A Mixed Up Mishmash Muddle

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.

There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.

You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.

The trick is in the subject line, not the email

When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.

So how is it a scam?

Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.

Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.

@everything-you-feel-is-real I know by tumblr tradition that I'm to say "impossible, my posts never blow up like that," or "please don't do this to me."

Love-bombing: A manipulation tactic of increasing affection and grand gestures before or after doing something abusive, specifically to weasel one's way out of consequences.

What it is not: A streak of affection and generosity towards friends/loved ones.

Trauma-bonding: Knowingly traumatizing someone to take advantage of their vulnerable state, to then act like the "hero" or the one who cheers them up.

What it is not: Bonding over similar traumas.

Gaslighting: *Knowingly* convincing someone they cannot trust their own perception of a situation in pursuit of one's own narrative.

What it is not: Misaligned perception of events.

Narcissist: Someone afflicted with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a traumagenic cluster B disorder, that struggles with self-obsession, paranoia, craving validity from the public, delusions of grandeur, and social disconnection.

It is not: Your rubbish ex that cheated on you.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

The trade off of getting to play for the NHL is giving up their bodies, names, and likenesses. Their whole identities are used as a marketing tool and that’s part of their job. People are making a lot of money off of their rivalry. The NHL is getting more ticket and jersey sales from it. Fans are placing bets on their games. It really is that serious and people really are that invested.

That’s why the Irina Foundation plan is so smart. The rivalry is a narrative people are buying into, so Shane’s suggesting a new narrative. It gives the league a new marketing angle and it generates enough positive PR that people are kinda backed into a corner of letting the rivalry go. No one wants to be the guy saying a sports rivalry is more important than charity, kids, and mental health.

So no, Shane and Ilya are not stupid for feeling trapped by the stakes of this rivalry. They are trapped. They’re trapped in that tricky dissonance between the Hollander and Rozanov the media, league, and fans expect them to be and the Shane and Ilya they really are.

When Shane wakes Ilya up in the middle of the night with his plan, he’s saying: who we really are matters. What we have matters. I’m tired of giving up happiness to contort myself into the shape of who Shane Hollander is supposed to be. The real me wants you and chooses you and this is how we can make it happen.

It's great, actually, that in 2025 basically only toxic sportsball and churches hold the oppressive power authors don't think needs explaining.

I needed an oomf to explain this to me, that football, for example ("soccer" for the US), also still is a shithole like that. My first, unassisted, read was that those are two very rich men working in entertainment and yes: "Wow what low stake problems, Shane might lose some sponsors and be slightly less extremely rich 🙄"

My point is: HR would indeed have needed to establish the real stakes. Shown a montage of the hold the industry has on the players and show us some horrible locker room bullying, show us some violence, actually. Because. Well, sorry I didn't immediately get it because I wasn't already invested in a toxic asshole oldboys club industry thing and in any other branch it's not like this anymore.

Personally I like the fics saying hockey is like flying for Shane. Because I, too, have the knee-jerk reaction of "you're both filthy rich, just quit that shitshow". (A sentiment I already had back in the Thornbirds days of forbidden love. So. Quit the dumb church. Where's the problem. And tbh, I still think that.)