Stanford study finds walking improves creativity
news.stanford.edu
news.stanford.edu
I've found sobbing uncontrollably helps too.
-- posted from my smartphone
Yet, the article says:
While the study showed that walking benefited creative brainstorming, it did not have a positive effect on the kind of focused thinking required for single, correct answers. [...]
Productive creativity involves a series of steps – from idea generation to execution – and the research, Oppezzo said, demonstrated that the benefits of walking applied to the "divergent" element of creative thinking, but not to the more "convergent" or focused thinking characteristic of insight.
"There's work to be done to find out the causal mechanisms," Schwartz said.
Oh yeah, TFA: The pedometer on my phone tells me I walk 2.5+ miles a day... while smoking. My uncle was director of IT for Fortune 20 corp and does the same thing, he swears it is 'his process'. I concur, however, YMMV.
Ignore, if you will, the agent orange, forget the smog, forget the crap he ate and his voluminous waistband or the fact that he sat in his chair for 8+hours a day after work and definitely forget the lacquers & paints he inhaled as a gifted cabinet maker for decades. It was the tobacco that killed him, says so on his death certificate.
Everyone does a few dumb things while they are teenagers. A frighteningly large number of teens (esp. here in France) start smoking. Choose something else, please!
It'd probably be better to get pregnant; we'll be here to help you stay in school etc., and having a kid can be quite a difficult commitment for a few years, but gradually gets easier. It will make some things harder in your life, but it won't generally shut many doors.
Starting smoking is a lifelong commitment that will never have a positive payoff beyond "hey a little buzz", has a decent chance of a fucking horrible cost (hello, young people with cancer) if you have the wrong genes, and relatively-horrible costs even if you don't (having a lower quality of life when you're old and dying younger, yes, but also the financial cost is staggering -- the cost of the cigarettes is just a bit of it; you'll pay more for health/homeowners/car/life insurance, everything you own and might re-sell will have lower value, if you start a fire like one of the hundreds of thousands of other smokers who do in any given year, you'll pay for that, etc.).
Or you may quit, and live the possibly-quite-unpleasant life of an addict who has quit their addiction. See above; it can suck intensely, and you will crumble, you will choose "worse life with" vs. "worse life without" and construct flimsy rationalizations around it, but the only winning move is not to play.
I lost two grandparents early to smoking-related illness/cancers, and I have a once-smoking friend who got lung cancer when she was 20, though she's still alive, so I can make sure they won't have any illusions about "the bad outcomes only happen to other people".
[huh, this didn't start as a rant, but it sure is one now.]
I'm 23, and picked up smoking 5 months ago. I smoked heavily during this time period, but quit and went back to my healthy/athletic lifestyle. Stories like yours scare the hell out of me.
My point is, besides the cigs, the marketing department would label me a health nut...6'0" @ 165lbs and still able to carry 80lbs compressors up a ladder or stone a 2000sqft floor when I have off-time from the keyboard. Thanks to the cigs, this witch hunt has made me a 2nd class citizen all the while the majority benevolently deride me while eating big macs, popping 'good' pills to 'manage' their weight problems, idly watching their 'shows' while smoking equivalent fumes in their vehicles everyday.
PS: I had three schoolmates with cancer by 9th grade, none smoked, they just lived in N/W Indiana of which they had no choice(I was a transplant).
Edit: I NEVER smoke indoors, hate the stale cig smell more than most. My nose olfactory senses are still quite acute at 42yo.
Nicotine without the volatile smoldering micro particles hitting your lungs.
Abstract:
> Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford’s alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of participants’ creativity on the GAU, but only increased 23% of participants’ scores for the CRA. In Experiment 2, participants completed the GAU when seated and then walking, when walking and then seated, or when seated twice. Again, walking led to higher GAU scores. Moreover, when seated after walking, participants exhibited a residual creative boost. Experiment 3 generalized the prior effects to outdoor walking. Experiment 4 tested the effect of walking on creative analogy generation. Participants sat inside, walked on a treadmill inside, walked outside, or were rolled outside in a wheelchair. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies. The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.
EDIT: I guess this is it http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/uob-nrs021014...
Currently I'm in a very extremely urban location, no place to park, loud heavy traffic, nothing green for a couple miles unless its a hyper manicured lawn covered in blowing garbage or a potted plant, panhandlers all over, garbage everywhere, super high crime (relatively). Other than that, its a good job, but I miss working in better more civilized environments.
Maybe specifically for creativity there's no difference but other things (mood etc) benefit from getting outside.
Other studies have found high ceilings are good for creativity while low ceilings have a negative effect on creativity. I would imagine walking outside without any ceiling would be as good or better than a space with high ceilings.
The ideal walking for me is somewhere outside with fresh air, but without constant interruptions to the flow of walking and thinking.
Ideally you want to be able to walk alone, but in a type of daydream where you're thinking about the problem at hand instead of spending many cycles on the process of walking. That means covering a well known route with few interruptions.
Luckily for me I have access to this type of environment right near my front door. But for those who don't, a treadmill could offer a similar experience, but I suspect the treadmill needs to be a good space (light, airy room, nice outlook from a window).
I also walk at lunch time, also whenever shifting gears during the day, and hike on the weekends on trails, and I don't find a huge difference.
I have never found that running or cycling worked nearly as well as walking. You can't lose yourself in thought in those activities -- too much alertness is required. Maybe a slow jog, or very slow bike ride, on a very smooth trail with no traffic of any kind would work, I don't know. But in general I haven't found these conducive.
What has worked very well for me, though, is 15 minutes of vigorous running followed by 60 - 90 minutes of walking.
One of the best ways to work on software problems: design by walking around.
The first thing that came to mind for me was "Management By Walking Around", but I think that could easily be misapplied: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-01-16/
*I didn't wait until then out of negligence, I had enrolled in too many classes last semester and it became close to what I could handle.
I used to drive for about an hour to get to my former place of work, and I had time to think about things, whether they were related to a problem I was trying to solve or what haqppened to be on the radio at the time or the meanderings that usually lead to new ideas. While the job became increasingly unpleasant, I did enjoy those drives.
Acting on those ideas is key though, if you generate all these great ideas while you're on a constitutional but never do anything with them, how does that help your creative output?
I once worked with a type-2 and a type-1 diabetic (not the same guy obviously) and as you'd expect with a control loop malfunction illness, both predictable and unpredictable effects were in play.
If I recall correctly the type-2 guy complained that his innards would release lots of glucose while exercising and continue shortly after but his insulin production (or response?) was not so good, so his blood sugar measurably spiked high after exercise while the type-1 had his drop unless he adjusted his dosages. Or perhaps it was the other way around wrt the type 1 guy and the type 2 guy.
Being a spectrum disease, I suspect even a "healthy" individual might have some peculiar short term changes to blood sugar and/or insulin levels.
Although the authors do not report effect sizes directly it seems that, in many cases, walking shifted the distribution at least one standard deviation in a direction of higher creativity (that is a lot).
At the same time I wish the results were reported better, in many cases they do not even report the mean and standard deviation of different experimental groups.
Anyway, make your own opinion. It's a huge effect, you'll perceive it if you try. It's so big an effect that it's on folklore for as long as people started documenting such things.
In addition to walking around I highly recommend talking to yourself and gesticulating! Looks weird but it works.
It would be interesting to see a scientific study done on it.
I'd like to get a (passive) treadmill desk at some point for these reasons. I don't think I've ever found myself to be particularly creative on runs. I think I treat it too seriously, and when I'm not too serious, then I'm trying to be meditative with it or listening to nature. Interesting to hear other people's experiences.
It's one of the perks of working from home.
I write a lot, in addition to coding, and taking walks on the trails behind our house (I live on the edge of national forest) is a daily practice. I like to think about problems, what to write about, etc.
Like the article says:
"Many people anecdotally claim they do their best thinking when walking. We finally may be taking a step, or two, toward discovering why."
It's news because it's a scientific study into how walking makes people more creative, not whether. And it what ways: note how the study suggested that walking was better for some situations ("creative brainstorming") than others ("focused thinking").
Lots of people have a lifetime of experience to support that faith healing, astrology or homeopathic medicine works. Should we take their claims at face value as well or should we try to test them scientifically in a controlled manner?
For what it's worth I also love to walk and find that it helps my thinking, but I'm also willing to accept that anecdotes, personal or otherwise, aren't evidence of anything.