The Disruptive Power of Exercise: Dr. Wendy Suzuki (Transcript)

Full text of neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki’s talk: The disruptive power of exercise at TEDxACCD conference. In this talk, Dr. Suzuki describes the neuroscience behind why exercise is the new magic bullet for your brain.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dr. Wendy Suzuki – Neuroscientist & fitness instructor

Thank you so much Henry. Such an honor to be here.

So I am a neuroscientist. And in science, we have disruptive ideas, we call them paradigm shifts.

Now we typically think of a paradigm shift as Earth’s shadow, something that breaks the mold, something that destroys old dogma.

But the truth is that a paradigm shift can also be quiet and personal, yet still quite profound.

What I’m going to do today is tell you about a series of what I call cascading paradigm shifts, that really brought me to where I am today. And they start with one of those personal quiet shifts.

So my first story starts back in 1998 when I was a young assistant professor starting my first research position… professor position at New York University. I was so excited to start designing my own experiments, building my own lab. I was the most excited science nerd that you could ever imagine.

And the question that I was focused on was: what is the pattern of electrical activity in brain areas important for long-term memory? The one key brain structure I focused on is a structure called the hippocampus.

Now when I think back on those early years of starting my lab, the atmosphere in the lab reminds me of a fantastic dinner party that you never want to leave, because there was always something… somebody interesting to talk to and an interesting topic to talk about.

So that was the research lab.

By contrast, during that same time, if I think back on my personal life, the image that comes to mind is a dusty western deserted town from a Clint Eastwood Western with tumbleweed, you know swirling in the street, bone-dry.

I had no friends outside the lab, because I was working all the time.

I went and ate take-out all the time. So few years in, I was 20 pounds overweight. And that part of my life was in desperate need of a paradigm shift.

Well, my inspiration for that actually came in an unlikely place on a river rafting trip in Central Peru where I found myself the weakest person on the entire trip. There were 16 year-olds that were stronger than me, and there were 60 plus year-olds that were stronger than me.

And I came home and I said, “No way, I’m never going to feel like the weakest person on the trip again.”

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I went to the closest gym and signed up for a trainer. And this time it worked my exercise regime stayed in place. And I’ll tell you the secret. The thing that helped me really stay with this exercise program was a class that I found at the gym.

It’s a unique class developed by this amazing exercise instructor named Patricia Moreno, and this exercise called intenSati combines physical movements from kickboxing, dance, and yoga and martial arts, and [Pearson] with positive spoken affirmations.

So intenSati, we say I am strong now, or I believe I will…

OK. I’d go to these classes and I’d be sweating and yelling affirmations a whole bunch of other sweaty affirmation yelling people and I come out of class feeling pumped up. I felt like a million bucks.

And so what this did is it raised my energy levels, it raised my mood, and not only that, it actually helped revive my bone-dry social life because I started meeting friends, meeting new people at the gym.

But actually the most amazing thing that I noticed was when I was at work. So I write a lot of rants, and what I was noticing with this regular exercise is that my attention span was deeper and longer than it had ever been.

My memory was better. I had to pull together facts from all these different scientific journal articles that I was reading, I could do that much better. And the writing was going well.

So this was clearly a major paradigm shift for me. With this increased exercise, I got better mood, better energy, better memory, better attention and a better social life. So that was clearly a paradigm shift.

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But this paradigm shift quickly evolved into yet another paradigm shift. This time in my career. Why? Because I was fascinated as a neuroscientist that my memory and attention seemed to be so strikingly improved and I went back to the science journals to figure out what we knew about the effects of exercise on brain function.

What I found was a series of… was an area of research that was growing and very exciting showing that aerobic exercise can change the brain’s anatomy, physiology and function.

Let me break that down for you. Let’s talk about mood for a second.

So we know that aerobic exercise can increase the same neurotransmitters that are decreased in depression, neurotransmitters like serotonin and noradrenaline. Exercise also increases the neurotransmitter involved in that feeling of reward. When you win a million dollars, dopamine also goes up with exercise.

Let’s talk about memory. There’s actually a large literature studying the effects of aerobic exercise in rodents. Usually they have the rodents running in running wheels. And what those studies have shown is that increased aerobic exercise in rodents actually stimulates the birth of many brain cells in that structure that I’ve told you about that I study, the hippocampus.

Now it turns out the hippocampus is one of only two brain structures in adults like you and I where new brain cells can be born. So without doing anything special, we all have a few new brain cells being born in our hippocampi. But with exercise it pumps up the birth of those new neurons.

And in rodents not only do get more brain cells but their performance on memory tasks is improved. I don’t know about you but I want as many shiny new hippocampal cells in my hippocampus as I could get.

Finally, let’s talk about attention. So it turns out the most common finding in studies on exercise in people is that increased aerobic exercise will improve your attention, your ability to focus attention and your ability to shift your attention.

So I was fascinated, I wanted to go even deeper and I realized as a professor of neuroscience, the best way to learn an area of research is to teach a class on it. So I decided to develop and teach a new undergraduate class at New York University called: Can exercise change your brain?

And I was going to go over all the studies that I just described to you, in animals and people. But then I thought well this whole class was inspired by me going to the gym so wouldn’t it be fun if I could bring an intenSati instructor to class and have all the students exercise before class and then have me tell them what exercise is doing to their brain.

Well, that was a fantastic idea, and I ran to the administration; I said why don’t you give me some money so I would hire an intenSati instructor, because I have this great idea for a class.

And they said, “Well we paid you to teach the class. No extra money for an intenSati instructor.”

So I did what was seemed to be the next logical choice. I decided to go to the gym and become a certified intenSati instructor myself, which I did. So I took teacher training and I trained to teach this class for six months.

Okay, during this time of course I’m also developing the academic part of the course but I realized something important. I realized that my students would be exercising all semester and those students could be my first subjects in my first exercise study.

So the course worked like this. I decided… all I needed to do to do this was to test them on memory tests and mood tests at the beginning and at the end of the semester. There was a 15-week semester, every class would be an hour of intenSati that I would teach them, followed by an hour and half lecture discussion about what exercise was doing to their brain.

And not only that I got one of my colleagues who was teaching a neural science elective class to have me test his students before and after the semester and they would serve as controls.

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So I had a whole study designed and let me take you back to that day, September 9, 2009 which was the first time I taught this class.

Remember I have been training for six months. I had never taught an exercise class before. I’ve been going to lots of classes as a student but I didn’t really know whether I could pull it off.

And so I arrived in this classroom that I had given neuroscience lectures in for the past eleven years. But there were several things different that day.

Number one, I was clad head-to-toe in my best Lululemon, very different.

Number two, I was nervous and I usually do not get nervous giving lectures to students. I was nervous, I had never gone in front of a set of students at NYU and done this.

Number three, the students themselves are usually excited, maybe a little nervous before class. These students looked scared. They were scared because they saw me in my spandex and they didn’t know what they got themselves into. And I know they didn’t know whether they really wanted to sweat with their professor.

So I get to the classroom and I say we’re going to do this workout; it’s intenSati. All you have to do is do what I do and say what I say; it’s call and response. That’s all you need to know and I want to bring you back to that moment, just a little bit more…I am going to have you all stand up. Please stand up. We are going to do this, so you get a flavor. You have to know what is right.

OK. Here we go. Five, six, seven, eight… it’s right, left, right, left. Don’t punch your neighbor.

Right, left, right, left….

I say I am strong… you say… I am strong

I am so strong… I am so strong…

I am superman strong… I am superman strong

I am wonderwoman strong… I am wonderwoman strong

I am strong… I am strong

I am fire… I am fire

I am in fire… I am in fire…

I am pumped up…. I am pumped up

—–

How do you feel?

So imagine… everybody go back to your college years. Imagine doing that for an hour before your class.

So the energy and the enthusiasm generated in that kind of workout just flowed into my academic part of the class. And this class turned out to be the most interactive, the most engaged class that I ever taught.

And that was a paradigm shift. I’ve never taught a class the same again irrespective of it — if I bring exercises in or if I bring a drummer in to a classroom I find a way to try and get that engagement.

So the other thing that shifted in my career, because of this journey, is has to do with the results of my exercise study with the students.

So did they get better?

What we found is 15 weeks of increased aerobic exercise… remember this is only once a week they were getting this class… actually improved their reaction times on the memory test. They didn’t answer more questions correctly but when they answered them correctly their reaction times were faster.

Well, for me this was inspiring. I thought that was just once a week. These are healthy young high functioning NYU students. What would happen if I was able to get them to exercise not just once but two, three or four times a week?

I realized this had become a passion, and because of that I’ve switched from a focus of my research lab on memory to moving solely to ask the question: how can exercise improve cognitive functions in people?

What am I asking? I’m asking questions, like what kinds of exercise are optimal to improve cognitive functions? What kinds of cognitive functions are most improved? What kinds of memory are most sensitive to exercise or what kinds of attention are most sensitive to exercise?

How long do you have to exercise? Most people ask me: what is the minimum amount of time I have to exercise to get these effects? How long do I have to do it to make the effects last?

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So I’ve been focusing on three main brain functions today: mood, memory and attention.

But I want to add one more that might be particularly important and relevant for this audience. And that is imagination and creativity.

Now this is a really exciting new direction that was only discovered recently and the discovery is the following:

I told you about that structure, the hippocampus important for memory. Or the other way to think about memory is thinking about the past.

Everybody knows that for many years hippocampus is important for memory. But much more recently, in 2007 actually, people started to appreciate that the hippocampus was not only involved in memory, thinking about the past, but it’s also important for imagination, thinking about the future, trying to come up with new scenarios that you’ve never experienced before.

They discovered that people with damage to their hippocampi are not only impaired at memory, that’s a surprise to nobody. But when you ask them… when some clever neuroscientists asked them: could you imagine a situation that you’ve never experienced before?

They had a terrible time very very… not robust descriptions of these new scenarios, and so that suggests that the hippocampus is important for imagination, a key component of creativity.

And remember I told you that exercise enhances the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus and at least in rodents that also leads to better memory.

This also raises the possibility that increased exercise might enhance our ability to imagine the future in new way.

So this leads me to my last of my three cascading paradigm shifts. This isn’t a personal paradigm shift or career paradigm shift. This is a paradigm shift at the level of society, because what I’m saying is that these studies looking at the effects of exercise on brain function have implications for how we live and how we learn.

What do I mean by that? In children we should not be taking physical education away from the classroom. We need to start finding a way to integrate it into the classroom to optimize the way that they learn.

In adults, we don’t only have to be looking for that magic pill to make us smarter. But what we really should be looking for is that magic exercise regime that will make all of these different brain areas that I’ve mentioned optimized.

And my goal is to try and address that question with my students at New York University. I want to make New York University the exercise University and try and seamlessly integrate exercise into the academic pursuit to make them better at memory attention and creativity as they’re getting their college education.

And finally, something that is relevant to every single person in this room and that is how do you have the strongest brain possible as you move into older age, as you move into your golden years?

My answer is exercise. Start exercising now.

So my message is simple: aerobic exercise can improve key brain functions that I think you all want to improve right now.

A very simple idea but with profound implications for how we live, how we learn, how we educate, and that is my disruptive idea.

Thank you.

So I am going to leave you…

Take advantage of my amazing drummer Chris Byrd here and leave you before lunch with something that your brain can remember: exercise.

So stand up one more time.

[intenSati execise]