Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by
John J. Ratey
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
I don’t know enough about the science here to give a real critique, but my impression was that it was all over the place. Exercise is good; just look at plants, which never move, and don’t have a brain, while animals move and they have brains (he brings up the example of the sea squirt, which finds a place to plant itself and then “eats” its brain because, since it isn’t moving, it doesn’t need one). Also, Exercise is good because, evolutionarily speaking, if something “stressed us out” (i.e. a lion wanted to eat us) we’d run. So if we run we get rid of stress preemptively (Sounds a bit too much like how all Cretans are liars, and I’m a Cretan). Then it jumps to how exercise makes us more social, so that’s good for us.
I get the impression he’s trying a bit of everything just to see what sticks, rather than sticking to one overlying thesis.
Still, I come away from this pretty convinced that exercise in general is better than no exercise. Although, I doubt many people disagree with that nowadays.
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Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700 by John E. Herman
