Monday, February 28, 2011

Yep

From Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by John J. Ratey, MD, a wonderful gift last week from Templeton ES PE teacher Monica Chapin:

In the Introduction:
"In today's technology-driven, plasma-screened-in world, it's easy to forget that we are born movers - animals, in fact - because we've engineered movement right out of our lives.  Ironically, the human capacity to dream and plan and create the very society that shields us from our biological imperative to move is rooted in the areas of the brain that govern movement.  As we adapted to an ever-changing environment over the past half million years, our thinking brain evolved from the need to hone motor skills.  We envision our hunter-gatherer ancestors as brutes who relied primarily on physical prowess, but to survive over the long haul they had to use their smarts to find and store food.  The relationship between food, physical activity, and learning is hardwired into the brain's circuitry." Page 3
In the chapter Learning: Grow Your Brain Cells:
"The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too.  Learning and memory evolved in concert with the motor functions that allowed our ancestors to track down food [the reason we learned how to learn in the first place], so as far as our brains are concerned, if we're not moving, there's no need to learn anything." Page 53
So...if you are not moving you are not learning?

I think that's it in a nutshell.

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