Uhhhhmanda

Decades before the New York City subway cars were lined with advertisements for niche dating apps, personal injury lawyers, prescription weight loss medicines, and alternative internet browsers, the interiors of many of the city’s trains were adorned with editions of the two-toned mock newspaper known as The Subway Sun. Primarily produced between 1936 and 1965 under the artistic direction of late cartoonists Fred Cooper and Amelia Opdyke Jones, the imitation periodical campaign by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) fulfilled a variety of purposes in the subway system for over five decades. It encouraged polite passenger etiquette, but also promoted local attractions as a way to entice New Yorkers to use public transit — from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Live in the US?

Need to call your representative or senator, but nervous about making the phone call?

Do it at 2 am!

I'm not kidding. It will go to voice mail and you don't have to talk to a human person, and your call still counts!

Signed, someone with major phone anxiety who has pushed through it to do this several times now.

Dangers of working on a set.

he would spend multiple days walking overland to locations in full pack, sword, & armour when everyone else was travelling in trucks

refused to use any prop swords that weren’t actual steel

basically lived in the forest in-costume, sleeping rough under the sky, even fishing & foraging for his food when possible

often spent hours in the barn just bonding with the horses. He adopted the horse he rode, Uranus, after filming ended

repaired all his own gear by hand, which was often since he never took it off

had a tooth knocked out during filming but had the crew simply glue it back in place so they could keep filming

the instructor who taught everyone swordplay said Viggo was the best swordsman he had ever trained

carried his sword literally everywhere & practiced non-stop, resulting in the cops being called when locals reported “a wild man swinging a sword around his head" outside a gym in Wellington

an orc actor fucked up & accidentally threw a dagger directly into Viggo’s face, but Viggo just deflected it with his sword. They kept that shot

infamously broke 3 toes kicking that helmet but stayed in-character & sold his very real scream as part of the scene. They also kept that shot

Viggo insists on doing his own stunts; in The Two Towers where Aragorn is unconscious & floating down the river, the strong current pulled him underwater for so long that a rescue team had to go in to save him. Viggo survived by grabbing a boulder on the riverbed and pulling himself to the surface

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.

ok guys you have to promise to be cool. I hyperfocused on this short film and translated + subtitled it in like 24 hours. do not reupload, do not post this link elsewhere thanks I barely moved for 7.5 hours straight today sldkfsjlkj

anyways gonna admit I mostly did this so I could finally show my partner some chinese media that I translated to some measure of my own satisfaction. I'm really excited! I think I did okay. ╰(*´︶`*)╯