I'll Be Your Pawn And Sword

short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.

he and ilya are hanging out in the yard and some bees are buzzing around because some watermelon juice spilled on the ground earlier and shane suggests they go inside or rinse the juice off the patio and ilya teases him about being scared of little bees and shane SO nonchalantly just, "no, but i am allergic and you don't know where my epipen is"

and ilya

reblogging with my own tags because i'm also CACKLING imagining the implications of this not being specific to ilya, either. they're having a barbeque at hayden and jackie's house and hayden is good-naturedly encouraging shane to try a piece of coffee cake or something and ilya just goes, "no, bad for you"

and hayden IMMEDIATELY is on the defensive because what? you get to tell him what to eat now? where do you get o-

"no, bad for him because it has walnuts in it, pike. you want him to die? this is what you want?"

"what are you talking about?"

shane: "i'm allergic"

"??? since WHEN??"

"since always??"

"you've eaten over at my house HOW many times?? and never brought this up? the fuck, dude?"

"jackie knows"

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

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.

Okay this is the problem with sharing pop science stuff online and content aggregation accounts

The study is real, it's very easy to find by searching up the author's name + study. Give it a read yourself. It's written in a pretty accessible way imo.

Note that it does not put forward any explanations for why this effect happens, only that it does. In the conclusion it posits many possible reasons for why, and that it's most likely nothing to do with the specific action of walking, merely any semi automatic repetitive activity. They also acknowledge the study did not account for the social company the walkers were in, which is a pretty massive factor imo. Considering the conclusion brings up MANY alternative explanations and future experiment possibilities, it's decidedly not "killed every alternative explanation" like the tweet says. The actual paper ends like most scientific papers, listing alternative possible explanations, these are preliminary results, more research is needed, wider demographics of people need to be included, etc.

Another thing is the phrasing of these tweets are like red flags flapping in the wind to me. Any short form social media content that's 1. Pop science 2. Conveys absolute certainty 3. Ends with self improvement biohacking adjacent advice, should set off alarm bells.

Look at the implications that if the tweets were true, it would mean wheelchair users and people with mobility issues would be inherently worse at creative tasks.

So who is this person that's tweeting this, rephrasing this paper in a "helpful" way that is sure to get shares from people who really value being creative and are looking for any way to become more creative in their -

OFC ITS AN AI BRO

You wanna see what his recent articles look like?