... To Take A Walk

Give your ideas some legs - this was the brilliant title of a Stanford University research paper by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz. They were looking to see if there was a positive effect of walking on creative thinking.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1889, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”, & he knew a thing or two about great thoughts. Oppezzo and Schwartz state that the effect is not simply due to the increased perceptual stimulation of moving through an environment, but rather it is due to walking. Whether one is outdoors or on a treadmill, walking improves the generation of novel yet appropriate ideas, and the effect even extends to when people sit down to do their creative work shortly after.

Many would assume that walking outside in nature or along a beach would be the ideal place for such creative thinking, but interestingly the effect is not due to the external flow of stimulation that normally occurs with walking. Walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall improved creativity!

There is still more work to be done to try and isolate exactly what it is about walking that helps generate creative ideas, but in the mean time, get out from behind your desk and go take a walk.

(You can watch Marily’s TED Talk here.