spreading the good word about fictional lesbians

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Julia Serano, "Whipping Girl"

65 Million Years BC

hello, I thought of posting here too. Maybe the quality isn't as bad? 😭

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?

i decided to try a romcom i somehow missed i the 2000s 'head over heels' and i got 3 and a half minutes in and we're introduced to the lonely MC with bad taste in men as evidenced by her extremely short list of ex boyfriends, including her first boyfriend when she was 11 or something because i guess that's still relevant in her adult life.

so she's resigned herself to never finding love and prefers to ignore men to focus all her energy into her career.

this job is immediately presented as though it's for spinsters with no hope of ever finding a man.

the mc's lesbian bestie (whose first line involves her being scolded for being too sexual in the workplace, but moving on) points out their colleagues as evidence that they're doomed to a romance-less, sexless life if they don't switch up their shared career path. the colleagues are three old women, so-dubbed "the menopause triplets":

these women are presented as if they have no idea what's going on at any given moment. this is 2001, and presumably this is an entry level job requiring low effort and no experience.

then their boss bursts into the room, unceremoniously bumping a large painting into the door jam and walls, announcing that it's a new project for our MC.

our MC is thrilled to see the painting. apparently it's a light in the daily slog at her dreary job for loser women with nothing going on in their lives.

And that job is? Conservator of paintings (specializing in Renaissance) at the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The painting being handled like an old couch on its way to the curb?

The Bacchanal of the Andrians by Titian.

Her lesbian colleague who is presumably also a a highly trained & skilled curator finds it depressing that the MC is so excited about the painting.

But yeah like to be more constructive than just going "lol tumblr prose bad", really the issue in Large part that characterizes "tumblr prose" (which to be clear I don't think is a discrete thing and at most is a combination of several writing tendencies influenced by the medium of Online) comes down to the lack of real contrast in Any aspect of narrative construction, and an obsession with being quotable and constantly being at 100% of Going Hard (which go hand in hand).

In that post, the character voice is indistinct from that of the narration, and the characters quote one-liners that look Meaningful as excerpts and are borderline nonsensical as dialogue. There is no more than the faintest, most generic hints of characterization; these people exist as vague concepts to say deep words for the reader. The sentence length has little variation from its staccato beat, and so it is awkward to read and fails to complement the action or accomplish anything with the pacing (save for the slight slowdown when the torturer feels all that damp animal electricity). The timing is awkward and exaggeratedly dramatic. The description is a flowery kind of tryhard visceral and seems avoidant of describing anything too directly ("something dark and arterial" where there's nothing being accomplished by conveying uncertainty about what is currently gushing out of the injured character and the simple use of "blood splashed across the stones" would actually be 10x more effective), in a way that does disservice to what is supposed to be a torture scene, and leaves it weightless and ungrounded. In fairness to the people saying "this is good", that is MUCH easier to say when reading this fake excerpt as the standalone piece it actually is, but this kind of writing Cannot function in an actual narrative and is not what an excerpt from well constructed narrative fiction is going to look like basically ever.

It reflects a lot of very typical amateur writing issues that just about everyone has to grow out of (the minimal diversity in sentence length, simulated non-attention to scene pacing and timing), and issues common to fanfiction-influenced writing on social media (allergy to paragraph lengths of more than two sentences, little to no description of the characters or setting because, in fanfiction, the reader already knows their physical characteristics and mannerisms and it doesn't need to be lingered upon, Unlike In Original Fiction). But this particularly hits on an issue I think is semi-unique to narrative writing in the social media milieu, which is a focus on being quotable. This may not even be a conscious impulse at all But It's There. This kinda apparent terror of any moment not being as beautiful and hard hitting as possible (or for comedy, any moment not being A Joke). Everything "Goes Hard", so nothing actually does. A lot of "tumblr prose" type writing is less a narrative, more a string of quotes loosely assembled into narrative that vaguely gestures at things like Plot and Character. It substitutes depth for Suggestions of depth by utilizing stock symbolism without building it into the narrative, and by gesturing at weighty contexts without actually engaging with them. There can be little contrast or effective use of tone, pace, description when your story is a series of Hard Hitting Quotes.

I'm reading Watership Down right now and I think it's a great novel overall and can work as an example of how important it is to utilize contrast in your writing.

This segment is the lengthy first description of the titular down, which the rabbits are now encountering for the first time:

Adams is slowing the pace here to introduce us to the setting of the next segment of the book. The average sentence length is very long and keeps us lingering in the sensory detail, while still varied and thus smoothly readable. This new place is introduced by simultaneously conveying its physical description in vivid detail and conveying its feeling and character, and getting the most out of every described feature to do so. The thorn trees are "wind stunted". The air is "scented". The language takes on a very flowery character and heavily utilizes simile and metaphor. Woodland is "tumultuous with evening", sunlight filters through grass "like a wind" to the small creatures below, in contrast to laying "like a gold rind" on the hill when seen from a distance. This grandiose description is heavily functional and conveys both exhaustive physical detail and a feeling that this place is beautiful, awe inspiring to something like a rabbit, and full of life, though not without quiet hints of danger. It hits because Not Everything In The Book Is Described This Way. It means something that we're lingering like this and stopping to get a sense of this place on every possible level, and moving away from more direct, simple prose to convey the feeling of the place in depth.

This segment describes the rabbit Bigwig being found caught in a snare:

The prose here here has the opposite approach of the first excerpt. The language is concise, direct, and brutal. It only veers slightly away from the literal to describe Bigwig's voice as 'bubbling out' from his mouth, both conveying that the saliva and blood in his mouth is literally bubbling as he speaks, and implying the unsettling way his voice sounds as he's being strangled. The sentences are much shorter on the whole, as fit for the pacing of a tense and rapidly changing scene, and the timing closely complements the action - "There was a pause" not only conveys That There Was A Pause but interrupts the rhythm of this segment; the moment of uneasy stillness is echoed in the act of reading itself.

When I was in grad school working on my fiction writing MFA, a friend of mine, John, came to class one day talking about this book that had just been published and someone he knew recommended, saying it had an interesting premise.

The rest of us went out and bought the book, read it over the weekend, and were discussing it the next week. I mentioned that I liked how brutal it was in satirizing nostalgia for consumption, and that it was refreshing to see someone lampoon that impulse in post-boomer generations. My classmates all had similar thoughts.

In the end, we all agreed that, while a bit heavy-handed, Ready Player One was a pretty good satire piece. We all moved on and didn't really think about it again.

Fast forward five or six years later, and a friend I'm talking to (might have been @miss-prince actually) says something to me about Ernest Cline being a cringey hack.

"Wait, the guy who wrote Ready Player One? But that was such a pointed piece of social criticism about nostalgia pandering?"

"...What?" my friend says. "RPO wasn't critical of the nostalgia porn. It was entirely sincere."

"That can't be true. What would the point even be if it was just about how cool the 80s were?"

"Exactly. The book doesn't have a point beyond being shallow masturabatory fantasy."

They then linked me to some interviews, where it became increasingly clear that Cline was, in fact, earnest.

This whole thing is just so funny to me. A whole class of writers, many of us really skilled, were convinced this dumb slop novel that was using "gunters" unironically was in fact satirizing everything it depicted, because otherwise, why would it exist? The possibility it might just be barfing up scenarios the author thought were cool didn't even occur to us, because we were all people who took writing seriously, and assumed if you bothered to write something, you had something to share or communicate beyond surface aesthetics.

Part of me believes that if you read the book through that lens, it's still a semi-competent warning about the coming deluge of Gen X/older millennial nostalgiabait that was on the horizon in the early 2010s.

It also makes me wonder if someone else out there in an MFA or game design program played YIIK and assumed it was doing All That for a greater narrative purpose.