I attended a talk the other day by John Ratey. He is, I learned, an expert and best-selling author on the subject of healthy lifestyle. His last book, which came out a year ago, is “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain”.
Boiled down to its essence, his message was two-fold: (1) sitting around is really really bad for you, and (2) the best thing you can do to develop your brain is strenuous exercise.
Dr. Ratey filled this message in with lots of facts and figures, user studies, scientific explanations of what goes on in our bodies and our brains when we sit or when we get our heart pumping. It was all fascinating and very informative.
But then I started looking around the room, and I realized that there were about a hundred people all sitting. Including me. Physically, that’s all we were doing — sitting. According to the talk I was hearing, it would actually have been better for our intelligence and our learning capacity to spend that time running, or swimming, or playing tennis, rather than to be sitting in a room just, um, listening.
That’s when it occurred to me that I really should take Dr. Ratey at his word. I left the talk somewhere in the middle and got up to take a vigorous walk.
I hope he would have approved.