no brothers left and there'll be no more after me

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.

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

There is a direct correlation between feathering and CPL. As the name suggests, the disorder is a progressive swelling of the legs due to an accumulation of lymph, and you cannot keep track of its progression without shaving the legs.

The swelling also causes hyperkeratosis (a thickening of the skin) and deep skin folds where feather mites thrive. And when horses get feather mites, they scratch their legs until they bleed. And since legs that are swollen with lymph have a lowered immune response, those sores can get infected very easily, leaving the horse in constant pain and putting its immune system on overtime.

And if it's rainy, those feathers wick up water, causing mold and dermatitis, the latter of which can lead to extremely painful mallenders/sallenders. When owners finally give in an remove the feathering, they often find things like this:

I'm currently helping out with a Jutland horse who had no symptoms other than a bit of swelling and stomping (when they can't properly scratch their legs, they stomp them instead). When I removed her feathers, this is what I found:

The pic on the left is before I started treating her skin issues and mites. On the right is 2 weeks later. It's slow going. She's only 5 years old. Imagine if her owners, out of ignorance, had let this fester until she was 15. Imagine living your entire life with skin like that and no ability to take care of it yourself, and no one bothering to help you.

They're sold often by breeders but buyers are pretty much never warned of the complications. Not only are they more prone to tumors because of the extreme scale growth genes, but they are pretty much guaranteed to get what's called diamond eye.

The fish's eye is overtaken by the scales and they're unable to see.

Miss Nebet, a spotted python (Antaresia maculosa) who will be serving as our live model for today.

many of these are probably well-known; others have surprised even other snake owners.

Snakes (suborder Serpentes) are lizards (belonging to order Squamata). Snakes are no longer thought to be a group outside of all other lizards; snakes are more closely related to iguanas than iguanas are to geckos, for example. The closest living relatives of snakes are Iguania (for example iguanas, chameleons, and dragons) and Anguimorpha (for example galliwasps, beaded lizards and monitors). Snakes are also relatively closely related to mosasaurs (such as the lovely Platecarpus pictured below), with some proposals suggesting mosasaurs are their closest squamate cousins. The various other legless lizards arise from all across Squamata, and aren't necessarily closely related to eachother or to snakes.

Snakes are almost entirely composed of "torso", with their ribcage extending down the majority (~90%) of their length and only a short neck and tail. The tail begins just after the vent/cloaca and is usually distinguishable by a slight narrowing and an end to the wide, flat ventral (belly) scales. By contrast, most other legless lizards have long tails making up a large portion of their overall length.

The green bar marks the approximate beginning of the tail, the diagram demonstrates the layout of belly and tail scales in two species. On her request, I have not included an image of Nebet's vent as it would be improper.

Snake ribs are jointed and manipulable, serving a role in movement, constriction and Their flat ventral (belly) scales are independently mobile, and can be raised in sections to create friction or flattened to glide across a surface. Both of these features are lacking in other legless lizards.

Miss Nebet's very cute pink ventral scales.

These unique features allow snakes to use four (conservatively; I have seen categorisations as high as eleven) separate methods of locomotion, combining these different methods in many ways to move across all sorts of surfaces. These methods include lateral undulation, in which the snake exerts muscles all across its body to push against the terrain in a typical serpentine motion, concertina, in which the snake pulls its body into bunches then extends in an accordion-like manner, rectilinear, in which the snake flexes muscles across its length while manipulating its ventral scales to drag itself in a straight line, and sidewinding, in which the snake 'throws' itself at an angle to traverse a slippery surface with little traction. Other legless lizards use simple undulation only, a more basic method of movement involving essentially wriggling in waves.

I have personally seen miss Nebet use all of these methods of locomotion except sidewinding.

Snakes do not 'unhinge' or dislocate their jaws when eating- rather, the lower jaw is split into two halves with a flexible attachment to the skull, allowing them to be independently 'walked' over prey. This allows them to swallow prey items much larger than the size of their head would suggest. Other legless lizards lack this bifurcated jaw, although they typically have very flexible skulls to allow them to swallow larger prey.

An Indian Rock Python (Python molurus) skull demonstrating the bifurcated jaw and Nebet demonstrating its utility in swallowing a mousey.

Snakes possess several unusual sensory organs depending on species. The first is their famous forked tongue. They flick their tongues to collect scents from the air then return it to a special cavity on the roof of their mouth (called the vomeronasal or Jacobson's organ) that allows them to detect chemical information. The fork in their tongue makes the sensing directional. They can also smell 'normally' through their nostrils.

The second of their unusual sensory organs is their heat pits, found in boas, pythons and pit vipers. These special rows of pits on (some) snakes' faces allow them to sense infrared thermal radiation. This adaptation, not found in any other lizard, has evolved independently multiple times across snake species.

Contrary to popular belief, snakes do possess ears and can hear sounds, although they lack visible external ears. They are also sensitive to groundborne vibrations through their jaw. Other legless lizards typically have visible, external ears.

Miss Nebet's forked tongue and heat pits (circled in pink). Scientifically speaking, these can also be referred to as 'charm points'.

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

The coppice and pollard systems are one of my favorite pre-modern things, it's just so visually unique and sensible, but most people haven't heard about it.

When you coppice, you cut the tree close to the ground, so only the trunk is left, then the tree puts out fairly straight shoots that are great for firewood. They would typically have these trees harvested on rotation so new trees would be ready every year.

This is a coppiced tree:

When you pollard, you cut the tree to the trunk, but higher, and let the branches grow for longer. They'll be be nice and straight (depending on species) with fewer knots, and suitable to various crafts without much need to work the wood. Sadly seems to be etymologically unrelated to "pole", though the branches from these trees were used to make poles. Part of why you do this instead of coppicing is that the shoots are out of reach of animals.

This is a pollarded tree:

At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.