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In the spirit of disruption,
I'm going to be a little disruptive.

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So, I want you all to stand up.

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Please, everybody, stand up.

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We're going to do an exercise
that's called the Hindu squats,

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and I guarantee you that no one here -

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well, maybe I should ask,
Has anyone ever heard of a Hindu squat?

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Oh, there are a few.

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Well, I had spoken
in Mumbai, India, to 500 Hindus,

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and no one had heard of it, so ...

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(Laughter)

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But it's good you have.

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So anyway, put your hands
right out in front of you,

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and pull them back real tight,

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and then bend down and touch the floor
or just sit on the seat there.

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Yeah. Okay.

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Now, once again. Let's do it again.

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Bring it in and then down here.

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Now, when we bring it in,

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I want you to go, "Boom!"
and then come down like that.

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Okay, really loud.

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(Audience) Boom!

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And then go down, and touch the floor.

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Then, "Boom!" go down,
and touch the floor,

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and then, "Boom!" and go down,
and touch the floor,

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and then, "Boom!" and go down,
and touch the floor.

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One more time. "Boom!"
and go down, and touch the floor.

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Okay.

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Great, now you can be seated.

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Now your brains are ready to learn.

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(Laughter)

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And what I'm going to talk
to you today about

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is how exercise is really for our brains,

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physical exercise turns our brains on,

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and all the wonderful side effects
that we get help our body be healthy.

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I first learned
about the power of exercise

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when I was doing my residency
in psychiatry in Boston

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at the time of the Boston Marathon's
explosion with Bill Rodgers,

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and everybody in Boston was running.

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We began to see patients
who had to stop running

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for the first time
in their lives with an injury.

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First thing that happened
they got depressed.

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Then I began to see some people
come in and say,

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"Look, I can no longer pay attention,"

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"I can no longer plan well,"

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"I am procrastinating
for the first time in my life."

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And these were professors
from MIT and Harvard and industry leaders

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that had never experienced what we
now call attention deficit disorder,

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but they were self-medicating
with their daily exercise.

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And this changed

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and led me to be interested in exercise
as a treatment for a lot of disorders.

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We knew, from the time of Hippocrates,

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that exercise was a good
treatment for depression,

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and I began to say that a bout of exercise
was like taking a little bit of Prozac

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and a little bit of Ritalin.

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(Laughter)

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This was solidified some years later

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when a study came out of
Duke University Medical School,

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who had been really onto this whole thing
of exercise making our emotions better,

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improving our depression,
improving anxiety,

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improving our aggression.

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But they did this study,
looking at 100 patients who came into Duke

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and divided them into
three different groups.

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All these people were sedentary.

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The first group they started on Zoloft,
increasing doses of Zoloft.

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The next group they put into an exercise
program four times a week for 30 minutes,

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and the third group,
they did both medicine and exercise.

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What they found after four weeks

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is that all their depressive scores
dropped to the same level,

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and at the end of the fourth month,
which is how long the experiment went,

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the changes had remained.

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And so, this kept me interested

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in exercise as a treatment,

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but then I learned about this school
in Naperville, Illinois, in 2003

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that led me to write my book "Spark,"

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which has given me the purpose and mission
of changing our education system,

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bringing back play and exercise
as a treatment modality

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or as a stimulant modality
for all of our kids and all of us.

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Naperville had 19,000 students,

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and they had evolved,
over a 20-year-period,

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this wonderful PE program
that was fitness-based,

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and it was everyday.

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So, the kids were spending 45 minutes
all of them moving and grooving.

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What got them national recognition

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is that three percent
of their children were overweight,

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and it was at time
when 33% of our kids were overweight.

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In 7,500 children in the high school,
there was not an obese child to be found.

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Remarkable,

88
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but what really got me
on an airplane to go there

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was that some years before,
they had taken the TIMSS tests,

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the international science and math test

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that every country takes every three years

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to see how they're doing
in science and math,

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and the US is usually
in the low- to mid-teens.

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And they took it as a country,

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and they came in number one
in the world in science

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and number six in math.

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So, I jumped on an airplane, went there,

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and began to put together
the science of exercise and its effect

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not only for mental health issues
but for cognition.

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We began to take this idea
to other schools,

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went to an inner-city school
in Charleston, South Carolina,

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where they had no resources:
one gymnasium, one PE teacher.

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She set up eight
different stations in the gym,

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had her fourth- to eighth-graders
come in every morning for 30 minutes,

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had them play basketball one station
double Dutch jump rope in another,

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pogo stick, hula hoops.

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They kept rotating,
so the novelty was there.

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What they found in the first four months

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was a 83% drop in discipline problems.

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Now, it wasn't just burning off energy.

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What they were doing
is they were turning their brains on.

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We worked with another school
up in Northern Ontario -

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the high school -

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where they had a special class
for their 25 bad boys.

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They were very disruptive in a bad way,

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and one of the things that they had to do
was to suspend these children

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if they were in fights, breaking furniture
or just disrupting the class too much.

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So, we went in and helped them
design a program

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to get all these kids moving
and moving vigorously in the morning.

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And so, what you can see on the graph here

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is that the semester before, they had
95 days of suspension of these children.

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After we started the program,
it dropped to five.

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Then, as well, the attendance went up.

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So, these kids came to school -
and these were rough kids -

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came to school to get their credits,

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to finish their courses,
to participate in schools.

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Now, what happens when we exercise
is we turn on our front part of the brain,

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the last part of the brain to evolve.

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This is a part of the brain
that's called our CEO of the brain

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or prefrontal cortex,

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where our frontal executive functions are,

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and when we exercise, when we move,
we turn that part of the brain on.

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As well, we create
a lot of neurotransmitters

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that we aim at with our psychiatric drugs,

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and we create another substance
that we had just learned about called BDNF

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or brain-derived neurotrophic factor,

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which I called Miracle-Gro for the brain

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because when we fire our nerve cell,
we make this stuff,

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and this keeps our brain cells
young and perky -

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one of the reasons why exercise
is one of the best ways to prevent

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the onset of cognitive decline
and Alzheimer's disease -

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but it also readies
our brain to be plastic.

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And we know we need
to have our brain cells grow

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to log in any new information.

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So, exercise is a terrific way
to improve the learner

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because it turns on the attention system,

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it turns on the motivation system,

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it turns on the memory system,

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as well as it makes all of our little
brain cells ready to grow and sprout,

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and that's the only way we learn anything.

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Here in California, for the past 12 years,

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you've tested a million children
in grades five, seven and nine every year.

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This is a representative graph
of what it looks like.

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They evaluate them
on six different fitness standards.

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And the graph shows as more and more
standards are completed,

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that is they achieve them,

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their test scores -

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in this case it's math,
but it's the same in language, arts -

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their test scores go up,

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and this is what you see
in every single year.

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So, the more fit the child is,
the better learner they are.

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So, my purpose, my mission
is to go around the country and the world

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to tell people, "Look,
exercise makes your brain better,

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it optimizes your
brain's ability to learn,

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it helps regulate your emotions,

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it improves your motivation,

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and it's something

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that we have unfortunately
been taking out of our schools."

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We need to reinvigorate our schools

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and get our kids out of
their seats and moving.

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So, thank you very much.

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(Applause)