In the spirit of disruption, I'm going to be a little disruptive.
So, I want you all to stand up.
Please, everybody, stand up.
We're going to do an exercise that's called the Hindu squats,
and I guarantee you that no one here -
well, maybe I should ask, Has anyone ever heard of a Hindu squat?
Oh, there are a few.
Well, I had spoken in Mumbai, India, to 500 Hindus,
and no one had heard of it, so ...
(Laughter)
But it's good you have.
So anyway, put your hands right out in front of you,
and pull them back real tight,
and then bend down and touch the floor or just sit on the seat there.
Yeah. Okay.
Now, once again. Let's do it again.
Bring it in and then down here.
Now, when we bring it in,
I want you to go, "Boom!" and then come down like that.
Okay, really loud.
(Audience) Boom!
And then go down, and touch the floor.
Then, "Boom!" go down, and touch the floor,
and then, "Boom!" and go down, and touch the floor,
and then, "Boom!" and go down, and touch the floor.
One more time. "Boom!" and go down, and touch the floor.
Okay.
Great, now you can be seated.
Now your brains are ready to learn.
(Laughter)
And what I'm going to talk to you today about
is how exercise is really for our brains,
physical exercise turns our brains on,
and all the wonderful side effects that we get help our body be healthy.
I first learned about the power of exercise
when I was doing my residency in psychiatry in Boston
at the time of the Boston Marathon's explosion with Bill Rodgers,
and everybody in Boston was running.
We began to see patients who had to stop running
for the first time in their lives with an injury.
First thing that happened they got depressed.
Then I began to see some people come in and say,
"Look, I can no longer pay attention,"
"I can no longer plan well,"
"I am procrastinating for the first time in my life."
And these were professors from MIT and Harvard and industry leaders
that had never experienced what we now call attention deficit disorder,
but they were self-medicating with their daily exercise.
And this changed
and led me to be interested in exercise as a treatment for a lot of disorders.
We knew, from the time of Hippocrates,
that exercise was a good treatment for depression,
and I began to say that a bout of exercise was like taking a little bit of Prozac
and a little bit of Ritalin.
(Laughter)
This was solidified some years later
when a study came out of Duke University Medical School,
who had been really onto this whole thing of exercise making our emotions better,
improving our depression, improving anxiety,
improving our aggression.
But they did this study, looking at 100 patients who came into Duke
and divided them into three different groups.
All these people were sedentary.
The first group they started on Zoloft, increasing doses of Zoloft.
The next group they put into an exercise program four times a week for 30 minutes,
and the third group, they did both medicine and exercise.
What they found after four weeks
is that all their depressive scores dropped to the same level,
and at the end of the fourth month, which is how long the experiment went,
the changes had remained.
And so, this kept me interested
in exercise as a treatment,
but then I learned about this school in Naperville, Illinois, in 2003
that led me to write my book "Spark,"
which has given me the purpose and mission of changing our education system,
bringing back play and exercise as a treatment modality
or as a stimulant modality for all of our kids and all of us.
Naperville had 19,000 students,
and they had evolved, over a 20-year-period,
this wonderful PE program that was fitness-based,
and it was everyday.
So, the kids were spending 45 minutes all of them moving and grooving.
What got them national recognition
is that three percent of their children were overweight,
and it was at time when 33% of our kids were overweight.
In 7,500 children in the high school, there was not an obese child to be found.
Remarkable,
but what really got me on an airplane to go there
was that some years before, they had taken the TIMSS tests,
the international science and math test
that every country takes every three years
to see how they're doing in science and math,
and the US is usually in the low- to mid-teens.
And they took it as a country,
and they came in number one in the world in science
and number six in math.
So, I jumped on an airplane, went there,
and began to put together the science of exercise and its effect
not only for mental health issues but for cognition.
We began to take this idea to other schools,
went to an inner-city school in Charleston, South Carolina,
where they had no resources: one gymnasium, one PE teacher.
She set up eight different stations in the gym,
had her fourth- to eighth-graders come in every morning for 30 minutes,
had them play basketball one station double Dutch jump rope in another,
pogo stick, hula hoops.
They kept rotating, so the novelty was there.
What they found in the first four months
was a 83% drop in discipline problems.
Now, it wasn't just burning off energy.
What they were doing is they were turning their brains on.
We worked with another school up in Northern Ontario -
the high school -
where they had a special class for their 25 bad boys.
They were very disruptive in a bad way,
and one of the things that they had to do was to suspend these children
if they were in fights, breaking furniture or just disrupting the class too much.
So, we went in and helped them design a program
to get all these kids moving and moving vigorously in the morning.
And so, what you can see on the graph here
is that the semester before, they had 95 days of suspension of these children.
After we started the program, it dropped to five.
Then, as well, the attendance went up.
So, these kids came to school - and these were rough kids -
came to school to get their credits,
to finish their courses, to participate in schools.
Now, what happens when we exercise is we turn on our front part of the brain,
the last part of the brain to evolve.
This is a part of the brain that's called our CEO of the brain
or prefrontal cortex,
where our frontal executive functions are,
and when we exercise, when we move, we turn that part of the brain on.
As well, we create a lot of neurotransmitters
that we aim at with our psychiatric drugs,
and we create another substance that we had just learned about called BDNF
or brain-derived neurotrophic factor,
which I called Miracle-Gro for the brain
because when we fire our nerve cell, we make this stuff,
and this keeps our brain cells young and perky -
one of the reasons why exercise is one of the best ways to prevent
the onset of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease -
but it also readies our brain to be plastic.
And we know we need to have our brain cells grow
to log in any new information.
So, exercise is a terrific way to improve the learner
because it turns on the attention system,
it turns on the motivation system,
it turns on the memory system,
as well as it makes all of our little brain cells ready to grow and sprout,
and that's the only way we learn anything.
Here in California, for the past 12 years,
you've tested a million children in grades five, seven and nine every year.
This is a representative graph of what it looks like.
They evaluate them on six different fitness standards.
And the graph shows as more and more standards are completed,
that is they achieve them,
their test scores -
in this case it's math, but it's the same in language, arts -
their test scores go up,
and this is what you see in every single year.
So, the more fit the child is, the better learner they are.
So, my purpose, my mission is to go around the country and the world
to tell people, "Look, exercise makes your brain better,
it optimizes your brain's ability to learn,
it helps regulate your emotions,
it improves your motivation,
and it's something
that we have unfortunately been taking out of our schools."
We need to reinvigorate our schools
and get our kids out of their seats and moving.
So, thank you very much.
(Applause)