I spend my walking time creating a TED talk, it will not be praising the doctors for saving my life. Instead it will be a brutal takedown.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf
Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz
Stanford University
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.
People have noted that walking seems to have a special relation
to creativity. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1889) wrote,
“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” (Aphorism
34). The current research puts such observations on solid footing.
Four studies demonstrate that walking increases creative ideation.
The effect is not simply due to the increased perceptual stimulation
of moving through an environment, but rather it is due to walking.
Whether one is outdoors or on a treadmill, walking improves the
generation of novel yet appropriate ideas, and the effect even
extends to when people sit down to do their creative work shortly
after.
The Mind–Body Connection
Prior research has documented several ways that physical ac-
tivity can influence cognition. These include studies that have
shown global protective effects of exercise against cognitive de-
cline (e.g., Kramer, Erickson, & Colcombe, 2006), the “embodied”
dependency of semantic concepts on physical activity (e.g.,
Klatzky, Pellegrino, McCloskey, & Doherty, 1989), and the com-
petition of physical and mental activity for shared attentional
resources (e.g., Li, Lindenberger, Freund, & Baltes, 2001). As we
show later, these literatures do not explain the creativity effect
demonstrated here. More relevant is research that examines how
physical activity selectively enhances specific cognitive processes.
Studies on selective cognitive effects of physical activity have
largely focused on aerobic activity (running), rather than mild
activity (walking) or anaerobic activity (sprinting). For example,
aerobic activity appears to increase the speed of concurrent cog-
nition (Brisswalter, Collardeau, & Rene, 2002; Fontana, Maz-
zardo, Mokgothu, Furtado, & Gallaher, 2009; Tomoporowski,
2003). Researchers have also investigated short-term residual ef-
fects of aerobic exercise (e.g., Kubesch et al., 2003). In their
meta-analysis, Lambourne and Tomporowski (2010) found a small
improvement in memory performance following acute exercise.
Within this literature, there is also a hint that exercise could have
positive effects on creativity.
Gondola (1986, 1987) found gains in participants’ ideational
fluency after aerobic running or dancing, and Netz, Tomer, Axel-
rad, Argov, and Inbar (2007) found similar results for aerobic
walking, regardless of participants’ fitness history. Steinberg et al.
(1997) measured people’s flexibility in generating unusual uses for
common objects
after they had participated in aerobic exercise or
slow rhythmic stretching. Both activities led to greater flexibility
compared with watching a 20-min video on rock formations.
Unfortunately, the authors of this study did not determine whether physical
activity facilitates ideation or a geology video suppresses it.
These creativity effects occurred after sustained periods of ex-
ercise, often aerobic. Asking people to take a 30-min run to
improve their subsequent seated creativity would be an unhappy
prescription for many people. Thus, the current research examined
the more practical strategy of taking a short walk. In the General
Discussion, we consider possible mechanisms by which the cre-
ativity effect takes hold.
No comments:
Post a Comment