Performance Intelligence

A professor at Harvard and MIT wrecked his knee and stopped running the 7.5 miles he ran every night of his adult life. 5 months later he could not finish his own work. He was losing the thread in conversations, forgetting things he had never forgotten, and getting angry in a way he did not recognise. He was convinced he had developed adult ADD in middle age.

He hadn't. He had just stopped running...

The psychiatrist who worked that out went looking for evidence that barely existed at the time. 2 decades later it became Spark, the book that put exercise and the brain in the same sentence for most of us for the first time.

You already know you should move more. That is not the problem. The problem is the distance between knowing it and doing it, and what that distance costs you if you are paid to think for a living. Attention? Mood? Whether you can still hold a hard problem in your head at four in the afternoon?

Dr John Ratey is now 78 years old. He has been at Harvard since his residency, he has written 12 books, and his own protocol is far simpler than anything you would expect from a Harvard laboratory. He explains what BDNF does to a brain, why he now describes muscle as an endocrine organ rather than scaffolding, what the last 10 years of research has added to the case he made in Spark, and the one thing he could not write at the time because the evidence was not there yet.

You can keep treating exercise as the thing you do for your body when there is time left over. Or you can treat it as maintenance for the organ you are actually being paid for.

00:00 The Harvard genius who lost his mind when he stopped running
 06:05 The cocktail party patient who started it all
 11:01 The 1970s discovery behind the runner's high
 14:05 Turn ADHD into a superpower: the Ferrari brain with bicycle brakes
 20:06 The real prescription for a distracted mind
 24:54 The school that got smarter by moving more
 29:08 Meet BDNF: the brain's own Miracle-Gro
 32:45 Dr Ratey is 78, and he's nowhere near done
 37:11 Inside Spark 2.0: what's changed since the first book
 43:26 Why a fit brain matters more in the age of AI
 53:16 John's own weekly training plan
 1:04:16 The question John didn't expect: why he took up Zumba at 75

Learn more about Dr John Ratey here: https://www.johnratey.com/ 

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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

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