RL Nicholas - Abstract Floral and Geometric Watercolor Painting

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

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.

The student's room. The pink fairy book. 1897. Illustrated by H.J. Ford.

[ENG] Before the Labyrinth, I already painted thresholds that smiled before they closed.

The Morrigan.

She invites. White birds. Purple silk that pools like blood.

You walk toward the goddess, past the flowers.

Later, you notice the red at your feet.

The Labyrinth shows you a door that looks exactly like the one you dreamed.

A test disguised as an exit.

La Morrigan — 2013

Oil and gold leaf on wood panel.

---

[FR] Avant le Labyrinthe, je peignais déjà des seuils qui souriaient avant de se refermer.

La Morrigan.

Elle invite. Des oiseaux blancs. De la soie pourpre qui coule comme du sang.

Tu marches vers la déesse, passes les fleurs.

Plus tard, tu vois le rouge à tes pieds.

Le Labyrinthe te montre une porte qui ressemble exactement à celle dont tu as rêvé.

Une épreuve déguisée en sortie.

La Morrigan — 2013

Huile et feuille d'or sur panneau de bois.

Basia Irland’s Ice Books are for rivers and stream ecosystems, not for libraries (water and libraries don’t mix well.)

Basia Irland (b. 1946) works with communities to foster collaborations – with rivers and with each other. In her Ice Receding/Books Reseeding, she creates ice sculptures in the shape of books, filling the ice with local riparian seeds selected in consultation with botanists and stream ecologists for each specific riparian zone. She then releases these seed-laden ephemeral ice sculptures into rivers.  

The Ice Books are hand-carved ice sculptures, some weighing over 300-pounds. They emphasize the necessity of communal effort, scientific knowledge, and artistic expression to focus on complex issues of climate disruption and watershed restoration. The ephemeral sculptures are launched into waterways during community events, and sometimes from a flotilla of kayaks. As the ice melts the seeds are released to help repair nearby riverbanks. The first Ice Book was created for an exhibition in Boulder, Colorado, to make visible the fact that the Arapaho Glacier is melting, as are glaciers around the world.

Irland writes, “When an ecosystem is restored and the plants grow along the riverbanks they give back to us by helping sequester carbon, mitigating floods and drought, pollinating other plants, dispersing seeds, holding the banks in place (slowing erosion), creating soil regeneration and preservation, acting as filters for pollutants and debris, supplying leaf-litter (for food and habitat), promoting aesthetic pleasure, and providing shelter/shade for riverside organisms including humans.” 

Wood Engraving Wednesday

GWEN RAVERAT

English wood engraver Gwen Raverat (1885-1957), a descendent of Charles Darwin and the only woman founding member of the influential Society of Wood Engravers (SWE), is recognized, along with fellow SWE founding member Eric Gill, as one of the first engravers to break from the wood-engraving traditions of the 19th century and begin the modern era of wood engravings. This style is evident in the first book to be recognized as including this modernist approach, Raverat's engraved illustrations for her cousin Frances Cornford’s Spring Morning, published in London by the Poetry Bookshop in 1915 (shown here). Raverat would continue illustrating books with wood engravings until a stoke in 1951 forced her to give up this meticulous medium.

Raverat and her Darwin family, including her astronomer father Sir George Darwin (1845-1912), her naturalist grandfather Charles Darwin (1809-1882), and her physician and natural-philosopher great-great-grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), had long associations with Cambridge, where Raverat was born and where she died and is buried. Darwin College, Cambridge, occupies both her childhood home, Newnham Grange, and the neighboring Old Granary where she lived from 1946 until her death, and the college has named one of its student accommodation houses after her.

View more posts with works by Gwen Raverat.

View more posts with women wood engravers.

View more Women’s History Month posts.

Crabapple branch and Granite with Lichens

12x22 inches, watercolor pencils

The Night Shepard

A little comic from last spring I made that hasn’t really had a home anywhere.