Exercise, Consciousness, and Reconnecting with our Roots- Optimize Podcast E5, Dr John Ratey

Dr John Ratey is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, an internationally recognized authority on exercise and neuropsychiatry, and the author of Go Wild and Spark. He's also been a longtime advocate of exercise and reconnecting with our ancestors' ways of life, ideas that today echo across many corners of the internet. Today I had the chance to talk to him about topics ranging from the essentials that we aren't getting from the modern world, how reconnecting with our origins betters our lives, neuroscience's failure to find an explanation for consciousness, and the importance of exercise for health and performance. Connect with Dr Ratey! http://www.johnratey.com/ Check out his book on exercise at https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/0316113514 Connect with Simply Neuroscience: simplyneuroscience.org Connect with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/simonjiang43 Intro and Outro Music: Where The Waves Take Us by Purrple Cat | https://purrplecat.com/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... 0:00 Entering the field of exercise science 1:08 Intro 2:16 What got you into studying psychiatry? 2:55 We aren't close to understanding consciousness 6:35 Exercise can be as effective as medication 10:04 Can exercise be used alongside medication? 11:30 Aerobic vs anaerobic exercise 13:09 Exercise increases academic performance 15:00 Temporary high vs lasting mood boost 17:00 How a sedentary lifestyle wrecks your body 18:38 Forced vs voluntary exercise 21:10 People who change the world all exercise 22:30 How the modern world messes with our hunter-gatherer bodies 29:22 Find a community for your exercise 30:12 Outro