pixel skylines
dirt enthusiast
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Stranger Things
Kaledo Art
Mike Driver
trying on a metaphor
tumblr dot com
Today's Document
oozey mess
we're not kids anymore.
#extradirty
Love Begins
Cosimo Galluzzi
JVL
if i look back, i am lost
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h
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@desinatural
destiel || out of the woods bridge
People are unfazed if you hate women but if you dislike dogs they assume you're a bad person
Tumblr users will read a post complaining about normalized misogyny and hyperfocus on your claim that it's ok to dislike dogs
istg the phandom is unhinged like no fandom I've been in before I feel like I could say "hmmm I wonder how many times dan and phil have each respectively blinked on camera since the start of their careers" and within an hour of me posting it someone would be like "oh actually phanniephreak1 has been keeping count since 2015, here's the link to it" and the information will be perfectly fucking accurate
And you picked that example because it's a real thing right?
oh my fucking god.
the author's barely disguised longing for a kinder world
the author's barely disguised hatred for capitalism
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)
[runs hands down face]
Okay this is the problem with sharing pop science stuff online and content aggregation accounts
The study is real, it's very easy to find by searching up the author's name + study. Give it a read yourself. It's written in a pretty accessible way imo.
Note that it does not put forward any explanations for why this effect happens, only that it does. In the conclusion it posits many possible reasons for why, and that it's most likely nothing to do with the specific action of walking, merely any semi automatic repetitive activity. They also acknowledge the study did not account for the social company the walkers were in, which is a pretty massive factor imo. Considering the conclusion brings up MANY alternative explanations and future experiment possibilities, it's decidedly not "killed every alternative explanation" like the tweet says. The actual paper ends like most scientific papers, listing alternative possible explanations, these are preliminary results, more research is needed, wider demographics of people need to be included, etc.
Another thing is the phrasing of these tweets are like red flags flapping in the wind to me. Any short form social media content that's 1. Pop science 2. Conveys absolute certainty 3. Ends with self improvement biohacking adjacent advice, should set off alarm bells.
Look at the implications that if the tweets were true, it would mean wheelchair users and people with mobility issues would be inherently worse at creative tasks.
So who is this person that's tweeting this, rephrasing this paper in a "helpful" way that is sure to get shares from people who really value being creative and are looking for any way to become more creative in their -
OFC ITS AN AI BRO
You wanna see what his recent articles look like?
CAN WE STOP GETTING BAITED INTO PLATFORMING GRIFTERS
Thank you! There were so many red flags in the first post's language. The original paper straight up says that the mechanisms weren't isolated! Also there is no single part of the brain responsible for creative idea generation, it involves communication between multiple brain networks.
Glad I wasn't the only person who looked at this and thought that it was weird to say this study is SO perfect when the way it's framed here directly implies that people who can't walk are inherently less capable of being creative than people who can.
Project Hail Mary (2026) + Letterboxd reviews
month starting on a monday we have no excuse guys lets get to work and lock the fuck in
yk its actually very chic and avant garde to start on tuesday the second
many claim theres nothing more subversive and revolutionary than starting on wednesday the third
making a collection
Wait I have more
Luke Skywalker put away his targeting computer to destroy the Death Star so I don't need AI to help me write an email.
garbonzo
happy pride month
[AFTER REVEALING VERY TELLING PERSONAL INFO] But don’t read into that. let’s move along
project hail mary time travel fic but it's stratt. and she has to do it again.
the thing here is of course that it worked. it worked, so she has to do it again. she has to send him again. she's not even going to save dubois and shapiro, she's not going to save yao and ilyukhina, she's not changing anything, it worked.
except maybe she adds some supplies, to the ship. increases the amount of food, includes some organic compounds. more painkillers. and maybe she spends more time in proximity to grace. not working with him, not talking to him, just doing what she'd be doing anyway, what she's already done, with him in her line of sight
and he notices, because that's his job. was his job. that was the point of him, to know her well enough to notice something has changed. and he doesn't say anything, isn't going to say anything, and in fact maybe nothing gets said. neither of them say anything and the lab explodes and she sends him to die and she waits and waits and waits and the beetles come back and he doesn't. and then she wakes up again on an aircraft carrier off the coast of china
and it WORKED. and she's here AGAIN, because maybe this is just what happens to you when you are the final signature on a mass extinction event. maybe this is her penance. maybe the world continues on without her, warmer and brighter, but she has to stay here in the worst of it and hold it all together.
she did better. she tried. she knew more. once she'd killed him, once he was out her reach, she could change more. maybe less people died. maybe different people died.
she looks at him as long as she's able and she packs him more vitamins and she doesn't say anything and the lab explodes and she waits and the crops fail and she waits and the wars start and she waits and the beetles come back and she wakes up again on an aircraft carrier and she rolls over to press her face into the mattress and she screams
the fifth time, she promotes him. six months from launch, that's when she wakes up, and she gets out of bed and gets presentable and walks to his door and says You're the primary science officer now. and he says What? No. No, it can't be me. and she says It has to be you. and she's not trying to do anything with her face, with her voice, but something must happen anyway because he looks at her and says You're sure? You're really sure? and she says It should have been you from the start. and he says Okay, let me– Gosh, okay, I have been awake five minutes and all I've eaten since yesterday is candy, but sure, yeah, I'll go on the suicide mission. Are you– We're getting breakfast, c'mon.
she packs him vitamins. she looks at him. he gets mildly obsessed with a different c-drama every time, somehow. maybe that's the linchpin, maybe he just has to make it through them all. she fills a harddrive with them. she tells him she's never been more sure of anything than she is of him. she waits and she waits and she waits. the beetles come back. he doesn't. she wakes up on an aircraft carrier.
she stops the lab explosion. she keeps him out of prison by the skin of her teeth. the beetles don't come back.
she lets the lab explode. she lets him hate her for killing him. she's going to be older than his alien, soon. she's on the aircraft carrier, watching him breathe, for six months. and then she's waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for twenty seven years. twenty seven years is too long for any neat little montages of her catching things before they fall. the weather isn't even the same. it depends who wins the war for the sahara. she's sisyphus, she's prometheus, she's atlas. she kills her only warmth and it gets colder and colder and colder until she wakes up again and there he is. maybe it's a gift. six whole months of him breathing
There were a lot of freshwater mussels on the 2021 US extinction list. They didn’t leave us with haunting recordings of them calling out for a mate they’d never meet, there were no drawings in vivid color. They were extremely important nevertheless and their loss is frustrating too. That’s why stream ecology and mollusks have always fascinated me. They were silent, stalwart little heroes and entire species were lost to pollution.
Yeah, I am bothered by extinct animals. Even this guy. They can’t all be thylacines.
swag won’t pay the bills but apparently neither will your degree
