People who walked instead of sat generated more novel and feasible ideas, reported Santa Clara University’s Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz of Stanford University.
More than 175 volunteers completed well-validated assessments of creative thinking:
Guilford’s Alternate Uses (GAU) for common objects, created by University of Southern California’s J. P. Guilford, to measure of cognitive flexibility and divergent thinking,
Compound Remote-Association test (CRA), developed by University of Wisconsin’s Edward Bowden and Mark Beeman of Northwestern to evaluate convergent thinking,
Barron’s Symbolic Equivalence Test (BSE), introduced by Frank Barron of University of California, Santa Cruz to calibrate the number of original insightful analogies generated for complex ideas.
Oppezzo and Schwartz coded analogies according to a protocol developed by Northwestern’s Dedre Gentner to measure:
- Quality, determined by:
o Level of detail (vague vs precise),
o Semantic proximity to the base statement (near vs far),
o Relational mapping to the base statement (low vs high).
Walking was associated with increased divergent creativity on Guilford’s Alternate Uses (GAU) and improved convergent thinking measured by Compound Remote-Association test (CRA).
This trend significantly increased when volunteers walked outside and these participants produced the most novel and highest quality analogies.
Walkers generated an average of 60% more creative ideas than when seated.
People who walked were more talkative, and their greater verbal output was associated with more valid creative ideas.
Participants generated more valid creative solutions when they walked first then sat for the next problem-solving session.
These effects may be explained by Attention Restoration Theory (ART), described by University of Michigan’s Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan as two types of attention:
–Involuntary attention, captured by inherently intriguing stimuli,
-Voluntary or directed attention, directed by cognitive-control processes.
They suggested that walking in natural environments renews directed attention and improves performances on difficult tasks even when no longer walking.
Even viewing photographs of nature was associated with improved performance on a complex backwards digit-span task.
In contrast, walking in an urban walk requires directed attention to avoid obstacles and dangerous situations, and provides less opportunity to restore directed attention.
After volunteers walked, they performed better on attentional function tasks on the Attention Network Test, developed by Jin Fan of Mount Sinai Medical School
Benefits of walking were not related to mood or weather conditions during four different seasons.
These studies validate Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation that “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” and walking in a natural setting before generating creative ideas.
Access to walking places in natural settings can enhance cognitive functioning and performance.
-*How effective have you found taking a brief walk outdoors before high-stakes discussions?
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