Musings of a confused millennial

Exactly one week later, Thursday at 3:13 PM, the next one looks up, blank-faced, and uses a car key to scratch the word ‘CAMEL’ into the side of their car. There are memes. 

The week after that, in the middle of an interview, the third victim turns to the camera and says ‘THROUGH.’ He drops dead. 

The man who writes “EYE” is in a private underground bunker. Enough radiation shielding to survive a direct nuclear strike. There are fifteen guards posted at the door- surveillance confirms not one of them left their post. 

Two limits! You can have a maximum of 4,096,000 characters in 1 [one] tumblr post. I would work out how many combinations this is, but 26^6,000 is already considered to be "Infinity" by most calculators, and a program I wrote threw an error code.

26^95,000 is already over 134,000 characters long - which would take 33 different text blocks to convey via tumblr. Whenever somebody says we're running out of posts, don't forget that tumblr is needlessly designed for MASSIVE amounts of information [no matter how detrimental it may be for mobile phones].

Though I'm not certain if that character count includes spaces, unfortunately, as I got that figure by googling "how many letters are in lord of the rings" and came upon a TikTok that counted the number of letter characters in LotR in order to figure out how many Spaghettios cans would be needed to re-write the entire thing, if one were to cut and paste each individual letter from the cans blackmail-letter style.

For those curious, the numbers are 2,261,081 letters in LotR, which calculates out to 8,795 cans of Spaghettios needed, which would cost about $12,225.

So, those are the theoretical limits, yeah. But in practice, the editor is not even close to be optimized to handle these kinds of huge posts: there is a point, far far away from the size of the lord of the rings, that your browser would just crash.

So if you are planning to post long fanfiction, or anything, you better work on something that's optimized for long form (locally, or some alternative to Google docs) and then post in chunks.

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.