consist? Simply gym clothes, worn all day long. If your children’s school isn’t on board, consider how you could help your kids get 20 to 30 minutes each morning for aerobic exercise; and 20 to 30 minutes each afternoon for strengthening exercises. Most studies show a benefit from exercising only two or three times a week.
You could apply the same idea at work, taking morning and afternoon breaks for exercise. Conduct meetings while you walk, whether in the office or outside. You just might see a boost in problem solving and creativity.
Treadmills and bikes in classrooms and cubicles
Remember the experiment showing that when children aerobically exercised, their brains worked better, and when the exercise stopped, the cognitive gain soon plummeted? These results suggested to the researchers that one’s level of fitness is not as important as a steady increase in oxygen to the brain. Otherwise, the improved mental sharpness would not have fallen off so rapidly. So they did another experiment. They administered supplemental oxygen to young healthy adults, and they found a cognitive improvement similar to that of exercise. This suggests an interesting idea to try in a classroom. (Don’t worry, it doesn’t involve oxygen doping.)
What if, during a lesson, the children were not sitting at desks but walking on treadmills or riding stationary bikes? Students might study English while peddling comfortably on a bike that accommodates a desk. Workers could easily do the same, composing email while walking on a treadmill at one to two miles per hour. This idea would harness the advantage of increasing the oxygen supply and at the same time harvest all the other advantages of regular exercise.
The idea of integrating exercise into the workday or school day may sound foreign, but it’s not difficult. I put a treadmill in my own office, and I now take regular breaks filled not with coffee but with exercise. I constructed a small structure upon which my laptop fits so that I can write while I walk. At first, it was difficult to adapt to such a strange hybrid activity. It took a whopping 15 minutes to become fully functional typing on my laptop while walking 1.8 miles per hour.
Office workers can sometimes choose their own desk setups, integrating exercise on an individual basis. But businesses have compelling reasons to incorporate such radical ideas into company policy as well. Business leaders already know that if employees exercised regularly, it would reduce health-care costs. There’s no question that halving someone’s lifetime risk of a debilitating stroke or Alzheimer’s disease is a wonderfully humanitarian thing to do. But exercise also could boost the collective brain power of an organization. Fit employees are more capable than sedentary employees of mobilizing their God-given IQs. For companies whose competitiveness rests on creative intellectual horsepower, such mobilization could mean a strategic advantage. In the laboratory, regular exercise improves problem-solving abilities, fluid intelligence, and even memory—sometimes dramatically so. It’s worth finding out whether the same is true in business settings, too.
Brain Rule #2
Exercise boosts brain power.
• Our brains were built for walking—12 miles a day!
• To improve your thinking skills, move.
• Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting.
• Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of general dementia. It cuts your risk of alzheimer’s by 60 percent.
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Brain Rule #3
Sleep well, think well.
IT’S NOT THE MOST comfortable way to raise funds for a major American charity. In 1959, New York disk jockey Peter Tripp decided that he would stay awake for 200 straight hours. He got into a glass booth in the most visible place possible in New York—Times Square—and rigged up the radio so that he could broadcast his show. He even allowed scientists (and, wisely, medical professionals) to observe and measure his behavior as he descended into sleeplessness. One of those scientists was famed sleep researcher William Dement. For the first 72 hours, everything seemed fine with Tripp. He gave his normal three-hour show with humor and professional aplomb. Then things changed. Tripp became rude and offensive to the people around him. Hallucinations set in. The researchers testing his cognitive skills halfway through found he could no longer complete certain mental skill tests. At the 120-hour mark—five days in—Tripp showed real signs of mental impairment, which would only worsen with time. Dement described Tripp’s behavior toward the end of the adventure: “The disk jockey developed an acute paranoid psychosis during the nighttime hours, accompanied at times by auditory hallucination. He believed that unknown adversaries were attempting to slip drugs into his food and beverages in order to put him to sleep.” At the 200-hour mark—more than eight days—Tripp was done. Presumably, he went to bed and stayed there for a long time.
Some unfortunate souls don’t have the luxury of experimenting with sleep deprivation. They become suddenly and permanently incapable of ever going to sleep again. Only about 20 families in the world suffer from Fatal Familial Insomnia, making it one of the rarest human genetic disorders that exists. That rarity is a blessing, because the disease follows a course straight through mental-health hell. In middle to late adulthood, the person begins to experience fevers, tremors, and profuse sweating. As the insomnia becomes permanent, these symptoms are accompanied by increasingly uncontrollable muscular jerks and tics. The person soon experiences crushing feelings of depression and anxiety. He or she becomes psychotic. Finally, mercifully, the patient slips into a coma and dies.
So we know bad things happen when we don’t sleep. The puzzle is that, from an evolutionary standpoint, bad things also could happen when we do sleep. Because the body goes into a human version of micro-hibernation, sleep makes us exquisitely vulnerable to predators. Indeed, deliberately going off to dreamland unprotected in the middle of a bunch of hostile hunters (such as leopards, our evolutionary roommates in eastern Africa) seems like a plan dreamed up by our worst enemies. There must be something terribly important we need to accomplish during sleep if we are willing to take such risks in order to get it. Exactly what is it that is so darned important?
To begin to understand why we spend a walloping one-third of our time on this planet sleeping, let’s peer in on what the brain is doing while we sleep.
You call this rest?
If you ever get a chance to listen in on someone’s brain while its owner is slumbering, you’ll have to get over your disbelief. The brain does not appear to be asleep at all. Rather, it is almost unbelievably active during “rest,” with legions of neurons crackling electrical commands to one another in constantly shifting, extremely active patterns. In fact, the only time you can observe a real resting period for the brain—where the amount of energy consumed is less than during a similar awake period—is during the phase called non-REM sleep. But that takes up only about 20 percent of the total sleep cycle. This is why researchers early on began to disabuse themselves of the notion that the reason we rest is so that we can rest. When we are asleep, the brain is not resting at all. Even so, most people report that sleep is powerfully restorative, and they point to the fact that if they don’t get enough sleep,
