wording

Doodle comic that’s a continuation to an AU where Wu Ming survives his dispersal and hualian begin traveling together to find Wu Ming’s “lost beloved” (they figure it out eventually). In this case, Wu Ming comes a bit too close to resting in peace

as for the au in question, here’s my old doodles for it:

short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.

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.

He thinks he's amazing, because he is.

His sense of his own value is a little fucked up, and tied up in demonstrating how amazing he is by fixing all serious problems and mocking all stupid ones, and when his methods stop working and he can no longer prove this to his own satisfaction he has a profound crisis about it, which he's still shaking off when we meet him.

But self-esteem is super very much not a thing he struggles with. He is a genius who received regular validation about his excellence in a form that satisfied him both as very a small child and from the ages of ~8 to ~17. He has a clear system of ethics which he is most of the time able and willing to act on; he feels really good about himself as a person whenever severe trauma is not actively making that very hard to do.

His default state is obnoxiously high self-esteem.

In-story accusations of arrogance are strictly speaking correct, it's just that most of the inferences about the rest of his character people draw from this trait are deeply wrong.

His willingness to self-destruct is at least as heavily wrapped up in his conviction that because he's so awesome and tough and clever he can handle things other people can't, as it is in the idea that he's disposable.

So yeah the thing is. He really genuinely actually did sacrifice himself for Jiang Cheng in part because he thinks he's better than Jiang Cheng. Stronger, braver, smarter. More adaptable.

And he was right! And Jiang Cheng knows he was right!