first, your movements are likely to be clumsy and jerky, but the more you do them, the smoother they’ll become. Pretty soon, they’ll be so easy to do and so fully automatic that it will be hard for you to even remember that you might once have had trouble with them.
I’ve structured the Super Body, Super Brain exercises to be endlessly changeable. This deliberately stimulates your basal ganglia so they can share all your newly learned patterns with the rest of your brain, strengthening its overall function and making it stronger and smarter.
THE HIPPOCAMPUS
The hippocampus is found inside the medial temporal lobe of the brain, and it is essential for learning, memory formation, and what’s called allocentric spatial processing, or spatial navigation. This is the process that allows you to navigate in the real world so you know where you are in space and can then picture where else you may need to go.
You want your hippocampus to be as well developed as possible; the implication is that the stronger your hippocampus, the better you will be at processing memories and at being able to draw associations from unrelated items in your memories.
For instance, whenever you meet someone new, your hippocampus will help you remember that person’s name by encoding it in the context of a larger episode, which would be why you met that person, and when, and where. This will help you pull up the memory should you need it in the future. These more complex, episodic memories are likely encoded by a larger network of neurons in the brain.
Eric Kandel is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and one of the most towering figures in neuroscience thanks to his studies on learning and memory. (His research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons won him the Nobel Prize in 2000.) According to Dr. Kandel, we have two types of memory: explicit memory, found in the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe and dealing with facts or events through conscious recall; and implicit memory, found in the amygdala, cerebellum, and reflex pathways and dealing with motor tasks or perceptual skills through unconscious recall.
According to his theories, once you master explicit memory, constant referral back to this memory allows it to move into implicit memory, because implicit memory is more efficient, going from deliberate, conscious thoughts to subconscious thoughts. In other words, the Super Body, Super Brain exercises may seem complicated at first, but once you do them consistently, you master them.
I love seeing this with my clients who’ve never exercised before. Suddenly, an exercise that they may have struggled with for a week is not only flawlessly executed, but is in fact too easy! That is always such an empowering moment for both of us (and it also means the client is now ready for a more complex set of exercises.)
Even more exciting, a study in the journal Hippocampus, as reported in Science Daily on March 3, 2009, claimed that “elderly adults who are more physically fit tend to have bigger hippocampi and better spatial memory than those who are less fit.” This was the first new study to show that exercise can affect hippocampus size and memory in people.
THE STRIATAL SYSTEM
How do dancers learn new patterns so easily? After years of training and endless classes in which they’ve repeated the same movements countless times, they have a well-developed subcortical motor system called the striatal system. This is nonverbal, motor learning—think of it as muscle memory—which allows them to recollect a dance in the same way you can consciously recollect a conversation.
Neuroscientists believe that, possibly given a boost by the cerebellum, the striatal system develops circuits for every little move, and the interconnectedness of these circuits makes it progressively easier to learn new exercise movements and respond to commands—whether read or heard—to execute them.
Move It On Over: BrainPower from Left to Right
Your brain has two hemispheres, the left and the right, each its own universe of power. But the two hemispheres are like symbiotic twins: they can’t function on their own, so they’re constantly sending information from one to the other and back again so you can be a thinking, feeling person on the go.
The Left Hemisphere, the Right Hemisphere, and the Corpus Callosum
As the information flows from one hemisphere to the other and back again, it moves through a structure called the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is like the Brooklyn Bridge connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn—and all the cars driving over it are the equivalent of your neurons.
Both brain hemispheres deal with movement. The left hemisphere of your brain controls the right side of your body, and the right hemisphere controls the left side of your body. Each hemisphere is associated with different kinds of skills: the right side of the brain is considered to be more creative, artistic, and emotional, and the left side to be more logical, analytical, and fact oriented.
There are lots of functions other than movement that require coordination of the left and right hemispheres: vision (especially three-dimensional vision and tracking objects in space); hearing; the integration of visual and verbal thinking; reading; and writing.
Traditionally, it’s been assumed that someone is either right-brain or left-brain dominant, but the most current research shows that we’re more likely to be a little of both and that it is very important for both hemispheres to work together and coordinate information efficiently. A perfect example would be when we’re reading and understanding what we’re reading at the same time.
So how can you maximize this constant side-to-side chatter when it comes to movement? Simple: train both hemispheres to strengthen their communicative powers by doing oppositional movements at the same time. That’s why the Super Body, Super Brain exercises you’ll do while standing always begin with this basic command: raise your left arm and right leg.
Move It On, This Time with Feeling: Brainpower, Proprioception, and Your Sensory System
Have you ever thought about what makes your muscles move, and how? I have to confess that I hadn’t, even with all my sports training—until I needed to figure out why my exercises were having such a profound effect on my clients. I had to understand why our muscles move the way they do and how they are connected to our brains so I could take this information, apply it in even more depth, and maximize every movement.
I already knew that every movement we make has a purpose. It can be as simple as reaching for that first delicious cup of coffee in the morning, typing a boring report for your boss, kissing your kids’ dumpling cheeks good night, or doing an exercise routine with multitasking limb movements.
And then I learned that what makes any of these movements possible is our sensory system—the component of our nervous system that deals with our senses, how we use them, where the information is processed, and how this information is sent to our brains.
The Endless Feedback Circuit and How It Makes You Move
Your nervous system has two parts: the central nervous system, or CNS, comprising your brain and spinal cord; and the peripheral nervous system, or PNS, which connects the CNS to your muscles and organs. The PNS is made up of your skeletal (somatic) system, which controls voluntary muscle movements and reflexes, and your autonomic nervous system, which regulates your breathing and heart functions. (Super Body, Super Brain targets all these systems, by the way, especially the autonomic nervous system. Proper breathing brings more oxygen to your brain, which in turn improves both brain and muscles.)
Your motor system refers to the part of the CNS responsible for movement. In fact, your body is one amazing motor system that’s constantly sending information from the brain to the muscles and back again in an endless cycle of stimulation.
The CNS communicates with the PNS in two ways. First are the messages carrying information from the top down, from your brain to your muscles. These are carried along efferent, or descending, nerves.
Second are the messages carrying ascending information, from the bottom up. These come from the receptors of our sensory system in the motor neurons of our muscles, tendons, joints, and skin.
In other words, one signal comes from your brain, and the other literally comes from your body’s feedback. These systems can then process the information in real time, as it’s happening, since the information is needed in order for you to control how you move. And so the systems send the information back down to your muscles along your body’s receptive channels, like cars driving north and south on your body’s never-ending information highway. Once the signals arrive back at the motor neurons, neurotransmitters are released to activate the motor neurons. These in turn tell your muscles how to move.
This information is ceaselessly flowing in a controlled manner from down to up and back again. I like to think of it as if you were gazing down from high above Times Square. The cars are flowing into it from all directions, and the movement looks utterly chaotic at first. But then you realize that the traffic has a pattern: the stoplights are regulating the flow of the cars, and what looks like a mess is actually following a logical and deliberate structure.
the mojo behind motor skills
Proprioception Is the Body’s GPS: How We Process Information from the External World
None of my clients had ever heard of the word proprioception, and I had a lot of fun explaining it to them. “Stand tall, raise one leg off the floor and keep it raised, and then close your eyes and clap your hands fifteen times over your head. Make sure you allow at least a second between claps,” I’d say, and when they asked why, I’d simply tell them to try it.
And then they were blown away. None of them could do it with their eyes closed, even though it was a breeze with their eyes open. What had made a simple exercise so hard?
The reason is that our brains are used to relying on our eyesight; when deprived of vision, our brains are forced to compensate by using other information channels. Enter proprioception.
Proprioception is distinct from cognitive thinking or feeling. It’s not something we normally think about, like listening to music, because it’s so basic, even as subconscious as breathing. Derived from the Latin words (re)ceptus (the act of receiving) and propius (one’s own), proprioception is often referred to as our “sixth sense,” because it will continue to function if our other physical senses cannot.
Proprioception gives your brain information about where you are in space. Your sensory system and your proprioceptive receptors in your eyes, ears, skin, and joints constantly feed information to your nervous system, and most particularly to your brain. This tells you how to integrate information from the external world into your internal world and tells you where you are, literally, in space.
In other words, proprioception provides critical information about the position of our bodies—not just our posture but the position of our limbs. It’s like having a GPS in our fingers, toes, joints, skin, eyes, and ears.
Having a good sense of where your limbs are allows you to properly control your movements. If someone is handing you a glass of water, your brain must first process the location of both the glass and the hand. Thanks to proprioception, you don’t need to think about or look to see where your hand is, since proprioception is so automatic. As soon as you see the glass, you “know” exactly how far to extend your hand to take it.
Proprioception kicks in anytime you take a walk, whether on a smooth sidewalk or on a rocky beach or patch of ice (where you have to be careful of where you place your feet so you don’t fall). It also snaps into alert when you raise your heels up off the ground; your body instinctively will know how high to go so you won’t topple over. This is why I often have you do this kind of heel raise when you’re in the middle of a Super Body, Super Brain routine.
You can test the power of proprioception yourself by going outside of your home and then closing your eyes and taking a few steps. Do you feel odd? Do you know where you are? Where can you safely move? Are you about to trip on the curb? Are you going to walk into the mailbox or another pedestrian? How far did you get, and how did you feel moving without any visual clues and cues from the outside world?
Only the blind, who’ve learned to compensate for the lack of proprioceptive signals to their eyes (and who still have highly developed proprioception thanks to their other senses), can navigate in a dark world. Without proprioception, you have no idea how to move or where to go.
Proprioceptive power tends to be overlooked, mainly because most people don’t understand what it is. But the information flowing up from the receptors is as important as the information flowing back down from the brain. That’s because proprioception is crucial not only for balance, movement, and spatial orientation, but because it’s absolutely essential to use movement to integrate your proprioception with your motor system, to keep them functioning in sync since they feed off each other. Which is why I designed all the Super Body, Super Brain exercises to incorporate elements to keep your sensory system activated, using specific movements to strengthen your joints, balance, and coordination while stimulating your neural connections. And since the sensory system naturally starts to slow down with age, keeping it challenged with new patterns of motor coordination and movements should help keep the information flow as smooth and ceaseless as possible. This will keep you moving the way you want to as you grow older.
jill’s story
Get Moving and Get Smarter
Rodents might have been a scourge throughout history, but brain researchers feel more kindly toward the laboratory mice and rats so helpful to their studies. Lab rodents who had lots of toys to play with and mazes to run around in—what’s called “enriched” environments—had thicker brains compared with toy-deprived, bored rats.
According to Dr. Suzuki, it wasn’t the toys that made these rats’ brains get so much thicker, with stronger motor-learning centers. It was the aerobic exercise they had as they ran around, playing with their toys as well as with each other. Regular and precise kinds of movement made their neurons bigger and with more copious connections. These playful rodents had literally changed their brain structure through exercise!
This was proven by researchers at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, who published the results of their study in May 2009, and the results were impressive. They’d expanded an earlier study done in the late 1990s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies near San Diego. There, one group of mice outshone another group when trying to navigate a maze—because they’d been given running wheels in their cages, and ran around (and around!) on them all day long. The other mice didn’t.
In the Taiwanese study, when the brains of these mice were examined, they had loads of new neurons. “Our results support the notion that different forms of exercise induce neuroplasticity changes in different brain regions,” Chauying J. Jen, an author of the study, said.
Can Exercise Make Us Smarter?
Dr. Charles Hillman of the Neurocognitive Kinesiology Laboratory at the University of Illinois is one of the world’s foremost experts on exercise and its effect on brainpower, and his landmark 2007 study was covered extensively in the articles “Stronger, Faster, Smarter” in Newsweek in March 2007 and “Be Smart, Exercise Your Heart: Exercise Effects on Brain and Cognition” in Nature magazine in January 2008, among others. His team clearly showed how aerobic exercise led to measurably improved brain function and cognition—not just in rats, but in people. And not just in healthy adults, but in adults with early signs of Alzheimer’s disease such as loss of memory and cognitive ability.
One of their most compelling findings was that aerobic exercise increases the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that promotes the growth of your neurons. Not only that, but these new and our preexisting neurons branch out, join together, and communicate with each other in new ways. And when our nerve connections get thicker, we’re able to speed up reasoning processes.
According to Dr. Ghilardi, BDNF is active in the areas of the brain crucial for learning, memory, and higher thinking. Studies have shown how this protein may help us get smarter as well. This is what learning is all about!
Every change in your neurons and neurotransmitters shows that new information or skills have been processed and stowed away for future use. BDNF is what makes that process possible, and specific skilled movements and cardiovascular activity like the Super Body, Super Brain circuits will help you to get more of it.
More BDNF is important not just for learning but also for how well and how long your BDNF-stimulated neurons survive and function. Brains low on BDNF literally shut themselves off to new information.
This is amazingly exciting news, because if researchers can figure out how to increase your brain’s BDNF levels—either with a drug or with specific kinds of exercise—then you should absolutely be able to actually make yourself smarter!
When I spoke to Dr. Hillman, he told me how the results of his study were, happily, not a surprise. Other brain researchers had already suggested an evolutionary link between physical activity and brain health—probably because our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed to be mobile and use both brain and body to capture food.
That made perfect sense to me, especially because Dr. Hillman found that aerobic exercise had a more potent effect on cognitive brain function than other kinds of exercise. Our ancestors had no choice but to spend energy, through heart-pumping movement, so they could survive. They didn’t have the luxury of being able to take yoga classes or go salsa dancing. If they couldn’t move, and move quickly, they would die.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that other forms of exercise aren’t good for you—only that a lot more research needs to be done on how all forms of exercise can stimulate BDNF.
What is indisputable, however, is that different kinds of movement trigger different kinds of brain activity. And learning motor skills that your brain perceives as complex requires you to think about those skills on many levels so you can successfully master them. If you want to juggle, for example, you have to learn not only how to throw the balls up in the air but also how to regulate the timing and the speed, and you have to learn all the intricate coordination moves it takes to keep the balls in motion. This would obviously require a different part of the brain than the areas that would support a more repetitive kind of exercise like running on a treadmill or pedaling a stationary bike in the gym. That kind of aerobic activity might get your heart pumping, but it’s not novel enough to stimulate the brain activity you want.
I was determined to make Super Body, Super Brain as novel as possible. Ramp up the stimulation and concentration, and you’re going to get the best of both worlds: strong muscles and strong brains.
I Can’t Remember If You Said This, But Can Exercise Improve Memory?
One of the frustrating issues for neuroscientists is how to standardize their studies and testing. When studying memory, for instance, how can they quantify any improvements or failures in their test subjects, since each person’s memory is unique to that person? Any ability to remember tasks, events, and people will vary tremendously from person to person.
And as you undoubtedly have experienced in your own life, memory can be easily affected by a host of factors. These can range from the normal aging process to hormonal changes (just ask a perimenopausal woman who’s undergoing wildly shifting hormonal levels that can trigger a host of different symptoms on any given day about that!) to stress. After a horrible, taxing day at work, you’re likely to forget something you’ve never forgotten before. So memory testing results can potentially fluctuate widely in the same person.
Despite this, some studies have been able to show that exercise can have a measurable effect on memory. Usually, the improvement is seen in the attention processes, which is important for learning.
ashley’s story
Let’s take this a step further. If you’re constantly repeating specific exercise movements, can the new neural connections you’ll form somehow be triggered to overlap into another section of the brain, one that might have even more cognitive functions that can help your memory?
One of Dr. Kandel’s findings is that repetition is more important for improving neural networks than duration. In other words, how much you repeat the same task is, in the long run, better for your brain’s learning power than how long you do it.
Musicians know this; they practice scales until their fingers are nimble—but if they practice scales too long they’ll be super proficient at scales and stink at Beethoven sonatas. Ballet dancers also know this; they go to class every day not just to keep their muscles toned but to wake their brains up for the real work of the day—the further interpretation of the basic steps they’ve already done a gazillion times in class. The consistent repetition has literally drilled this knowledge into their brains, and it then becomes the basis of all future knowledge.
Learning drives us as human beings. Every time you do these Super Body, Super Brain exercises, and try to do them better, you’ll be improving your neural connections. Without even realizing it, you’ll have stimulated and integrated all the areas in your brain responsible for memory, movement, and higher thinking. It’s the exact same process you went through when learning to ride a bicycle as a child. Even if you haven’t ridden for twenty years, if you get on a bike again you’ll still know what to do.