Unfiltered Thoughts

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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.

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

push in your chairs when you get up from tables.

when people don't push in their chairs, people with bulky aids like wheelchairs and rollators can't get through. also a lot of people who use canes have wider gaits than able bodied people, and having a chair in the middle of their walking path is a real obstruction. while some of us are able to push chairs out of our way, a lot of us are not, and wind up boxed in/out because somebody didn't push in their chair.

You've probably seen these tweets lol and while lots of fuss has been made about teerak already, I think the language of it is more fun:

Kit posted the first exchange between him and Singto with the caption "Basketball, right - shooting hoops, playing sports...."

K: 555555 เล่นเกมกันเถอะที่รัก Let's play games together, darling S: วันนี้น่าจะไม่ได้จ่ะ ดองรูปเขาไว้ ยังไม่ทำส่งซักที พี่นุกรี๊ดละมั้ง. Probably not today, I've been putting off working on them and haven't sent a single photo, P'Noo is going to scream. K: TT ชั้นไม่ถูกชู้ต I'm not the chosen one TT S: ชั้นก็ไม่ถูกเธอชู๊ตค่ะ. 🥹 I haven't been your chosen one either, kaa. 🥹 K: ไปต่อไม่ถวกเลยงับ55555 I don't know what to say to that, ngup 5555

... and Singto follows up with the second captioned "Go ahead, screenshot it all if you dare"

K: ทำเสดกี่โมงงง what time will you be doneeeee K: เล่นคนเดียวก้ด้าย 😭 I can play alone, too 😭 K: ถึงมันจะเหงาก้ไม่เปนไรหรอก Even though it's lonely, but it's okay S: ไม่รู้ ยังไม่ได้เริ่มเลย. Don't know. I haven't started yet. S: ใช่มะ ถึงเหงาก็ไม่เป็นไรหรอก. That's right. Even if it's lonely, it's okay. K: อย่าย้อนสิ 😭😭😭 Don't replay my words to me 😭😭😭 S: 😒 K: งั่มๆ ngam, ngam

Anyway translation aside I've colour-coded some fun features of their texting: In blue we have cute deliberate misspellings for... vibes Kit uses ชั้น in place of ฉัน chan, "I", and Singto copies him in his reply He also says งับ ngup instead of ครับ krub and later, ด้าย in place of the usual spelling ได้ dai

In orange we have just straight up misspelling because we can't be bothered to press the shift key: เสด instead of เสร็จ ก้ instead of ก็ เปน instead of เป็น Yes, in the latter two cases Singto helpfully shows us the right spelling in purple when he mockingly repeats the sentence. This sentence is a fun one that goes OBJECT - got (ถูก) - VERBED:

K: ชั้นไม่ถูกชู้ต I didn't get chosen S: ชั้นก็ไม่ถูกเธอชู๊ต I didn't get chosen by you either

I also added purple annotations here for helpful teacher Singto because he shows us

How to place ก็ gor (= "also") for emphasis/contrast: [topic] ก็ = [topic] ALSO

Where the subject goes in this sentence: OBJECT- got - by subject - VERBED where the subject is เธอ ter (="you"), ie I - also - didn't get - by you - chosen

In green we have Kit's hotly-debated wordplay: ชู้ต or ชู๊ต chood (Krist and Singto spell it with a different tone accent, both seem acceptable) which is a loanword for shoot, as per Kit's basketball caption. However, the pronunciation chood could totally also sound like the loanword for choose. Arguably it makes more sense to spell that as ชูส (like they do here) since it ends with the 'S' consonant, but when ส appears at the end of a word, it's just pronounced 'T' anyway. Like in Krist's name คริส :D So since we've established earlier that we can play around with spelling things the way they're pronounced, ชู๊ต chood easily stands in as wordplay for choose. There's no verb conjugation so it's always just 'choose'.

Bonus, in pink: Singto uses the 'feminine' 'polite' particle ค่ะ kaa in his retort instead of krub, to emphasise his petulance and sense of being-wronged-ness.