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@bespectacled-ghost
mermaid internet cafe in an upside down boat, where the mermaids go to read fanfiction, and do whatever else they do on the internet. remote work, probably.
edit: 2 weeks later i realize the acronym should have been We Have A Lot of Exceptions to spell whale. oh whale.
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)
Since I just searched it for myself: TED Talk link and link to the actual study article for anyone interested in further details
Marguerite Duras - La femme du Ganges (1974)
We’re surrounded by middle-aged adolescents.
they should invent a body that feels normal to be inside of
One of the most annoying genres of people on the internet are people who act like they believe science is one single monolithic thing. Like, you'll see an article saying something like "scientists studying the movement of tectonic plates", and then in the comments there'll be several smug people saying "smh why are scientists doing this instead of finding a cure for cancer", like. Why would a geologist be doing that.
thank you Project Hail Mary for accurate glasses representation
stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.
À l'aventure (2008), dir. Jean-Claude Brisseau
i hate the word spicy can we bring back calling things erotic
“Ghosts are real” I can see how you could believe that
“Ghosts aren’t real” it’s very fair and rational that you believe that
“Ghosts aren’t real anymore” I’m about to hear a poem or very sad story
“Ghosts aren’t real yet” the fuck are you going to do
The Swan, No. 1, Hilma af Klint, 1915.
i'm not dying on this hill, I'm killing you on it actually.
i think avoiding everything is going to save me for real this time
I asked my kids if they’d prefer a secret garden or a secret library and my son shook his head and was like “I don’t trust the secret gardeners and librarians”
Me: what if there aren’t any gardeners or librarians.
Son: there’s always a librarian. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And it’s a garden, there has to be someone taking care of it or it isn’t really a garden.
Me:
Me: this was supposed to be lighthearted
Daughter: don’t trust the secret librarian.
Son: any librarian who hoards a library to themselves is hiding something.
Daughter: /nods seriously/
Me: why are you two talking as if from experience should I be concerned
The kids are right Jazz
Rocky: we built our spaceship by unifying every mind on the planet to create a super hive mind, pooling out collective knowledge and problem solving skills to come up with a plan.
Grace: we gave the scariest woman I've ever met two coffees every morning, an unlimited budget, and enough legal immunity to cuss out any world leaders she wanted to and boy did she want to.
