Deep Dive into Best-Selling Author John J. Ratey's Books "Spark, Go Wild and Driven to Distraction."

<p>Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast EPISODE #118 with a deep dive into John J. Ratey’s most recent books including the groundbreaking ADHD “Driven to Distraction” with Dr. Edward (Ned) Hallowell, MD, "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain" that established Dr. Ratey as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the brain-fitness connection and “Go Wild”, that explores how we can achieve optimal physical and mental health by getting in touch with our roots.</p> <p>During our interview together on EPISODE #116<a href='#_edn1'>[i]</a>, we barely scratched the surface of these three books, so I wanted to take the time to dive a bit deeper into each one of them, keeping in mind the top 5 health staples that we focused on with episode #87.<a href='#_edn2'>[ii]</a> Dr. Ratey’s interview was insightful and many people from around the world emailed me with feedback about how timely and inspiring they thought Dr. Ratey’s research was, especially with where we are in the world today.</p> <p>Dr. Ratey said himself, “If we are going to have to learn to live with COVID, we’re going to have to learn to be well.” (Episode #116) and I thought about how our podcast took a turn from just focusing on social and emotional skills and neuroscience to a serious focus on the importance of health, around Season 3 and episode #71 (which was July 2020-right in the middle of the Pandemic) when I first started to study Dr. Shane Creado, from Dr. Daniel Amen’s offices on the importance of sleep<a href='#_edn3'>[iii]</a>.  It seems to me that we can’t ask our students in our classrooms, or employees in our workplaces to focus on social, interpersonal, emotional or cognitive skills, without first, putting an emphasis on health. The more I Iearned in this area, the more convinced I became of the mind-brain-body connection that inspired me to take a trip to Dr. Amen’s Clinics in Costa Mesa, CA for a brain scan to see what we could learn to improve the health of my