Of Four Hundred Waters.

mutual 2: the new dandys world event is mid as fuck

mutual 3: liveblogging a foursome

mutual 4: on lunch break

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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.

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?

Her name is Marily Oppezzo.

Image #2: Text reading: Theoretically, we can eliminated several explanations for the results. First, the effect cannot be due to real-time competition between physical and mental activity for shared cognitive resources, although this does occur. For instance, one study showed a dual-task cost for 60-year-olds walking a difficult obstacle course while performing a word-recall task (Li et al., 2001). Here, when people sat down after walking, they continued to be more creative even though they no longer needed to attend to walking.

Second, the residual effects also block an embodied account, because when seated after walking, there were no longer moving legs to semantically prime cognition. Third, the causal pathway is likely to differ from mechanisms that translate exercise into global protective factors for cognition. Walking was selectively beneficial for divergent thinking, no convergent thinking. Finally, the effect is not due to the external flow of stimulation that normally occurs when walking. Walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall improved creativity.

How, then, might one explain the effect of walking? The explanation will eventually comprise a complex causal pathway that extends from the physical act of walking to physiological changes to the proximal cognitive processes. These studies eliminated alternatives but did not isolate mechanisms. Nevertheless, it may be use to consider each link in the chain with the results in hand.

Walking constitutes the first part of the casual chain. Is it walking per se, or would other forms of mild physical activity have similar elevating effects? Moreover, it may be the mind-freeing quality of engaging in a comfortable task (e.g., knitting), rather than exercise. A second issue is the manner of walking. We asked people to walk at their natural gait. When people walk outside their natural stride, it demands more cognitive control (Brisswalter, Durand, Delignieres, & Legros, 1995). Whether these mild attentional demands or more aerobic walking would detract is unknown. A third question considers the context of walking outdoors on a busy campus did not significantly increase appropriate novelty compared with walking indoors, although the more varied stimulation did appear to increase novelty. This suggests that walking may be effective in many locations that do not have acute distractions. The social context also needs investigation. Participants were encouraged to talk aloud to a friendly researcher. Will the effects generalize to solitary walks?

Leg movement and external stimulation were not direct causes of increased creativity, given the residual effects of walking when seated. This implicates biological mediators that may range from circulatory to chemical changes. Mood is also a possible mediator. Physical exercise is linked to mood enhancement (Rethorst, Wip-

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