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✦ New Frontier Of Your Mind ✦
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Forty eight students, one treadmill.
They faced a blank wall and walked at a pace they chose.
Then came four minutes to name uses for an everyday object.
Walking answers ran about 60% ahead of sitting…
And 81% of them beat their own seated score.
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// Quick Check
First reaction?
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Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz ran this at Stanford.
Four experiments, on 176 people between them.
Some walked a treadmill indoors. Others went outside. One lot were pushed round in a wheelchair.
Walking was the bigger lever… though the open air added something of its own.
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// Brain Hack
Walk The Question
The gain sits in open questions. Those are the ones where many answers count, such as naming uses for a brick.
A puzzle with one right answer went the other way. Correct answers fell while walking, at p 0.03.
The lift also outlasted the walk. Those who walked and then sat down scored as well as anyone still moving.
| 01 |
Pick the open question. It wants options rather than an answer. |
| 02 |
Walk at a pace you would choose yourself, indoors or out. |
| 03 |
Give it four or five minutes, which is what the trials used. |
| 04 |
Say the ideas aloud, or into your phone. Your hands are busy. |
| 05 |
Sit down and write them up while the lift is still on you. |
Save the single answer problems for the chair. Those came out worse on the move.
↗ Source: Oppezzo and Schwartz, J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn, 2014
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// The Facts
| 176 |
people across the four experiments, students and adults. |
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| 81% |
of them beat their own seated score on ideas. |
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| 95% |
of walkers produced a fresh, high grade analogy, against 50% sitting. |
Short lab tasks, scored as uses for an object and as analogies. That 60% belongs to the treadmill run, and it is the average of each person’s own gain. Nine more people were dropped from an outdoor run. Nobody has tested whether any of this reaches work that takes a month.
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Walk for options. Sit for answers.
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Most creativity advice sells a workshop and a whiteboard.
I spend more than $20,000 a year on private research… the sort hedge funds pay for. Walled off from the public.
Then I look at which task the gain actually landed on.
My own version runs twice round the block before a draft. Ideas turn up on the second lap, and that is one man’s report.
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// Your Pick
Where do your ideas turn up?
Pick one and hit send.
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// Talk To Me
What question would you take for a walk?
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Stay primal,
Dex
Primal Code
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