Stanford study finds walking improves creativity (2014)
news.stanford.edu
news.stanford.edu
I think there are a number of reasons for this. I don't have a lot of time to write it all out here, and I would like to get my thoughts more focused on the whole subject before I write too much but here are a few reasons that I think lead to a so-called loss of creativity.
Inactivity and stress leads to a whole host of issues, which I think loss of creativity is a side effect of. I suffered a severe loss of creativity during my early to late 20s. I attribute this to high stress, too much work, and a loss of focus. Also depression didn't help at all.
Inactivity and stress makes you feel like crap. So does depression. I would go through bursts of creativity even at my low points, but I could never finish anything I started. Depression would always make me fail. Learning to live with depression, getting rid of my stress and focusing in hard on the things I want to make has boosted me to (what at least feels like) a whole new creative level.
I think people lose their creative focus. They forget the reason for creating in the first place and so they see no reason to remain creative perhaps, or they can't see whatever it may be they enjoy creating panning out into a profitable business, so they stop. They allow social norms to smash their creativity at various critical stages in their life perhaps. Some parents are pretty down on creativity as well. Society as a whole celebrates people who think differently, but in day to day life the people you encounter openly show their disapproval (if you speak your mind).
If you don't practice your creativity, study techniques, test yourself, fail at whatever you're doing and learn from your mistakes (just like literally everything else) you will end up "losing" your creativity... though I like to think that some people who were "creative" never really found it in the first place. They perhaps started down the right path, and then abandoned it, like a child who gives up on reading. During my youth (I can remember as young as 5ish but I have one story saved which i wrote at age "3 1/2") I created things nearly every day. I have piles of papers saved from nearly every stage of my life, be they sketches, doodles, or something more. Most of it is unfinished and pretty much rubbish. I like to look at that pile of garbage and compare it to what I have now (just like I do with the stuff I made a few years or months ago).
I think that kids are just less inhibited, are able to make weird connections because they don't know how the world works (this can be simulated though, so don't despair), have less stress, less obligations, have more time, are healthier and more active like you said.
As a kid I could spend hours or days (or, during summer, even weeks) doing whatever it is I was interested at the moment - be it playing games, writing code or drawing things. I could go easy and take as much time as creativity requires. If I fail, no problem. There was always tomorrow afternoon. There was always next Saturday.
As an adult, I can no longer do that. There's tons of obligation, and every scrap of free time I have must be allocated well. I feel this pressure to be immediately successful, immediately rewarded, because there's very little time left in between errands and having to get some sleep.
This pressure is what I think makes people just not bother. Not think creative thoughts, because there won't be time to do anything with them anyway. There's this bit of "statistics" floating around the Internet, that "Americans [or other first-worlders] spend on average 4 hours a day in front of TV". If only they could channel that time into something creative... Except they can't. Because when you come home tired, your willpower drained at work, after you're done with your chores, for many drinking beer and watching a movie (or reading a book; somehow, no one ever says reading books is a waste of time) is the only reasonable way to wind down. Because you don't have to commit. You don't have to allocate time, worry that you won't have enough of it. You just sit down and enjoy the show, and then repeat the loop 'till you retire.
/rant
And he also notes that two of the worst environments for the brain are: (1) the office (2) the classroom
This little line came out nowhere, hah! Well done. Thank you for sharing this.
As an adult I love walking, I feel that it's when I can think the clearest. And as an adult I still pace, especially at the gym when I'm resting before my next set.
Now I'm starting to wonder about myself. Anyways, go on walks!
It's just a shame it was a) closed source and b) I didn't get paid for it!
Strangely enough I saw a similar tool that Facebook built being demoed at a meetup this week. Theirs was much nicer-looking (mine was text only).
I enjoy writing time-saving tools, but now I try and profit from it myself.
https://blog.fitbit.com/50-states-no-excuses-see-which-state...
I worked a physical job, stocking books and filling book orders for a summer while in college[1]. I used a pedometer and rarely went much above 10k steps (for the 8 hour shift anyway). That's walking basically for 8 hours straight (with stops to place or grab a book).
[1] - not my only physical job, but the one I walked the most, and the only one I ever had a pedometer on.
Despite how it might subjectively seem, its not anything even approximately like walking 8 hours straight if you don't get over 10k steps; a fairly average walking pace is ~80 steps per minute, for 8 hours that works out to 38,400 steps.
Well, yeah, you'd kind of expect that with active Fitbit users.
> so I wouldn't expect a significant drop with the weather.
I would, though I'd expect it to be less than you'd see from more casual people. Conscious effort doesn't completely negate the effects of convenient opportunities vs. adverse conditions.
I'd venture that anything down, say -10C (15F), assuming moderate wind, doesn't cause much real problem for walking.
If you want the least pleasant weather for walking I'd say half a degree above freezing and pouring rain wins every time.
Which suggests that -40 with windchill is a relatively uncommon condition.
A half-hour walk in 20F weather is perfectly comfortable with decent clothing (an insulated jacket, wool socks, long johns under one's pants, a scarf), and that's about as cold as it gets in most of the inhabited world.
On the other hand, a walk in California can be pretty uncomfortable due to the beating sun & high-speed traffic situation in many areas.
-40 is uncommon, but "-40 with windchill" can mean something different. In Canada it's common to report the temperature along with a lower number that takes wind chill into account. Thus a weather reporter might say, "-25 (Celsius), -40 with wind chill", meaning it's windy enough that if you go out walking it'll feel like -40 and the creativity won't exactly flow.
This became standard about a generation ago. I believe they started doing it to alert people to the risk of frostbite. But every time I hear it I can't help thinking that previous generations of Canadians would look down their possibly frostbitten noses at us for weakness.
"No such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing." (Swedish saying I was told)
People who want to be outside have good boots and down-filled parkas.
> The cognitive tests were more demanding, designed to measure practical aspects of cognition, such as working memory and delayed recall, and the ability to concentrate, all of which are important in performing office work. In one of these tests, volunteers had to learn and later recall lists of words; in another, they were asked to juggle lists of numbers and add them up in their heads even as new numbers were added to the list...
> The results, when the researchers compared the treadmill walkers with the people sitting at their desks, substantially favored sitting. The people who had walked during the testing performed worse on almost all aspects of thinking, including the ability to concentrate and remember, compared with those who had been seated.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/the-downside-of-tre...
> None of the participants had used a treadmill desk before, so they received a few minutes of instruction and practice
A few minutes? Jeez, I'd expect that getting acclimated to a completely different way to work would take at least several weeks or months.
I can pretty much set myself up for the work that day in the morning thinking through issues very deeply. In the evening, I find it clears my head and lets me think around any issues I've had during the day or just get myself prepped for any side projects I'm working on that evening.
I like the idea of a walking meeting however the dynamics of having 5 people walk together and be able to have good conversations might not work. I'm guessing 2-3 people maximum would work.
How does this relate to standing desks? Standing desks with treadmills underneath them? ;)
Did this improve the discussion? Who knows, but it certainly was nice to get outside and have a reason to walk around.
In the case of this study, I'd guess that walking excites the supplementary, pre-motor and the motor cortex, as well as some attentional processes devoted to it from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) compared to just sitting. If this is the case, then I have two hypotheses why this works. (1) Because the motor cortices are involved, the PFC are easier excited as well. (2) Since some attentional processes are devoted to walking it's easier to think in a divergent manner, because there's less conscious and sub-conscious room for convergent thinking.
I don't know how to test hypothesis 1, but hypothesis 2 has probably already been tested in cognitive science (I just didn't look it up). Reports where people get distractor tasks in the experimental group and a similar task as the main task in the control group probably exists.
What do you think?
In the 19th century everyone knew that you could determine if someone was a criminal by studying the shape of their skull.
[1]http://theartofcharm.com/podcast-episodes/olivia-fox-cabane-...
Even when I had my office in La Jolla California, I favored business conversations during walks along the ocean.
Absolutely being outside and getting light exercise helps creativity.
But why was this posted 3 times today?
Completely a co-incidence for me. Yesterday, I had a discussion with some friends about creative process and how I like long walks. Today, I saw this 2014 article on my Twitter TL. Hence, the share.
These studies put "that which we already know" on a testable basis and also allow us to look at the underlying mechanisms, often we find that the underlying mechanism is counter-intuitive to our assumptions (this is often the case, the universe rarely works the way we'd expect) so dismissing it with "Of course, we knew that" is frequently wrong.
You say "eating well is good for your health" but of course eating well is predicated on knowing which things to eat for health and how do we know that via studies on human nutrition of course!.