Agi's Alley @agidius - Tumblr Blog

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pseudomantis

What the fuck

astarlingdiscovery

It's a yellow bittern! They are very creechur.

[x] [x]

bogleech

Nature is incredible, you can really see just at a quick glance how these evolved to speak together in rhyming riddles while performing a spooky dance, laughing at you because they're The Wee Creatures Three and you will Never Get Their Key.

ceanothusspinosus

foot to head ratio off the charts

#love these little weirdos

manuciruja

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

manuciruja

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

smadsel

would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.

smadsel

that’s not the whole flag, now is it

manuciruja

hey staff what the fuck

villainessbian

hey staff don't you think you're being too on-the-nose

shrodingers-catgirl

HEY STAFF DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING TOO ON-THE-NOSE

tieflingkisser

lesbianslimefriend

here's where to find it on windows 10

twiststreet

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

ramramartist

Ran on the first day of summer

mockva

Man notices an Eagle eyeing the fish he just caught

mexicain-sans-frontiers-v2

the-davest-of-uncles

*gets back to the nest* baby you are NEVER gonna believe how i got this fish

anarchopuppy

straight up 'unforchin it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. my circumstants

yorgen-sh

yokowan

instant stagnation girl panel 1 doing nothing panel 2 still doing nothing but looks exhausted for some reason

kimwexlersfeetandtoes

never not enamored with how stark the tone shifts between pov characters is in better call saul. jimmy and kim are in a legal drama, mike is in a spy thriller, nacho is in a mafia city ad,

kimwexlersfeetandtoes

his 10 lvl crook life.....

kholdseid

theinfiknight

Love when you try to take a screenshot but fuck up the timing of the volume down lock button combo and are left sitting there with slightly softer music and a black screen and you just have to sit there looking at your reflection on the locked phone and contemplate your failure for a bit

#love it when I mistime it the other way and get a nice screenshot of the thing I wanted and also the volume of my earbuds at the time

viewtiful-kim-deactivated202105

Hamlet adaptation where Hamlet is a vlogger and all his soliloquies are breakdowns he uploads to YouTube

animatedamerican

… I am unironically here for this

oldfilmsflicker

this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life

kabesattic

This is - legitimately - my favourite delivery of Shakespeare I have EVER seen (and I have seen some good-ass productions yo, in the Globe Theatre itself even). Like seriously, even though the words are unchanged, he’s stripped away ALL of the archaic pretense and assumed grandeur of ~presenting the bard~ that makes even the most wildly talented of actors and innovative of productions inherently inaccessible to a modern audience. Like, they’re still great, they can still communicate the message and (some) of the nuance, but they’re still always a step removed from being identifiable to any viewer’s lived experience. They’re still always reciting 15th century poetry. But this guy? This guy is like, screw iambic pentameter, to hell with being precious about the material, HOW WOULD AN ACTUAL PERSON SAY THIS SHIT?

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

So yeah, this shit post? I love it. Deeply and sincerely.