have a horse-tastic sunday folks!
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if i look back, i am lost
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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have a horse-tastic sunday folks!
Flemeth
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)
it just really shouldn’t be controversial to suggest that little girls who were forcibly masculinized in their youths did not in fact gain any degree of privilege from that act of miscategorization, let alone a sort of permanent miasma of maleness that follows them forever into their womanhood no matter what they do
like it’s not a hypothetical for me is the thing. I know and have known these girls, I’ve loved them dearly. I’ve seen the ways that being forced to try to perform boyhood wore heavily on them and broke their spirits, I’ve seen the way they get to bloom and thrive once they shed it. when you talk about her like she’s contaminated by what was actually a quite traumatizing youth, I’m picturing a real person I care for and she’s not who you make her out to be. it’s so fucking cruel I struggle to even wrap my mind around it
"it's just stress" oh thank god, it's just the silent killer that slowly kills you, perfectly harmless, no need to worry
if i had a time machine, first thing id do is obviously kill hitler. even if germanys fascism was caused by complex socioeconomic factors itd still be worth doing for the bit. then id go even further back to the early 20th century and become one of those old timey bank robbers, when they had names like 'pretty boy floyd' and 'baby face nelson' and id make sure people knew me as 'sweet baby ray' just to see how it fucks with barbeque sauce history
this summer we WALK IN A RANDOM DIRECTION and NEVER STOP
i’m a lover. AND a biter
Explaining tumblr to anyone
image: tweet which has been photoshopped.
him: ok so you've never met them... and you're friends online bc you like the same [porn]? me: ok well you're making it sound weird and it's not
the original poster's name has been cropped out. end ID.
this too shall pass but the fuck was that for
OHHHH i get it now i was supposed to die as a child
*Despite her protestations to the contrary, it is clear that Minthara is afraid.* It's ok to be afraid. Given Orin's powers it would be madness not to be.
"stop with the oppression olympics" has always been a thought terminating cliche, but i feel like around a decade ago it at least sometimes tended to be used in response to those sort of completely incoherent Privilege Calculation Charts and the discussions they sparked, which didn't really deserve any meaningful engagement anyway because its a useless way of trying to understand power and harm.
now it is almost exclusively used by people who categorically reject the idea that there are groups who are observably more at risk than others, and you should consider it a red flag whenever you see it. anyone trying to convince you that we're all on equal footing is not ever doing this to uplift anyone and develop a sense of community. it's the move of someone who just wants to abdicate their own responsibility for understanding their relative social position, because they have built up too much of their identity on being, in all circumstances, the victim.
Cold take but all languages are beautiful actually. Every single one. Every single human language on earth is a collection of stories interwoven into the very fabric of the words that are spoken.
“Oh but this language sounds scary-“ have you heard a child speak it while pointing at a butterfly?
“Oh but this language sounds silly-“ have you heard someone’s grandma recite a recipe with such practiced ease it comes off as poetry?
“Oh but this language is really weird-“ and yours isn’t? Everyone’s language is weird, dumbass, it came free with your fucking humanity.
Every tongue that is spoken is a work of art. Every language a unique window into the world.
Isn’t it wonderful?