past limbo; angeles national forest, california

women who say no to sex with any kind of male for any reason or no reason commit an injustice. to the right, our injustice is against civilization itself, because our failure to comply means they will find it harder to propagate the next generation of slaves and slave masters at our expense. to the left, our injustice is against the oppressed, the marginalized males who want to reap this particular spoil of patriarchy but cannot due to their diminished value in the patriarchal pecking order.

the right will be honest. they will tell you that their solution is to simply erode and eliminate your ability to enforce your boundaries. that your ability to say no is a glitch in the system that has been left unpatched for far too long. the left will lie. they too agree with the right’s solution, and they too agree that your boundaries are an inconvenient glitch in the system. but the left will use progressive language to obfuscate this belief. to the left, the erosion of your boundaries is necessary for the marginalized males of this world to achieve some semblance of their denied birthright.

come to think of it, both the left and right believe your ability to say no can be an act of oppression; some of the most high status, western white men, are losing their minds over birth rates, saying women are oppressing the human race itself by saying no. they both believe that your ability to say no is an ethical and moral failing. to the left, to say yes is justice, to say no is bigotry. to the right, to say yes is justice, to say no is catastrophe—on par with human extinction.

all males are politically incentivized to view your ability to say no as an injustice, and they are socially and culturally compelled to correct and overcome this injustice. they correct or overcome this injustice with rape. the more sophisticated male supremacists will push for a psychological strengthening of patriarchy. a world where you’ll never say no at all, because you are a good comrade, or a good wife, and there will be no rape to speak of and no boundaries to think of because you will always say yes. that is true liberation for both the marginalized males, and for the higher status males who have marginalized them. you were never really supposed to say no in the first place. it’s inconvenient. they want to claw back this power.

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.