Healthy Brain, Happy Life (22 page)

“I want it, I want it, I really really want it!”

“I believe I will succeed!”

“I am ready to be inspired!”

“I am willing to be inspired!”

“I am able to be inspired!”

“I am inspired right now!”

As we moved, bursts of laughter peppered the classroom, but it was joyful, playful laughter as if the students could not believe they were actually jumping around, sweating, and yelling out affirmations in the same classroom where they usually spent all their time sitting and listening to neuroscience lectures. I could hardly believe it myself.

All my butterflies disappeared as I got into the flow of teaching this exercise class.

I asked them questions like “What are you committed to?” and “What are you saying yes to in your life?” when we were doing the move Commitment.

I asked, “When you do feel strong in your life?” when we were doing the move Strong. Sometimes I stayed on a particular move for longer and did different variations to get the students moving around the room or have them change places in the room. The key was to be very systematic about how I taught the moves and affirmations but to also keep it interesting by adding variation and by asking them to think about the affirmation. As we learned and performed the series together, I traveled the classroom, mirroring the movements right in front of the students or calling individual students out by asking,

“Becky, are
you
ready to be inspired?”

“Ed, are you strong now?”

This was a great way to engage students in the workout, and it forced me to quickly learn their names. As an academic lecturer I always thought I did a pretty good job at engaging my students and trying to ask relevant questions and encouraging discussion in class. I could already tell on that first day that interacting with the students in this way was changing how I taught. I was discovering a whole new way to relate to them as students and I learned it . . . at the gym!

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE STUDENTS

In memory research, there is something called the primacy effect. It refers to how our brains remember the first items in a series very clearly and strongly. We all have experienced this phenomenon: Think about the immediacy of the memory of your first date, your first kiss, and your first day at a new job.

When I began teaching my new class I realized that I was smack dab in the middle of lots of firsts. This was my first time ever teaching an exercise class. My first time deeply exploring a topic outside of memory and hippocampal function in front of a class full of students. My first time venturing outside of my comfortable “I am an expert professor in charge” box. Yes, this was a brand-new day, and I was immersed in a completely novel experience.

You had to have a bit of an adventurous spirit to sign up for a new class, and my students certainly fit that mold. Jamie was a standout from the beginning, very engaged and a real leader in the classroom. She was there because she had a personal interest. Her autistic sister had been greatly helped by exercise; in fact Jamie told me her mom had always had her sister on a serious exercise regime as part of her therapy. Maybe because of this emphasis on exercise in her childhood home, Jamie herself was not only very athletic but also racked up some of the highest weekly exercise hours of the entire class (I had all students in the class keep a weekly exercise log). She had also worked for wilderness camps for autistic kids and had seen for herself the positive effects of physical exercise on autistic symptoms. Jamie wanted to learn more about the research that supported what she had seen and thus had a deeper purpose in taking the class. She was not there just to fulfill a requirement and get a good grade. Her focus helped set the tone for the entire term. By the way, Jamie went on to graduate school to study, what else: autism.

Emily was the giggler of the group, leading the infectious laughter during the workouts throughout the semester. I still remember the first day of class when she was laughing so hard her glasses steamed up and she could not see. I found out later in the semester that Emily was also working in the lab of a colleague at the medical center, examining the effects of obesity on cognitive function in adolescent and preadolescent children. That work, headed up by Professor Antonio Convit, provided some of the first evidence that obese adolescent children with type 2 diabetes perform worse on a range of different cognitive tasks than do normal children, suggesting that obesity with diabetes is not only terrible for your health (adolescents with type 2 diabetes can expect to live twenty years less than the rest of the population), but bad for your brain as well.

Given her bubbly personality, it was not surprising that Emily graduated that year and started working for Teach for America, where I know she is bringing that same lightness and levity, along with the neuroscience of exercise, into her own classroom.

The academic part of my new class included a lecture (typically thirty to forty-five minutes long), during which I went over material from the readings that I had assigned. We started with the early, more historical precursor studies before launching into neurogenesis and the effects of exercise across different species. The last part of class was my favorite—the discussion session. Here I challenged students to not just read the articles I assigned but also to propose a new experiment based on the readings and current research. This shifted the class from a read, recite, remember strategy to one in which I asked them to think like scientists and ask interesting scientific questions. For example, the journal articles that I had assigned might describe a series of experiments in which scientists gave rats access to a running wheel to increase their exercise and then measured neurogenesis (the birth of new brain cells) in the rats’ hippocampi. The articles described the relationship between neurogenesis and the rats’ improved performance on various memory-demanding tasks. That week in class I asked my students to come up with an original experiment related to the studies they had read. They might propose to look at the effects of exercise on other brain areas like the prefrontal cortex and describe the tasks they would use and an experiment to start to understand what brain changes might underlie any improvement in prefrontal function with exercise. Or they might propose to examine a particular molecular pathway that might be involved in the change in brain function that the papers described. The great part of investigating the effects of exercise on brain function is that it’s a relative new topic in the field of neuroscience (a baby of a topic compared to memory, for example), and while there is a solid base of studies to learn from, there are also some key basic questions that remain unanswered, as I’ll discuss later in this chapter. My goal was to get the students first to identify the key questions and then to start to imagine and develop new experiments to address the questions.

This kind of assignment asked for a different kind of thinking and analysis than they were used to from other classes. I wanted them to use what they learned from the research findings to generate the next interesting question. While it was designed to be fun, it ended up causing anxiety in at least some of the type A students. I remember Becky had just presented her new experimental hypothesis in class one day when she blurted out, “I
know
this is bad, so don’t even tell me it’s good.” I laughed and told her that learning how to ask good experimental questions was a process and requires courage—courage to fail especially. I also assured her that knowing when a question misses the mark is a valuable first step toward figuring out what does make a good research question.

Slow but steady improvement paid off like gangbusters for Becky, who by the end of the semester turned in a beautifully designed experiment examining the specific molecules involved in how exercise enhances neurogenesis. She told me afterward that she could not believe what she had accomplished and that the combination of copious encouragement and gentle critiquing I had done had helped her immensely. I loved seeing this success, and it proves a major belief of mine: Anyone can learn to think like a scientist!

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WHEN I BROUGHT EXERCISE INTO THE CLASSROOM?

My original idea for bringing exercise into my classroom was that I wanted students to feel the high they got from a great workout as they were learning about all the effects of exercise on the brain. While I also hypothesized that exercise would give them a boost of energy that would also affect the academic part of the class, I never could have predicted all the changes that actually occurred—not only for my students but for me as well.

I used intenSati as the workout for this course for a few reasons. First, as I’ve described, I had found intenSati to be an incredibly motivating and uplifting workout, and I wanted an engaging form of exercise to keep the students motivated and involved in the exercise component of the class throughout the semester. But there were also reasons
not
to choose this workout. intenSati involves not only an aerobic component but a strong motivational component as well. I strongly suspected that the motivational/affirmation part of the workout added mood-boosting potential beyond the exercise itself. I weighed the pros and cons and decided for this class, keeping the students motivated and engaged in the exercise was most important so I chose to stick with intenSati, but I knew that for anything we found, we would have to go back to determine if exercise alone, affirmations alone, or the particular combination of intentional exercise was causing the effects that we saw. Indeed, this form of exercise did bring a whole new level of energy and excitement into the classroom and everyone, including me, felt it. This positive energy from the exercise portion of the class easily seeped over into the academic lecture and discussion parts. The most obvious change was that the students were more energetic and completely and totally awake after the workout when we got to the academic part of the class. We had just spent the last hour sweating, and working, and high-fiving each other during the exercise, which put the students in an excellent state of mind to learn: They were relaxed but aroused, focused and attuned, and the topic seemed highly relevant and interesting to them.

In addition, I ended each intenSati session with a three-minute meditation (see Chapter 10). This allowed the students to quiet their minds before we started the academic part of the class.

This intentional aerobic exercise together with the short meditation seemed to provide the students with both energy and focus for our academic learning session that followed. In fact, one of the students said this class was nothing like her other morning classes, where she was clinging to her Starbucks cup. Instead she said she was able to remember everything from this class and didn’t even need to take notes. Another student said she felt like she was able to pay better attention in this class relative to her other classes.

Part of this energy boost I believe came from the rather unusual situation of having students work out with their professor (in fact, led by their professor) before class. But in addition to this novelty, I explicitly challenged the students to be as interactive in the lecture part of the class as they were in the call-and-response part of the exercise class. All of these factors worked to give the students a higher level of energy than I’d ever seen before in my classroom. I believe the positive affirmations played a role in this positive shift in energy. As I described in Chapter 4, not only have positive self-affirmations been shown to buffer us from stress and improve our mood in certain situations but aerobic exercise increases a wide range of different brain hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, testosterone, and BDNF, all of which have been shown to have a positive effect on mood. Consistent with these findings, the mood in that classroom was somewhere up in the rafters.

But of course the students were not the only ones benefiting from the exercise. I was too. The first thing I noticed in me was the boost of energy that came from leading the exercise part of the class. I am typically tuckered out after teaching a traditional class, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to make it through the lecture right after having taught an hour of exercise. I found instead that I was more energized after the entire combination of exercise plus lecture/discussion than I was after my typical lecture classes. I was getting a boost of mood from the exercise and affirmations and from the increase in testosterone from the powerful poses I was leading the students in.

The most striking change, however, was how differently I engaged with the students in that class. The exercise class with all its shouted affirmations and playful interaction, which was not part of my regular academic classes, spilled over to the lecture/discussion parts of the session, so I was interacting with students during the entire class in a much more relaxed way. I also shared more of myself with the students in this class, finding myself openly and easily telling them stories about how the affirmations were working (or not) in my life. These were not science stories, but personal examples of how I used persistence (one of the affirmations) in my life or when I had been strong. This was part of the training I received to be able to teach the exercise class, but I had no idea how much that personal touch would change the interactions with the students in the classroom. It reminded me of the personal stories about her life or her family that Marian Diamond would share with us during class. I remember her stories, but it took me years and years to understand how important they were to establishing the kind of wonderful rapport she had with her students.