Mars Ruminates

truth over solace in lies

finished one of the most amazing reading experiences in my recent memory! these two are my very favourites.

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.

As you know, counting sheeps is perfect for sleep. Sheeps take that job very seriously. But some are still learning. It’s fine, I don’t think Wolf Hunter minds. 🐑🐑🐑

Watch with VERY CUTE AUDIO here!:

I'm not impressed by most futuristic predictions. It doesn't take a lot of brains or imagination to predict a new energy source, portable computer or communication device, or a large war. The only kind of scifi predictions that actually impress or shock me are those with a bizarre specificity. For example. how Star Trek: the Next Generation predicted that hypochondriacs would use the internet to diagnose themselves ("Realm of Fear"), or how Heinlein not only predicted the screensaver in Stranger in a Strange Land, but that it would also resemble aquarium fish, and finally, ghoulishly enough, how iCarly predicted that a member of the cast of Friends would die by drowning (though they said it would be David Schwimmer, which means in the Nickelodeon shared sitcom universe, David Schwimmer is dead).

It's interesting how almost no scifi predicted two major developments of the 1990s: the internet, or the fall of the Soviet Union. This, incidentally, is proof positive of something I spent the 80s arguing, that Kremlinology, and to a lesser extent, the entire discipline of International Relations, is a completely fraudulent field staffed by people who don't know what they're talking about. Imagine the side-eye you'd give to Marine Biologists if, one day, the Oceans evaporated and they failed to predict it!

But there was one person who predicted something like the internet: James H. Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon stories.

The Telzey Amberdon stories were published in Analog in the 1960s, and were about a girl genius and powerful psychic, a "xenotelepath" with the rare ability to communicate with vastly different forms of alien life. She often ran afoul of the Psychology Service, the Federation's internal police created to handle psionics, who often dispatched Psionic Cops to capture her, typically rated P12+ on the psi-scale. The Psychology Service started off as a means to handle telepaths, but ultimately became an unaccountable surveillance state-within-a-state (if all this sounds a bit familiar to Babylon 5 fans, it's because these stories are....clearly...a major inspiration for the psychic plot of that series, down to the fact a heroine's powers are activated/supercharged by mental contact with unknowable alien minds, and the weirdly specific detail of Psi being ranked 1-12). Lots of scifi writers predicted a surveillance state, but James H. Schmitz gets some credit for predicting how one would actually feel to live in: not oppressive at all, everything feels normal and it is all completely invisible...until one day, you cross an invisible line, and suddenly the Eye of Sauron that is the surveillance state fixes itself on you.

The Telzey stories (remember, this is the 60s) featured a ComWeb that used interstellar communications to instantly transmit data from linked computers. But as usual, scifi was too conservative: it took 30 minutes for the ComWeb to download and print a single scientific paper, and even Schmitz did not predict the ubiquity of the personal computer, as people had to go to phone booth-like structures to download anything off the ComWeb. What he got wrong was as interesting as what he got right.

What was extremely interesting about the Telzey stories is that it was so rare (at the time) for any main character in scifi to be female at all that they received a lot of letters that said something like "well, why couldn't this main character be male?" Which seems to strangely echo the insanely dumb and truly awful fights of today. The fandom of the 1960s viewed the Telzey stories as incredibly controversial, and there was as much discussion in xeroxed and mailed fanzines like Yandro and Science Fiction Review about Telzey Amberdon and other James H. Schmitz female heroines like secret agent Trigger Argee. The most common way the objection expressed itself was not quite "no girls should be in scifi" but one that attempted to sound more reasonable: "well, if a story could be changed to be about a man, it should be, so making her a girl is a distraction."

I have long said that Telzey Amberdon and James H. Schmitz inspired a lot of Japanimation, and my evidence for that is this: the stories existed in translation in Japan early on (as did his Witches of Karres), and were so enormously popular in Japan that they received covers from a certain Mr. Hayao Miyazaki.

photograher: wild momo photography

and they're just absolutely horrified because now they know why the Blip-A never returned, they sent them all to die, now to save their sun they have to redo the entire program all over again and Adrian is devastated -

Comic test page from way back when (I forgot comics are read left-to-right)

Wondermark #1589; The Ol' Scorny Mourny

So, there’s a post about how Bertie Wooster’s “what ho!” is a corruption of Beowulf’s “Hwaet!” And @fremedon​ and @oldshrewsburyian​ wrote up some things I decided to voice.

Scheherazade don't leave me here, there must be some escape, I caught you spinning shadows, watched as you forswore your fate. The truest of all falsehoods and the oldest of all tales: a girl can weave a grave-shroud that will walk her out the grave.

Scheherazade you taught me well, sharp tongue and empty hands, how to lose a world each evening, how to twist a crimson strand, past jewel caves and warnings, and things that run in threes 'til the ceiling's painted brightly and my lungs still know to breathe.