Just walk

August 22, 2021 2:25 PM

Oppezzo designed an elegant experiment. A group of Stanford students were asked to list as many creative uses for common objects as they could. The more novel uses a student listed, the higher the creativity score. Half the students sat for an hour before they were given their test. The others walked on a treadmill.   The results were staggering. Creativity scores improved by 60 percent after a walk.
posted by sammyo (52 comments total)

Thanks for sharing this! It certainly lines up with my personal experience. One of the many, many good reasons to have a dog, too, in order to have more occasions to take a walk and more things to observe while doing so.
posted by rpfields at 2:39 PM on August 22, 2021 [10 favorites]

Given the ongoing reproducibility crisis in psychology, I’d be very interested to see if this has been reproduced yet (and with different subject populations than students of an elite university).

That being said, nothing will stop me from taking a nice walk to get the brain moving.
posted by dis_integration at 2:44 PM on August 22, 2021 [56 favorites]

I'm a mathematician.

If you've been to any sort of exposition on the "maker"–hippie continuum, maybe you've seen the stationary bike with the blender hooked up to it. You pedal for five minutes, the blades turn, then you get off and enjoy your smoothie.

This is approximately, palpably, how I have always felt my brain is powered.
posted by aws17576 at 2:44 PM on August 22, 2021 [17 favorites]

Note that in this analogy, the brain is the blender, not the fruit. Usually.
posted by aws17576 at 2:46 PM on August 22, 2021 [56 favorites]

This ends so oddly I reloaded the page to make sure it was rendering properly.

Anyway, this is interesting to know. I hope this line of research identifies if there are ways we can replicate the effect in the many people for whom this type of brisk activity would be impossible, and would likely benefit more than average from a mental boost. In the meantime, it’s nice to know my dogs are helping keep my brain fresh.
posted by obfuscation at 2:46 PM on August 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

> Given the ongoing reproducibility crisis in psychology, I’d be very interested to see if this has been reproduced yet (and with different subject populations than students of an elite university).

I agree. Lots of bad research gets published, and the results of bad research get amplified by media/journalists/public who aren't able to critically assess if the experimental design & statistical approach makes sense. I don't know enough about statistics or experimental design to assess this.

Here's Oppezzo & Schwartz's 2014 paper Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking. They conducted four experiments, each with a set of around n=40 participants, all university/college students or adults at a university. While reading the description of experiment 1 I was thinking "what if you flipped the ordering of sitting and using the treadmill?" and indeed, that's what they did in experiment 2.

Here's an (arbitrarily dredged up by google) 2020 paper by Rominger & co Everyday bodily movement is associated with creativity independently from active positive affect: a Bayesian mediation analysis approach investigating to see if the association between bodily movement and creative performance is mediated by positive activated affect [a subjective mental state of energy and enthusiasm related to health and well-being].

> The aim of this study was twofold: Firstly, we investigated whether everyday bodily movement was associated with creative performance. Secondly, we examined if positive-activated affect may mediate the association between bodily movement and creative performance. In a sample of 79 participants everyday bodily movement was recorded during five consecutive days using accelerometers. Creativity in the figural and verbal domain was assessed with performance tests, along with self-reported positive-activated affect as a trait. Findings revealed that creativity, positive-activated affect, and everyday bodily movement were associated with each other. However, positive-activated affect did not mediate the association between everyday bodily movement and creative performance

>[...] It is important to note that—due to the cross-sectional study design—the reported correlations are not causal in nature. Hence, it would also be possible, for instance, that creativity leads to more positive affect and higher levels of positive affect result in more everyday bodily movement.
posted by are-coral-made at 3:13 PM on August 22, 2021 [9 favorites]

This is also how 9 month old babies judge us. You gotta get up and move around.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:30 PM on August 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

I loathe walking. No wonder I'm dull as toast.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 3:55 PM on August 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

This is a good reminder for me to get out for walks this week, so thanks for posting. My left eye is twitching a little though at constructions like this: "Little has been written about famous women who regularly walked. Virginia Woolf is one exception. She apparently walked quite a bit. More recently..."

Paragraphs of effusive prose about Darwin's Sandwalk, and Virginia Woolf "apparently walked quite a bit".

Or: "Historically, however, walking has been the privilege of white men. Black men were likely to be arrested, or worse. Women just out for a walk were harassed, or worse."

A small part of me appreciates the impulse to acknowledge that not everybody is a white man. But a bigger part of me rebels against this compression of all time and space into one word, "historically". It's just lazy. Perhaps when the writer says, "historically", what they mean is, "in North America since its colonisation". (And even then, I don't think this oversimplification holds up.) This guy is an anthropologist. He should know better.

Or: "And, of course, rarely in our evolutionary history was it safe for anyone to walk alone."

I'm not sure there's any "of course" about it. Can't we be a bit more imaginative and generous to people in the past? Perhaps they could handle themselves perfectly well -- even, gasp, the women! They had villages, didn't they? Paths? Charm? Confidence in their own abilities? The impulse to walk alone, whether it was safe or not?
posted by trotzdem_kunst at 3:57 PM on August 22, 2021 [31 favorites]

My ability to write has taken a huge hit over the past couple of years as my capacity for long walks has gone.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:02 PM on August 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

I noticed when I was in school that I would hit my wall on an exam, decide I couldn't solve whatever last problem(s...) I was working on, and turn it in.

Five minutes after walking out the door I'd realize what the answer was (or how to solve it), and kick myself.

So I started just doing that on purpose before I was really done -- set everything down, go out of the room and walk up and down the hall a couple of times, then come back in and finish. Test scores went up pretty significantly.
posted by curious nu at 4:05 PM on August 22, 2021 [19 favorites]

To take things meta (also about Oppezzo): Walk stirs scientists to measure walking’s impact on creativity
posted by johnabbe at 4:19 PM on August 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Weird to read an article about walking where the writer specifically mentions a lack of women, but with no mention of Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and city atlases for New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York.
posted by dobbs at 4:21 PM on August 22, 2021 [26 favorites]

More tangentially: So, Frédéric, you've written a whole book about the simple life and joy of walking because your life is too complicated to actually go walking? Is this what happened?
posted by johnabbe at 4:22 PM on August 22, 2021

each with a set of around n=40 participants

Am I wrong to dismiss n=40 as what got psychology into the mess it's in in the first place? Lately I've found myself filing studies of that size into the "might be true, might not" folder in my brain.
posted by clawsoon at 4:35 PM on August 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's even worse when the n=40 is actually 40 rich, white, elite, U.S. males of roughly the same age and upbringing.
posted by signal at 4:55 PM on August 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

OTOH n=40 is a reasonable argument for doing the big complicated experiment that would test it in people of many different circumstances.
posted by clew at 5:07 PM on August 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

I loathe walking.

You would get along well with my wife. Those are almost verbatim the first words she ever said to me, while we were on a hike. I was pretty sure we weren't ever going to be friends. Two months later we were dating.
posted by biogeo at 5:08 PM on August 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

I have a colleague who employs the creative uses task. As an instrument for measuring what it purports to measure, creativity, I find it... less than fully convincing. It is fun to do, though.
posted by biogeo at 5:11 PM on August 22, 2021

Ctrl+F "autism"

Hmm.

I've always known that pacing helps me think, but the medical establishment considers it much more maladaptive than "walking."

Women just out for a walk were harassed, or worse.

This still happens and is the main reason I pace inside of my apartment instead of going for a "healthy" walk.
posted by brook horse at 5:36 PM on August 22, 2021 [9 favorites]

In my experience, the sitting results would've been improved if they sat on a toilet.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:54 PM on August 22, 2021 [13 favorites]

#AaronSorkinWasRightAllAlong
posted by glonous keming at 6:10 PM on August 22, 2021 [18 favorites]

I expect scores would have gone up even more if people had been able to take the test while walking on the treadmill, and gone up even more than that if they had been able to take it while walking alone on a quiet dirt road or woods path. In my experience, the best thinking happens while you are actually in motion.
posted by Redstart at 6:28 PM on August 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

Tangentially, re: reproducibility crisis in psychology, there is a lot of discussion & links to papers that discuss methodological flaws on Andrew Gelman's blog, e.g. this 2016 post.

Gelman also argues that:
> The strengths and weaknesses of the field of research psychology seemed to have combined to (a) encourage the publication and dissemination of lots of low-quality, unreplicable research, while (b) creating the conditions for this problem to be recognized, exposed, and discussed openly.

Methodological problems in peer reviewed research are certainly not limited to psychology. E.g. here's a 2013 neuroscience paper by Button et al: Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience
posted by are-coral-made at 6:43 PM on August 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

So is Oppezzo getting money from treadmill companies or walking shoe companies?
posted by scruss at 7:12 PM on August 22, 2021

One of the great things (for me) about mowing the lawn (non-propelled pushmower) is that I can kind of autopilot the mowing part (pretty mindless) and use that time to move my body and THINK about things. It's not walking, but... works for me.
posted by which_chick at 7:14 PM on August 22, 2021 [6 favorites]

An hour long daily walk turns on my creativity like nothing else these days.

I make time for it; I don't let myself get caught up with statistics (steps, distance, speed, time, records, etc); I don't create an elaborate schedule because it's simply every day rain or shine; I don't carry my smartphone (no music, podcasts, etc) nor even my pen and notebook; I walk the same safe, quiet route every day; I listen to my thoughts and feel my feelings without interrupting them or trying to interpret them; I walk at a comfortable pace in a natural rhythm; I don't beat myself up if I have to miss a day for injury or illness or dangerous weather, nor do I continue to use them as excuses after they've passed; I make sure I have the simple equipment needed (a broken-in pair of comfortable unfancy athletic shoes, unfancy clothing for all weathers, a windproof umbrella); when I first started, I didn't overdo it, I ramped up to my now standard hour long walk because that length just naturally fit me, then once it became routine I avoided the temptation to make it longer; I walk alone so that I don't have to coordinate schedules, be dependant on an other, or be distracted by talking, however I happily go on an additional walk with my partner as time permits because walking conversation is such a healthy pleasure and benefit to our relationship; I don't dwell on the corollary benefits such as my weight loss and improved physical and psychological health, because they are simply secondary benefits to the simple lucidity of my daily walk.
posted by fairmettle at 7:27 PM on August 22, 2021 [24 favorites]

This is interesting, but it also does kind of fall into the "We did some stuff to undergrads" genre of research.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:54 PM on August 22, 2021

no mention of Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking

I love this book! (and I love walking.) I have read it 2 or 3 times and something new always sticks with me.
posted by Emmy Rae at 8:03 PM on August 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Not thrilled with the assumptions and overstatements of the linked article, treating, as it does, the benefits of walking being a given and saying stuff like:

Therefore, because cognitive decline is what occurs in the earliest stages of dementia, walking might ward off that neurodegenerative condition.

My mother was a big believer in walking for health, but showed the first signs of her dementia right at the peak of her habitual mall walking. Making too broad of claims about the potential benefits of walking in this way rankles a bit.

The experiment itself, understandably, seeks to measure the potential benefit of walking absent complicating variables, so constructed conditions that seem to offer a straight comparison between walking and not walking, but by doing so might inadvertently be as much measuring the difference between monotony and mild diversion, given the conditions of sitting in a white room without any adornment or view. That's potentially a problem because it doesn't really duplicate the possible exchange of real life conditions very well and because it allows for an alternative possibility of any distraction is better than staring at blank walls, which is something few people would find conducive to creative thinking.

That said, I know from experience there are a good many people who say, and from what I can tell, need some sort of activity to feel more creative or think more clearly. Commonly they also tend to be people who don't like sitting still for long periods and/or have a hard time with concentration when they aren't involved with something. At the same time, there are those, like me, who find walking to be no more conducive to creative thought than sitting, after years of trying to think while doing both regularly, and find sitting in a location with some moderate activity, absent interruptions, to be more conducive. Mild diversion is a help, while staring a blank wall would not be. Walking is better than the latter, but not the former as I end up focusing more on the act of exertion itself, which is something many of the other people I've known do not do in the same way.

I suspect the benefits of walking are quite real for many, for good health reasons or just as some activity to ward off feelings of monotony or tension, but for others the benefits will be less pronounced or even absent depending on the alternatives presented and how comfortable generally they are with spending time inside their heads, so to speak.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:08 PM on August 22, 2021 [10 favorites]

>In my experience, the sitting results would've been improved if they sat on a toilet.

Especially if the loo roll was empty.
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:50 PM on August 22, 2021

Hmmm, yes. In my life before wheelchair, I used to walk 2-5 miles around the neighborhood and cogitate, pet neighborhood cats, sniff whatever was blooming, and ponder the foibles of urban transportation while walking in an area without sidewalks under an airport landing flightpath.

Now that it's too taxing to perambulate my long rambles in the wheelchair, I realize I have replaced it with the long swim. I slowly swim a mile or more several times a week at Barton Springs, a long spring fed pool, and observe the clouds, watch the sparkle of light on the water, and listen to mockingbirds.

During the long months of covid and unemployment, my sister pointed out that she always hears me humming made up tunes as I brush my teeth. I never hum at other times. I am always trying to come up with new tunes to play on the guitar, but my lack of playing skills inhibits the creativity. Since the pool reopened after the lockdown lifted, I've noticed when I swim alone that I'm humming a long medley of made up melodies. It occurs to me that the motion and the unstructured contemplation have opened up a new way for the music in my brain to come out and play.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 8:57 PM on August 22, 2021 [19 favorites]

This is approximately, palpably, how I have always felt my brain is powered.

Palpably and pulpably!
posted by StephenF at 9:30 PM on August 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

I would put quite a bit of money on the proposition that this study massively overestimates the effect size. The directional effect might be real, but a 60% increase is too large to be plausible. Small sample size plus publication bias are almost certainly in play here. Journalists need to stop taking these studies at face value
posted by the tulips are too red in the first place at 11:13 PM on August 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

>I expect scores would have gone up even more if people had been able to take the test while walking on the treadmill, and gone up even more than that if they had been able to take it while walking alone on a quiet dirt road or woods path.

I'd want to take it in the shower.
posted by rifflesby at 1:08 AM on August 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

My history with walking might be of interest. I didn't exactly hate walking, but it's just as well no one was pressuring me to walk more than I needed to for practical purposes.

I got interested in bodywork-- various systems of improving kinesthesia and coordination-- Rubenfeld Synthesis, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, and these days it's qi gong. I didn't have a purpose, just a strong drive to do what I called getting moved into my body.

To my surprise, walking became a pleasure rather than than a neutral experience, and I can feel like getting out of the house and walking somewhere. I can't express how weird this would seem to my past self.

As a general thing, habitual tension and parasitic movement habits can make an activity no fun.

I've put a surprising amount of time and money into this over decades. I can't see offering general advice to do it, but maybe this will speak to a few people.

The cheapest way to get into this might be Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement-- gentle movement sequences which improve kinesthesia and can be done from books and videos. I have trouble getting around to them, though.

When I was a kid, I fell down a lot. Eventually, I figured out that my hips were so tight that I couldn't/didn't swing my leg forward far enough for my foot to clear the ground, so I'd have to swing my calf around the outside. If I didn't swing my calf far enough, my toes would catch on the ground, and I'd fall-- never got injured beyond skinned knees. The actual quality of life issue was that I was using little muscles in my lower legs which aren't built for that much work. I've had a few people say this story explains something about their walking.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:32 AM on August 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

Nancy Lebovitz: Eventually, I figured out that my hips were so tight that I couldn't/didn't swing my leg forward far enough for my foot to clear the ground, so I'd have to swing my calf around the outside.

If you had grown up in my little community, you would've been one of the people who I identified by their walk before anybody in my life realized I needed glasses.
posted by clawsoon at 5:26 AM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Children hassled me about my feet turning out. I tried straightening them, and it felt so bad I didn't continue. I probably would have given myself knee damage or something if I had continued.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:31 AM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

There is nothing wrong with studies where n=40, for looking at large effects. They're typically underpowered to detect small effects, fine. But here's the outstanding thing about them: they're easy to replicate.

There's a lot of fixing that science needs. We need power calculations front and center. We need pre-registration of studies. We need to treat replication of studies as an endeavor as worthwhile as performing new studies. But we don't need to scoff at studies that have low n.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 6:16 AM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

Two months later we were dating.

I that because you persuaded her to go walking or because she persuaded you to stop?
posted by Paul Slade at 6:47 AM on August 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

might inadvertently be as much measuring the difference between monotony and mild diversion, given the conditions of sitting in a white room without any adornment or view.

It would be fun to run this experiment over and over with different groups. See the effect of watching a horror movie, playing Call of Duty, assembling a Lego set, baking a pie, driving some fence posts, intercourse, running a 5k, etc.
posted by Mitheral at 6:58 AM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

My ability to write has taken a huge hit over the past couple of years as my capacity for long walks has gone.

I find that driving is a decent substitute. Even when I was still able to take long walks, I found long drives fruitful in the same way.
posted by Orlop at 7:13 AM on August 23, 2021

I've been writing a novel over the past few months (40K in! yay me!) and I have absolutely found that walking helps me with ideas. The kicker is that it needs to be walking on a treadmill, because when walking outside there are too many distractions to allow my brain to work.

But if I get on the treadmill, plug in a curated playlist of instrumental music (so I don't get distracted by words), and let my mind wander, within five minutes I've got ideas coming at me and need to use my phone to send myself voice memos about scenes, character notes, etc.

Driving and the shower can do this as well, but given the inadvisability of using my phone to send myself messages in either of those places, I prefer not to use those times for brainstorming.
posted by telophase at 8:00 AM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

One of the (many) things I like about my current job compared to previous ones is that my boss is completely comfortable with the idea of "I need to go for a walk to get this done."

If I'm walking to get somewhere, I'll have some music or a podcast on. But if I'm walking to think, I won't listen to anything except the sounds around me. The trick is to always have something to hand for when a good idea emerges.
posted by YoungStencil at 8:47 AM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

I loathe walking. No wonder I'm dull as toast.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. I love walking, and I am about as bright as a sack of wet mice from which the craftier mice already have been removed.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:57 AM on August 23, 2021 [9 favorites]

But, experimentally, ricochet biscuit, perhaps you would be even wetter mice if you didn’t walk, or of course someone else’s mice go NIMH with walks and overbalance yours.
posted by clew at 1:22 PM on August 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Because of an oppressive heat wave here, I have not walked more than a kilometre or two per day in the last week. I have been downgraded from ‘sack of wet mice’ to ‘bag of hammers.’
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:07 PM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

I thought I was getting stupider but it's comforting to know that I'm just getting lazier.
posted by bendy at 6:19 PM on August 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

Easy problem of consciousness: But here's the outstanding thing about them: they're easy to replicate.

One thing I've read about is research programs which produce dozens of successful n=40 studies across multiple labs stretching over years and costing lots of money which add up to proving nothing. Lots of replication, but it all means nothing. I know I've read about more than one case of this, but the one that springs to mind right now is intranasal oxytocin research.
posted by clawsoon at 6:26 PM on August 23, 2021

Clawsoon: Lots of replication, but it all means nothing. I know I've read about more than one case of this, but the one that springs to mind right now is intranasal oxytocin research.

In that case, it didn't replicate. And we dropped the ball by not publishing the failed replication attempt.

We desperately need to start publishing well conducted replication attempts whether they come out positive or negative. And let some scientists make careers out of replication.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 11:48 AM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

In that case, it didn't replicate.

This sounds like an interesting philosophical discussion. :-) Because it did replicate, lots of times, it just also didn't replicate a lot more times that didn't get published. Which I guess means that there's replication, and then there's replication...
posted by clawsoon at 12:49 PM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

I mean I'd call it more a critical flaw in the way we are doing science today than a "philosophical problem", but yeah: replication requires documentation of all replication trials not just the positive ones.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 8:15 AM on August 25, 2021 [2 favorites]