ahh. smell that asbestos

my mom is a professional film critic. when i was a kid, she'd often take me with her to film festivals and let me see whichever films i was interested in with her. now, the thing you've gotta understand about film festivals is that pretty much all the films being shown there have not seen any kind of wide release yet; maybe they've played at a few other festivals, maybe this is the first-ever public showing. iirc many of the films didn't even have official ratings yet

which is all to say: my mom took little ~10 year old me to watch films that she knew basically nothing about. she had a 1-2 sentence description of the film from the festival guide. sometimes she'd have a press kit with more info. so she may know that a film is about, say, a serial killer, but be unsure how explicit the violence would be

so when we were walking into movies together and she wasn't sure how heavy/dark/violent/sexual it was gonna be, she'd tell me beforehand "hey, this film might end up having stuff in it that makes you uncomfortable. i need to stay through the whole film because it's my job, so if you get scared, your job is to decide if you can keep watching and go out to the lobby if you can't. get some popcorn and i'll find you after the movie is over."

out of all the countless screenings i watched with her, i only remember walking out of one (a movie about a school shooting). i hit a point where i realized "oh, i'm not feeling fun-scared anymore, i'm feeling Real Scared", so i quietly left. one of my mom's friends saw me in the lobby and asked where my mom was, and i explained what happened, and she chatted with me for a while. i got some popcorn. i checked out the arcade games in the corner. by the time the movie was over, i was feeling fine, and now as an adult i don't even remember what the exact moment was that freaked me out so bad i had to leave

similarly, starting several years before that, i remember a few nights where i was having trouble falling asleep and feeling pretty restless, so i'd go out to the living room and ask my parents if i could watch whatever tv show/movie they were watching with them. and they'd say "yep, you can, but this our time to pick what's on the tv, so if you don't like what we're watching you can go back to your bedroom and read until you're sleepy". there were a handful of times when i decided that the thing they were watching was too scary, so i left. the rest of the time, i stayed, and it ended up being an interesting exposure to tv shows and movies i wouldn't have otherwise seen

the points i'm drawing to here are:

exposing kids to media that's "too mature" for them is Good For Them, Actually. adults have a tendency to way underestimate how much kids can handle! i watched mulholland drive when i was like 9! my favorite cartoon in elementary school was futurama!

teaching kids how to judge for themselves when they need to stop engaging with a media experience does a much better job at setting them up to have a healthy relationship with media than just banning them from anything deemed Too Mature For Kids

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.