Rebel Just For Kicks

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Jane Madgwick

john renaming all his friends with fancy neoclassicist names, naming them after shakespeare, because calling them by their original names doesnt feel right.

john, when he gets the chance to name his own child, of his own blood, he calls her kiriona - maori for 'gideon'.

alecto - one of the furies who sought to sow discord during the Trojan war, all in the name of Jove, punishing crimes committed by mortals against god.

how john hates that name.

calls her annabel lee.

he named her. annabel lee, after the poem by edgar allen poe about a love that transcends death, because the name annabel is made up of two words: anna for grace, and belle for beauty/woman.

but also;

it is derived from the latin word "amabilis", meaning "to love".

Excellent addition from @just-a-river here!

And... I do wonder why the guy who hated change and deeply wanted his friends would change their names. And I think about the pointed mentions of him constantly rubbing his temple, struggling to remember things, and getting some things (like Pyrrha's lab number) confidently wrong, and how Harrow rewired her brain to autocorrect to "Ortus", how those names are censored both in Alecto's dream and to Nona in the present the one time Pyrrha names G—, how John and Alecto are so synced that they even share hunger pains, and all the parallels between John and Harrow, and... It's specifically always his right temple, and the right frontal lobe is the one more responsible for memory recall. So I suspect there might be a bigger reason at play...

But regardless of why he did that part, the ways his preferences have changed over time and the implications of those are always fascinating.

Going from the neoclassical lean to giving his daughter back her own name but Slightly different, now with a tie to her—his—their roots, roots he'd all but abandoned for so long, certainly says Something.

And with Earth...

He named Her First, One. He's always known She was not a person, that She was something so much greater, despite the shape he'd made Her fill.

He named Her Alecto. There's still breath in his body. They're still out there. And isn't death what bad people deserve? (What he deserves?) Of course she'll help. She IS his vengeance, HE is vengeance and they are one. But then... Varun says "their vengeance is not my vengeance", and it's not 100% clear whose against whom, and Varun is clearly pissed chasing down John, but it begs the question... as filled with anger as She is, does She actually even want any form of vengeance, or do all those feelings come from John?

(We also don't actually know if an RB has ever killed a Lyctor (unless you count John himself and maybe Harrow lol); Cyrus and Ulysses and Cassy all died by their own plans to fight them, not the Beasts directly. With G1deon, we haven't answered the question of why Varun just left, or what happened to the cav crew that went to help... He does seem to be dead or somehow gone, but Pyrrha doesn't blame Varun, says he was always looking for something to throw himself on... For all their anger, are any RBs truly driven by vengeance?)

He named Her Annie Laurie. Just a woman. Just a pretty girl. Beloved perhaps, but mostly for those looks. The height of asking her to play pretend; absolutely nothing of her true self, a pure fucking insult.

He named Her Annabel Lee, and that's... not much better. It still makes Her so small, it's still so insidious in so many ways, still a gross warping of the narrative, but it also starts bringing some truth back into it, way more than Annie Laurie, and maybe about as much as Alecto.

Alecto the Fury is unceasing anger, and She has every right. But we've met Nona. We know who She can be and would rather be, if She has to be a somebody at all.

Annabel Lee frames him as tragic and mourning, which is true, but completely disregards his own culpability. The "angels in heaven" (his Saints) and "demons down under the sea" (the ten billion who haunt Her original corpse and are almost certainly part of the reason he can never return) certainly did play a prominent role, and She acknowledges that too—he did it in part to appease them—but they aren't the ones who put Her in the Tomb. It frames Her as precious and innocent, which She is, in the same way nature is, because She is nature, and just as powerful and terrifying. Her power is both Life and Death. And the framing as Annabel Lee doesn't do that justice at all.

"No other thought than to love and be loved by me" is a bit of a double edged sword, too. "In the year of nobody she thought about that much in particular" is such a funny fucking contrast to it. And at the same time... it's not Her name(s) that unravels Nona. Kiriona say "Alecto, Annabel, I don't care whatever her name is" a good minute before, and despite Her fear earlier when Pyrrha almost says it, nothing happens. What unravels Her is "John loves Alecto. John needs Alecto." And then She devolves, into he loved her, she loved him, for he had loved, for she had loved, for the world had loved, love, love, love...

And of course... None of them, not the Saints, not the devils, probably neither her kin nor his, "can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee."

And no matter what the motivation for any of them, none of those are Her name. We call Her—Them—It—Alecto. The last book title names It Alecto. But that is also not Its true name. It has many names, and has as long as there's been language. It's Earth. It's Gaia and Terra and Geb and Hòutǔ and Bhumi and Ki. It's Papatūānuku.

And... It's also not, anymore, I suppose. Because they are the God who became man and the man who became God. Part of the horror of John's existence is that no matter how badly he wants to still be human, he can never truly be that again, and part of Alecto's is no matter how much It hates being at all human, on some level She now forever is. Their souls have bled together and there's no going back.

—

A little tangentially, some of the other things John references might also have some implications about how his wants have changed.

"How sharper than the serpent's tooth" from King Lear, famously forgiven by the daughter he'd disowned and treated terribly. Also I mean, both die at the end, but considering...

Some businesses who are progressive did it to help trans/nb people for sure, but there’s a whole subset of businesses that I get the sense don’t really care either way, EXCEPT that they don’t want to deal with the headache. So they just took the gendered signs off the doors and put up gender-neutral ones.

Alice Neel

- Marxist Girl

Masafusa Shibuya, satin, organdy, and silk thread