Wishing for Some Magic?

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The importance of exercise and its role in cognitive functioning, mental health, and preventing obesity is presented. Two examples of school systems that successfully encourage exercise are described. “Not exercising when you feel down is like not taking an aspirin when your head aches”.¹

 

The compelling benefits of regular exercise

Ever wish someone would invent a pill that would make you happier, more alert, calmer, and better able to concentrate? While we are at it, why not make it easier to sleep and lose weight. What the heck, throw in a little added libido while you are at it. Think a drug company could make some serious money on a pill like that? No, it’s not Welbutrin. It’s EXERCISE, as in one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of exercise.

All of the benefits of our wished for drug are derived from exercise and the evidence is very compelling, even in the elderly. Check out Art Kramer’s work at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois. In this You Tube video, Dr. Kramer explains how exercise, even just walking, can reverse some of the effects of aging on the brain. (He has MRI evidence of new brain growth in elderly adults who participated in regular exercise.) So can you imagine what exercise does for kids? (Don’t tell the teenagers about the added libido effect.)

The obesity rates in the United States are alarming and have climbed dramatically in the last twenty years. One third of all adults in the United States are obese. Not overweight. Obese! As recently as 1986, only seven states had an adult obesity rate above 15%. Now all states are above 20%.

(Overweight is a Body Mass Index greater than 25. Obese is a BMI > 30. Check out the CDC data on obesity or CDC resources on interventions)

BMI = (Wt. in lbs.) x (703) / (Ht. in inches)

Seventeen percent of all children (ages 2-19) in the U.S. are obese.

Yet, if you have attended graduation ceremonies for the University of Illinois Laboratory High School, you will have seen no obese teenagers. Why is that? These graduating seniors could thank (or curse) Sally Walker for this. As Director of Physical Education at Uni High, Sally initiated a fitness program that includes every student, every day, for the entirety of their five years at the school. During the week, classes alternate between aerobic workouts and weight training. To get credit for the day’s class, a student must maintain his or her heart rate within their target zone for at least twenty minutes, now recorded by the monitors they wear. First semester of their (“Subbie”) first year, there is plenty of grumbling and feeble attempts to beat the system. But soon thereafter, everyone is on board, because it is a clear expectation for everyone and it has long been an accepted part of the school culture.

Fitness at this school comes in many forms and not just by decree. Beginning the second year, during the season in which they compete, members of the school’s athletic teams are exempt from Fitness Class. With a no-cut policy for all sports teams, Uni has a high percentage of student-athletes. Sally, who still launches the fitness program with the “Subbies”, told me that a number of alums have emailed her saying, “you may find this hard to believe, but I just finished my first 1/2 or full marathon”.

Here’s how Sally described the program to me recently in an email,

We started this program in 1986, my 3rd year at Uni. It was started when we observed the declining level of fitness of our incoming Subbies, and as a lab school we felt obligated to address it. Our program has evolved over the years, adapting to the current trends and needs of our students. The one constant has been the end of year requirement for each student to complete a 5K. Amazingly, our students always impress us with their accomplishments. For some just completing the race is a huge milestone, while for others, a PR (personal record), class record or school record is their goal. Whatever the case, we remain committed to this requirement, especially when we see the smiles of satisfaction on the faces of the subbies who just months ago were sure there was no way they could ever run that far! We also see growth from year to year as some students take time to buy in, but then when they do the change is sometimes dramatic. Weight loss, gain of self-esteem, whatever, it remains the best thing about teaching!

Over the past two decades, Phil Lawler, a physical education instructor in Naperville, Illinois, has developed a fitness program that now encompasses all 19,000 students in the school district. His work is well documented in John Ratley’s book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise And The Brain. Naperville students rank among the best in the world in areas such as math and science. There are many who would argue that the fitness program is a major contributor to the high levels of (math and science) achievement shown by Naperville students relative to comparable socio-economic status (SES) school districts.

The Uni High and Naperville programs share several important factors. Both focus on effort (or growth), rather than meeting normative standards. In other words, their goal is for constant growth in each child; (as Sally’s words suggest) a mindset they take with them even after graduating. These programs are thus minimizing the discouraging effects of between-child comparisons and emphasizing (where kids strive to make improvements in what they have previously accomplished). An appropriate level of effort for each child is objectively established by measuring their heart rate.

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Just like Sally was able to make exercise a universally accepted part of the routine at Uni High, parents can do the same at home. The younger the child, the easier it is, because they want to be just like Mom and Dad. If you exercise regularly, they will want to join you. One of the best gifts we can give our kids, as well as ourselves, is the habit of daily exercise, beginning at a young age. Parental modeling is the most powerful form of influencing children’s behavior.

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Although apathy and low energy often characterize people suffering from mild depression, those who can find a way to begin exercising invariably find some immediate improvement in their depressive symptoms.

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See Tomporowski, Davis, Miller and Naglieri, Exercise and Children’s Intelligence, Cognition and Academic Achievement, for a thorough literature review of the research on the benefits of exercise.

For a simple but compelling summary of the cognitive benefits of exercise, see the first chapter of John Medina’s Brain Rules .

Robert Brooks’ article, Physical Exercise in School: Fitness for Both Body and Mind is just one of a series of excellent essays he has written every month over the past decade about raising healthy children. These essays can be accessed at http://www.drrobertbrooks.com/writings/index.html.

Dr. Brooks is also the author of 14 books on children, including two of my favorites: Raising Resilient Children and Raising a Self-Disciplined Child.

Grade school children who participate in daily aerobic activities have fewer disciplinary problems

¹ From American Psychologist article on exercise.

Don’t let the cement dry!

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Before you read this essay, take five minutes to do a little experiment. Watch this You Tube video:

Promoting cognitive development.

Have you heard about the Gorilla that went missing? Yes, the now famous You Tube video of the Gorilla that walks on screen, thumps “his” chest, and exits, only to be totally overlooked by half the people who watched? How in the world can anyone miss seeing something so unusual and “obvious”? We actually see with our brains, not our eyes. If we are not expecting to see something, it can be totally “overlooked”.

The research involving the Gorilla has many interesting variations involving other errors in observation* or perception. We now know that “what you see is not what you get”. Eyewitnesses to the same events recall them very differently. Even the versions offered by the same person change over time, as the brain alters, embellishes and edits what it has “remembered”. Sometimes people and events from different times and places are incorporated into a memory that the person swears to recall with 100% certainty.

And these misperceptions or distortions were committed by adults – with IQ making no difference. So what does that say for the reality our children make of their day-to-day lives? Children whose brains are not fully developed, who are not yet capable of integrating the different parts of their lives or have the experience to draw upon to reason about the meaning of events?

Therapists and clients spend endless hours searching through the past, trying to make sense of what happened, how it felt and what it meant. What is remembered? What is reality? What was traumatic and what effect has it had? It is increasingly the case that it is our interpretation of the experience and our reaction to it that defines our reality.

The simple take-away message for parents is this – get to the child before the cement dries. Regularly asking your child about his day affords you the opportunity to be attuned to what is going on in his life, who his friends are, what he finds interesting and … what is upsetting him. An event for one child may be insignificant, while for another be traumatic. We cannot assume to know without asking. And for those events that are traumatic, what makes them so? Asking your child to explain and elaborate not only makes the process available to you, but it also calls upon him to listen to what he is saying and reflect upon it. Saying it out loud is different than letting it bounce around in his head, unedited. Just as writing reveals gaps in logic or areas left incomplete, so does the telling of his story. The causal connections and interpretations he has made that make us cringe are then available – not for criticism, but for understanding (via our curiosity).

Asking for elaboration can often allow a child to find his own dead ends in logic. Sometimes our questions of “How do you know that?” or “What did he (actually) say?” ease the process along. And when the script is totally out of control, we have the opportunity to say, “Do you want to know what I think?” or “Why don’t you ask her (what she said, meant, did)?” or “Do you really think you are a &*!# ?”. Without our help children can fail to challenge assumptions about themselves and others.

What better place for the development of logical thinking and healthy skepticism. We want our children to know for certain that there is no such thing as certainty.

Our brains are designed to jump to conclusions, to come up with immediate explanations for what has just happened. In terms of evolution, it was essential for survival. Our brains are wired to attribute causes to observations. Any good student knows that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but the saber-toothed tigers ate most of the guys who stopped to analyze their data before running. Ultimately, the slower, analytical thinking is what eventually got us off the saber-toothed tiger menu for good. Ideally, we need both the quick reacting and the slow analyzing processes.

Children are vulnerable to jumping to conclusions due to this built in quick firing brain process, but they are additionally compromised because their brains and life experiences limit their ability to do the careful slow analysis of their assumptions or conclusions.They are dependent upon adults for this sorting through and analyzing work as their cortexes continue to develop. Yet, as many adults prove, careful analysis does not come with age and capacity. We all have a built in tendency to stick with these quickly formed assumptions. Logical thinking and analysis – where assumptions are tested – must be learned. That process begins with a parent’s curiosity and requests for elaboration and explanations.

Sleep is when our brains do much of the work of converting memories to more permanent storage. Bedtime is a good time to talk. It is also a good time to get to our children’s potential certainty before the cement dries. Then, at least, when he sleeps, the annotated version of his day is going into the memory bank.

Bedtime is for reading stories, telling stories, and listening to your child’s stories. This is when they can tell you about their day, how it affected them, and what they’re concerned about. Genuine curiosity about what happened and what sense they made of it conveys caring and promotes attunement. It also brings these quickly formed conclusions out to see if they survive the “analysis” entailed in listening to themselves talk about it and explain why they believe what they have concluded.

Key Competencies: Logical thinking; communication; relatedness (engagement)

Key Words: Inattentional blindness; certainty; elaboration; listening; genuine curiosity; expectations; biases

If you thought their YouTube was interesting, wait until you read their book: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The implications for inattentive blindness are profound and often life threatening. You will also look both ways at an intersection, twice!

The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described significant biases in judgement and decision making. Regardless of intelligence level, humans make judgement errors due to built in cognitive biases or unconscious errors in reasoning. For a complete summary of what you don’t know and what you don’t know you don’t know, read Kahneman’s new book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He describes our intuitive System 1 brains as capable of drawing quick judgments and causal conclusions and our analytical System 2 brains as capable of slower, more deliberate thought. Unfortunately, System 2 not only fails to get involved enough, but when it does it is often in the service of substantiating a false assumption that originated with System 1. I do not do justice to a great book. If you are at all curious about how we think and make decisions, it is a must read. For a review, see Two Brains Running, by Jim Holt of the New York Times.