15 ms·

Walking increases spontaneous fluctuations in the brain

265 points by d4rkp4ttern 5y ago

afarrell 5y ago
It would be nice if there was an app that a could let a bunch of people tune in to an audio stream hosted by a phone within 30 meters. Then, a professor could lead walking lectures without having to turn around and shout. This would also be useful for city tours, outdoor dance parties, and churches with hard-of-hearing parishoners.
- mathgeek 5y ago
  I imagine that a silent disco setup would provide this rather well. Might need one with a better form factor for walking outside, but the technology for broadcasting locally to headsets has existed for a while now. Museums likely have these deployed already.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    The trouble is that you need to distribute headsets to people, hope they don’t get broken, and then collect them back. If there is both an android and iPhone app, then you can let people use their own earbuds. You’d merely need to tell people “open Soapbox and pick #gymnosperms. We’ll set out on the trail on 8 or so minutes”
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      And then you have to deal with people who don't have earbuds with them. Distributing headsets is a lot more reliable
      - dpcx 5y ago
        Until you think about people that have devices that don't use headphone ports, or don't have bluetooth on their phones (both, IIRC, are very small counts, but potentially a problem). Not to mention if you're sharing headsets that, unless they're all coming in plastic bags suggesting that they're new from the factory, everyone else's germs are all over them.
    - Godel_unicode 5y ago
      > headsets to people, hope they don’t get broken, and then collect them back Many museums do this already for their self-guided audio tours, it's pretty old tech but it works super well.
- totetsu 5y ago
  I think this is planned for a future version of bluetooth.
- pomian 5y ago
  Brilliant idea. We have thought of that before, when in a museum, where you know there is so much more history and information than just a label. Surprised no one had done it yet.
  - OneTimePetes 5y ago
    Could we geocode the lecture-snippets, so the statements persist at location? That way, one could advance at ones own pace. Or map it to a route of ones own design, while keeping the pace..
    - asoneth 5y ago
      I recall projects that did something like this. Besides museums and historic neighborhoods, one memorable application was at a graveyard. Reenactors read letters and diary entries written by the deceased. The closer you were to the writer's tombstone, the louder their audio. From far away all you heard was a combination of barely audible voices. I believe the relevant terms are "audio walks" or "phonoscapes".
    - Lukas_Skywalker 5y ago
      I have created something similar for a museum. I placed bluetooth beacons behind the exhibits, and when visitors approached them the app automatically switched to the "page" for this exhibit. The app was able to display texts, videos, images and audio files.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    A lot of tour buses catering to speakers of foreign languages do exactly this.
  - wil421 5y ago
    The museum would lose revenue because you wouldn’t have to pay to rent their audio devices.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
- atatatat 5y ago
  ...that's AM/FM etc radio.
  - sidpatil 5y ago
    Yeah, this is totally doable with walkie-talkies. The biggest drawbacks I can identify would be audio quality and interference.
    - Godel_unicode 5y ago
      Within a distance you can walk, it should be pretty easy to find a band with minimum interference even in a crowded metro. Also, quality won't be as much of an issue as range. There are pretty low limits on how much power you can use on the FM bands without a license. Source: I drove all over a crowded metro in the early 2000s with one of those fm transmitters for playing audiobooks to my shitty car stereo. 3 station presets was enough for the whole area.
  - jt2190 5y ago
    Yes. I think I’ve even seen this implemented. Certainly some drive-in theaters in North America worked like this. There would be signs telling you to tune your car radio to such-and-such frequency to hear the film audio. Here’s a picture of one: https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3186/2718300357_ec1b9f3f45_z.jpg https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3186/2718300357_ec1b9f3f45_z.j...
    - Ancapistani 5y ago
      These still exist :) https://kendadrivein.com/faqs https://kendadrivein.com/faqs
- bigdict 5y ago
  Could be accomplished with BLE broadcasting.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    This app indicates that existing Android and iPhones can already act as receivers. Can you (or anyone more familiar with the tech) verify that is true? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27294649/i-want-ble-broadcast-in-android-smart-phone https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27294649/i-want-ble-broa...
    - bigdict 5y ago
      Receivers of BLE broadcast packets? Yes, that's how devices are discovered. It's just that you can also stuff those packets with a payload and transfer data (one way) without a connection.
  - soylentgraham 5y ago
    I've tried using bluetooth in a museum exhibition before and noise from wifi and other equipment rendered it pretty hopeless... but may have been the modules I was using... Flawless at home/office. Useless on site
- birbs 5y ago
  Couldn’t you use Zoom for that?
  - xur17 5y ago
    Zoom isn't really setup for something like this. Ideally you want something that is one to many (broadcast), is low latency (since the participants would be able to hear the professor talking both in person and over the app), and is reliable.
    - asdff 5y ago
      Conference call
      - xur17 5y ago
        Latency on that would be even worse than a zoom call.
- y4mi 5y ago
  So basically a mobile hotspot with a webrtc webpage on which your headset microphone gets relayed? Participants can scan the QR-Code to join the hotspot WLAN and get directly redirected to the webrtc session
  - afarrell 5y ago
    That sounds even better than what I was thinking of because you wouldn’t need people to download an app. Also, ESPN and Sky could have a version of that which it could license to broadcast the audio of a football game at bars or pubs
  - bilekas 5y ago
    This is actually a really good idea. The hotspot could just locally serve the client and server side. Some pre connected devices could be distributed also for the elderly or the disabled. Then you could package it with a "creation studio" to create your own version for tourguides, museums, etc. Resell some hardware also as per requirements. You've got yourself a nice little business that seems useful for the business and client.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Oh boy, if ever there was a time to invoke the Dropbox comment! Seriously though, I think it's an under-explored area. Several years ago[^] I thought it could be a fun way to do an ephemeral social networking type thing on the tube; then something a bit similar ('YikYak'?) became briefly popular (in the UK at least) but just using GPS or whatever for location, still with a central server. I think there's plenty of interesting things you could do ephemerally, P2P over Bluetooth or mobile WLAN. ([^] edit: that's not some weird claim to fame, I mean it in the sense of I've long thought this should be good, but then, I've not bothered to do anything about it, and neither it seems has anybody else, so...)
    - rogerkirkness 5y ago
      Knowing Dropbox is like 10M lines of code now always teaches me the importance of not pretending things can in fact be built in a weekend.
- douglaswlance 5y ago
  You could do a group call where everyone else is on mute.
- api 5y ago
  Could be done with WiFi direct on phones that support it. The fact that WiFi didn't originally ship with (and in many cases still does not support) simple P2P with nearby devices is just unbelievably stupid. Apple still insists on their own stupid standard instead of the actual standard too, at least on iOS devices. (I think Macs can be coaxed into the standard mode, but Macs are real computers.)
  - webmaven 5y ago
    I am lookng forward to SDR-capable hardware falling in price to the point that it becomes the default for most devices. At that point, not only do wireless protocols become field-upgradeable (including more exotic options like UWB), but decentralized mesh-network protocols become installable as well.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  Why not a 'tour guide portable FM transmitter' (less than $100) and a bunch of dollar store FM radios?
  - afarrell 5y ago
    Because few people already carry FM store radios in their pocket, so relying on them requires solving a logistical problem.
    - athenot 5y ago
      True, but the FM solution could really be low latency, unlike the digital rube goldberg machine equivalent.
    - rahimnathwani 5y ago
      It will be more reliable than any solution based on either (i) a battery-powered web server, or (ii) mobile internet. And latency will be constant and near-zero. I suspect that's why a couple of the use cases you mentioned (city tours, dance parties) are usually addressed with FM radio and not apps. Perhaps there's a way to do this with a modern bluetooth stack. But none of the offline messaging apps I've seen (Bridgefy, Meshenger) support group audio.
      - PeterisP 5y ago
        What's wrong with the reliability of mobile internet? I'd expect that in the target environment (e.g. some building in the middle of a city) mobile internet would be like 100% reliable, that would be a problem only in remote wilderness areas.
        rahimnathwani 5y ago
        The things I had in mind: 1. I sometimes participate in Zoom/Meet calls when walking around SF. Not often enough to have a representative sample, but I know I've had a non-zero number of 1-2 second drops. 2. Students are often on a budget, and may have data caps on their mobile plans. Running out of data towards the end of the month might be OK if you're mostly in your room or the library. But it might impede you from participating in a lecture if you're walking out of wifi range.
- mro_name 5y ago
  Kinda near-range walkie, nice. Bluetooth transmission should do, shouldn't it?
- Graffur 5y ago
  Is this an audio guide available at lots of museums?
- bserge 5y ago
  Something like SoundSeeder (works via WiFi)
- t0mbstone 5y ago
  We already have this. Just have the professor start a Zoom call on their phone and have everyone else join it using their phones while wearing headphones and their microphones muted.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    I think the interesting bit is tying a stream to a (moving) location, and not having to scan QR codes, type in codes, or URLs to join.
- pc86 5y ago
  You just invented poorly implemented radio.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  You need zero-latency for this to be comfortable if participants will be in partial-hearing range a portion of the time. An analog solution (e.g. "walkie talkie") would work well, though.
- kerng 5y ago
  I think Crowdcast is what you are looking for.
- rurban 5y ago
  Horrible idea. I want it silent while walking around solving a complicated problem. It's only partially the walking, it's also the silence which brings out the best solutions to think over. But a good idea is to walk along a very loud river, the noise also clears your brain. Random talkers certainly not.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Your comment struck me as odd but then I thought maybe you live in the US or a country like that with a language largely used by everyone. In France and Belgium and Europe it's really common for museums to offer audio guides. Which are either headset with a radio receiver that plays whatever the radio emitter is cycling or a headset with a small media player that plays tracks when you enter a room or switch a button.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  That would be short range FM-Radio.
mercy_dude 5y ago
Whenever I see an article like this in one of the most activist so called news outlet, I can’t stop myself asking - what is their motive for pushing these? May be to increase residential real estate pricing? I mean sure, walking is good - I don’t need salon to tell me it is. But question rather is why are mainstream outlets like salon rather pushing these narratives of benefits of walking lately? The activism real estate these outlets have are valuable and limited so the motives are always something I question.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Are you really saying that salon is a front for big-real estate?
  - Florin_Andrei 5y ago
    It must be the opposite to their own political dogma, so "it must be evil".
- asutekku 5y ago
  Because it generates clicks and clicks generates ad revenue. A longer answe is that a healthy lifestyle is more and more trendy and people want to know, why does walking help them also mentally. This is as they want to find an easy answer to their problems, such as stress. After reading the article, they will then share the article with their social circle with a message claiming ”This is so true! After I started walking I started feeling so much better”, which generates more clicks, since the other people want to get help too. It’s seriously not that complicated.
  - mercy_dude 5y ago
    I disagree it is just for click revenue. Outlets like salon and NYTimes don’t need to worry about click revenues, their ad capital has been growing more than ever. My cynicism comes from the same angle when I see every other week some health benefits from drinking coffee coming out of some studies pushed by the same outlets. Surely it has nothing to do with a billion dollar industry funding and pushing benefits of drinking coffee through these outlets right.
ralfn 5y ago
Does any proof exists that humans think 'rationally' even when they are solving essentially deductive puzzles? Im not an expert about neurological stuff, but did anyone discover any hardware in our brains that does something beyond 'induction'? Is this notion of divergent/converged thinking based on anything objectively measurable? How do I make a machine that tells me if a given thought is convergent or divergent? Or is this all just cultural constructs similar to believe systems? I'm especially tempted to be extra skeptical with anything that attributes a particular metaphysical superiority to human thinking over machines or animals. Is that skepsis an example of convergent or divergent thinking? I'm sorry if my question make an actual expert cringe. But perhaps it can be an opportunity to enlighten simple minds like me further...
- Jensson 5y ago
  The evidence is that a group of humans can extremely reliably solve plenty of different classes of deductive puzzles, with error margins as close to 0 as you can find in the universe. Without that ability modern society wouldn't be possible.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    The question is whether deduction is implemented in hardware or in software (that is: is it neurological or cultural).
- krona 5y ago
  To make the case for irrationality, you must make the case using truth, objectivity and reason, and therefore you're implicitly committed to them.
- OneTimePetes 5y ago
  I think what we call rationality is the most likely (aka most active path, when some cost timer in the brain runs out), one can restart it and train it for long periods, but usually its attention is fleeting, because attention is expensive and should be on important things, like food, group, booty and nothing.
- 5y ago
bob229 5y ago
Salon is garbage
FigurativeVoid 5y ago
We have had a few walking related stories on HN the past few weeks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268136 was interesting.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  must be some submarine pr from big walking
  - ruined 5y ago
    clearly the left media is trying to develop a vanguard of hardcore urban communists with calm minds, good cardiovascular health, and detailed knowledge of the local geography. quite sinister if you think about it
    - hkt 5y ago
      The revolution will be pedestrianised
mshaler 5y ago
“Only ideas won by walking have any value.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
spookybones 5y ago
I’ve noticed it’s much harder to walk in my city and generate ideas because there are spontaneous loud sounds and random visuals compared to when I lived more rurally. I’m not sure if there is a way I can reduce this … dark sunglasses and noise-cancelling headphones maybe, but that seems distracting in its own way and potentially dangerous.
- the-dude 5y ago
  We have got parks.
  - spookybones 5y ago
    Unfortunately the only park I’m near is very small, and people frequently blast music at it. I could commute to a larger park, but that wont work for daily walks.
ProjectArcturis 5y ago
That article had a ton of links, but I couldn't find any support for the real factual claim that walking increases spontaneous brain fluctuations. Would love to see that paper. For the most part, spontaneous brain fluctuations are studied in the context of fMRI. Since you can't walk in an fMRI, I'd like to know how they actually measured anything.
- abandonliberty 5y ago
  I think the article/salon is optimized for clickbait. It's hard to boil down the concept into a couple words. Dr. Huberman mentions 'Optic flow', likely the same concept: >When you move through space, whether walking, running, or driving, you’re in what’s called optic flow. Things are moving past your retina at varying speed, depending on how fast you’re moving, but your brain has knowledge of how fast you’re moving. It cancels out the movement in a way that says, okay, these objects aren’t moving past me. I’m moving past them. All of this boils down to a set of circuits in the brain and body that make it so that when we’re moving through space, it has this property of relaxing us and giving us a sensation that is somewhat rewarding. And so what this translates to is at least once a day, get out and move. Optic flow doesn’t have to be fast. It can be at slow speeds. Ideally, it’s variable speeds, but this, I believe, underlies the sensation, the both calming and invigorating and kind of replenishing feelings that we get from taking a bike ride or a long run or swimming, for that matter. https://findingmastery.net/andrew-huberman/ https://findingmastery.net/andrew-huberman/
- superbaconman 5y ago
  Every movement our bodies make will show up in the brain in some way or another. This study for example started breaking down brain signal "noise" and basically found that the brain and body are super tightly coupled. The feeling of the pants against your legs and the wind in your hair is gonna show up in a brain scan, so of course you're gonna see brain stimulation while walking. > When researchers studied the spontaneous activity of more than 10,000 neurons in the visual cortex of mice, they were surprised to find it to be rich with information about the animals’ seemingly irrelevant movements. https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-areas-encodes-body-movements-20191107/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-ar...
jvanderbot 5y ago
My mental model is that the brain has some kind of pseudorandom idea generator. Like any pseudorandom generator, it needs a wide array of inputs. I bet walking around provides all kinds of muscular and sensory inputs, as well as increased blood flow and engagement of most parts of the brain which is precisely what is required for pseudorandom creativity.
- 65 5y ago
  Why would it be pseudorandom? If the brain is natural, wouldn't it just be random?
  - bigdict 5y ago
    Randomness is an abstraction for "we don't know how it works".
    - tompazourek 5y ago
      So... Random = Pseudorandom?
      - dagw 5y ago
        I mean, maybe. It's a rather philosophical question in the end. Can there be true randomness in the universe or is everything in some way deterministic, but it's just that the underlying system is so complex that it can never be computable. And is a deterministic, but uncomputable, system actually deterministic?
        ginko 5y ago
        FWIW, the hidden-variable theory, that the universe is deterministic and we just lack all information to predict it, has been considered and rejected by physicists. https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-do-physicists-really-believe-in-true-randomness/ https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-do-physicists-re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
The three times I have my best ideas are: walking, showering, or that state when I'm drifting between awake/asleep.
- mtgx 5y ago
  I think all of these might have to do with the brain's alpha waves. You get into a "relaxed" mode where much of your brain activity is suppressed, which I guess means your brain's resources can be focused on the thing you need to solve most at the time.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  I also get ideas reading. Which, really, makes me a bad reader because I get distracted.
  - arrow7000 5y ago
    Yes! I get this too. It can make reading books quite difficult. I imagine it's because reading is a much "quieter" brain activity than what I do the rest of the time, which is spending time on dynamic, interactive systems: i.e. my phone and computer, so the background "noise" has a chance to surface without being dismissed by something more dynamic and interesting.
- e40 5y ago
  I agree with the first two, but for me the latter doesn't produce much. I will literally get a shower if I'm working on a hard problem (and a walk is not convenient). So many times I solve the problem, sometimes after having sat at the computer for hours trying to solve it.
justinzollars 5y ago
In college I took a lot more random walks. I'm going to try to build those into my day.
vadansky 5y ago
I wonder if any of the benefits of walking carry over to biking? I've basically given up walking to always biking but after reading "Deep Work" I'm starting to feel like I'm missing out by not rambling around and zoning out.
- pkghost 5y ago
  I'm curious about this, too. I love biking for the distance you can travel, the wind, the strength it builds, but I do have a distinct taste for walking, though I'd have to think about it more to have any ideas as to why. P.S. a) It's easier to dawdle when you walk, to enjoy the particulars of the places you pass; biking is so fast by default that you have less time to savor details. b) Biking tends to be higher intensity exercise, which may actually take necessary energy away from mind-wandering; in fact, my mind wanders much less while biking than walking, so I'd guess this is the case, but maybe this isn't true for everyone. Moreover, biking forces external attention more regularly as you encounter pedestrians and traffic at a higher rate
  - arrow7000 5y ago
    I've found this too. I love biking and find it exhilarating, but it doesn't let my mind wander in the same productive way it does on a walk.
qez 5y ago
> So while my students are out on their walks, they might be mind-wandering more than in the classroom, but this is a good thing To be a bit flippant, isn't this obvious? Who thinks that mind-wandering is a bad thing? Teachers, I guess. How is it possible to be a philosopher without mind-wandering? > In 2014, a new study showed that walking decreased rational and linear thinking and increased divergent thinking and imaginative mind-wandering The only thing problematic here is the decrease in "rational" thinking. I think in context it means something closer to rigid, concentrated, and well-defined (ie - uninspired).
brainmapper 5y ago
Oh my this article is painful to read on so many levels. It treats as important many phenomena that are either inevitable or uninteresting. (1) The fact that engaging in one task distracts attention from another task is obvious. People derive inspiration from taking a shower, swimming, biking, playing music and yes, walking. All these tasks have something in common, they are different from whatever task one was doing beforehand, and they require less cognitive focus than many of the things that we do for work. (2) The fact that noise in the brain is 1/f is not particularly interesting. Many natural systems have 1/f amplitude spectra. This pattern occurs commonly in multi-scale systems (the brain being one example). (3) The fact that many aspects of brain activity (both signal and noise) are affected by aging, consciousness, mental experiences, memory and so on is not particularly interesting. Assuming that one is not a dualist, every distinct mental state must be reflected by some unique pattern of brain activity. (4) Scientists know quite a bit about where these “spontaneous fluctuations” come from. Many of them are a consequence of changes in blood pressure, which varies substantially and randomly over time (within some finite band, of course). Others are caused by mental states that are difficult to measure and model, and so are unknown to the experimenter. But just because something is noise from the perspective of the experimenter doesn’t mean that it is noise from the perspective of the brain.
m0zg 5y ago
Salon, so probably fake news, but anecdotally, I've had a lot of good ideas while just walking outside (or in the shower, which I suspect could have the same effect). Basically when I'd get stuck on something hard at work, I'd lock my machine, leave my phone behind, and walk around the building a few times. Usually that was enough to figure out how to get unstuck at least, if not outright solve the problem. Try this, if you're able, I'm pretty sure it's not just me. It's kind of aggravating that this is not considered to be "work" by most people. I'd say those are some of the highest value parts of my day.
pazimzadeh 5y ago
Isn't writing the pen going for a walk?
giuliomagnifico 5y ago
Yes I agree with all the article! Sometimes also if I can’t find a solution for something regarding the computer, I go out to make a walk and usually I find the solution thinks while walking, usually with the help of the phone while walking.

265 points by d4rkp4ttern 5y ago

It would be nice if there was an app that a could let a bunch of people tune in to an audio stream hosted by a phone within 30 meters. Then, a professor could lead walking lectures without having to turn around and shout. This would also be useful for city tours, outdoor dance parties, and churches with hard-of-hearing parishoners.

mathgeek 5y ago
I imagine that a silent disco setup would provide this rather well. Might need one with a better form factor for walking outside, but the technology for broadcasting locally to headsets has existed for a while now. Museums likely have these deployed already.
- afarrell 5y ago
  The trouble is that you need to distribute headsets to people, hope they don’t get broken, and then collect them back. If there is both an android and iPhone app, then you can let people use their own earbuds. You’d merely need to tell people “open Soapbox and pick #gymnosperms. We’ll set out on the trail on 8 or so minutes”
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    And then you have to deal with people who don't have earbuds with them. Distributing headsets is a lot more reliable
    - dpcx 5y ago
      Until you think about people that have devices that don't use headphone ports, or don't have bluetooth on their phones (both, IIRC, are very small counts, but potentially a problem). Not to mention if you're sharing headsets that, unless they're all coming in plastic bags suggesting that they're new from the factory, everyone else's germs are all over them.
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    > headsets to people, hope they don’t get broken, and then collect them back Many museums do this already for their self-guided audio tours, it's pretty old tech but it works super well.
totetsu 5y ago
I think this is planned for a future version of bluetooth.
pomian 5y ago
Brilliant idea. We have thought of that before, when in a museum, where you know there is so much more history and information than just a label. Surprised no one had done it yet.
- OneTimePetes 5y ago
  Could we geocode the lecture-snippets, so the statements persist at location? That way, one could advance at ones own pace. Or map it to a route of ones own design, while keeping the pace..
  - asoneth 5y ago
    I recall projects that did something like this. Besides museums and historic neighborhoods, one memorable application was at a graveyard. Reenactors read letters and diary entries written by the deceased. The closer you were to the writer's tombstone, the louder their audio. From far away all you heard was a combination of barely audible voices. I believe the relevant terms are "audio walks" or "phonoscapes".
  - Lukas_Skywalker 5y ago
    I have created something similar for a museum. I placed bluetooth beacons behind the exhibits, and when visitors approached them the app automatically switched to the "page" for this exhibit. The app was able to display texts, videos, images and audio files.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  A lot of tour buses catering to speakers of foreign languages do exactly this.
- wil421 5y ago
  The museum would lose revenue because you wouldn’t have to pay to rent their audio devices.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
atatatat 5y ago
...that's AM/FM etc radio.
- sidpatil 5y ago
  Yeah, this is totally doable with walkie-talkies. The biggest drawbacks I can identify would be audio quality and interference.
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    Within a distance you can walk, it should be pretty easy to find a band with minimum interference even in a crowded metro. Also, quality won't be as much of an issue as range. There are pretty low limits on how much power you can use on the FM bands without a license. Source: I drove all over a crowded metro in the early 2000s with one of those fm transmitters for playing audiobooks to my shitty car stereo. 3 station presets was enough for the whole area.
- jt2190 5y ago
  Yes. I think I’ve even seen this implemented. Certainly some drive-in theaters in North America worked like this. There would be signs telling you to tune your car radio to such-and-such frequency to hear the film audio. Here’s a picture of one: https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3186/2718300357_ec1b9f3f45_z.jpg https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3186/2718300357_ec1b9f3f45_z.j...
  - Ancapistani 5y ago
    These still exist :) https://kendadrivein.com/faqs https://kendadrivein.com/faqs
bigdict 5y ago
Could be accomplished with BLE broadcasting.
- afarrell 5y ago
  This app indicates that existing Android and iPhones can already act as receivers. Can you (or anyone more familiar with the tech) verify that is true? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27294649/i-want-ble-broadcast-in-android-smart-phone https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27294649/i-want-ble-broa...
  - bigdict 5y ago
    Receivers of BLE broadcast packets? Yes, that's how devices are discovered. It's just that you can also stuff those packets with a payload and transfer data (one way) without a connection.
- soylentgraham 5y ago
  I've tried using bluetooth in a museum exhibition before and noise from wifi and other equipment rendered it pretty hopeless... but may have been the modules I was using... Flawless at home/office. Useless on site
birbs 5y ago
Couldn’t you use Zoom for that?
- xur17 5y ago
  Zoom isn't really setup for something like this. Ideally you want something that is one to many (broadcast), is low latency (since the participants would be able to hear the professor talking both in person and over the app), and is reliable.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Conference call
    - xur17 5y ago
      Latency on that would be even worse than a zoom call.
y4mi 5y ago
So basically a mobile hotspot with a webrtc webpage on which your headset microphone gets relayed? Participants can scan the QR-Code to join the hotspot WLAN and get directly redirected to the webrtc session
- afarrell 5y ago
  That sounds even better than what I was thinking of because you wouldn’t need people to download an app. Also, ESPN and Sky could have a version of that which it could license to broadcast the audio of a football game at bars or pubs
- bilekas 5y ago
  This is actually a really good idea. The hotspot could just locally serve the client and server side. Some pre connected devices could be distributed also for the elderly or the disabled. Then you could package it with a "creation studio" to create your own version for tourguides, museums, etc. Resell some hardware also as per requirements. You've got yourself a nice little business that seems useful for the business and client.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Oh boy, if ever there was a time to invoke the Dropbox comment! Seriously though, I think it's an under-explored area. Several years ago[^] I thought it could be a fun way to do an ephemeral social networking type thing on the tube; then something a bit similar ('YikYak'?) became briefly popular (in the UK at least) but just using GPS or whatever for location, still with a central server. I think there's plenty of interesting things you could do ephemerally, P2P over Bluetooth or mobile WLAN. ([^] edit: that's not some weird claim to fame, I mean it in the sense of I've long thought this should be good, but then, I've not bothered to do anything about it, and neither it seems has anybody else, so...)
  - rogerkirkness 5y ago
    Knowing Dropbox is like 10M lines of code now always teaches me the importance of not pretending things can in fact be built in a weekend.
douglaswlance 5y ago
You could do a group call where everyone else is on mute.
api 5y ago
Could be done with WiFi direct on phones that support it. The fact that WiFi didn't originally ship with (and in many cases still does not support) simple P2P with nearby devices is just unbelievably stupid. Apple still insists on their own stupid standard instead of the actual standard too, at least on iOS devices. (I think Macs can be coaxed into the standard mode, but Macs are real computers.)
- webmaven 5y ago
  I am lookng forward to SDR-capable hardware falling in price to the point that it becomes the default for most devices. At that point, not only do wireless protocols become field-upgradeable (including more exotic options like UWB), but decentralized mesh-network protocols become installable as well.
rahimnathwani 5y ago
Why not a 'tour guide portable FM transmitter' (less than $100) and a bunch of dollar store FM radios?
- afarrell 5y ago
  Because few people already carry FM store radios in their pocket, so relying on them requires solving a logistical problem.
  - athenot 5y ago
    True, but the FM solution could really be low latency, unlike the digital rube goldberg machine equivalent.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    It will be more reliable than any solution based on either (i) a battery-powered web server, or (ii) mobile internet. And latency will be constant and near-zero. I suspect that's why a couple of the use cases you mentioned (city tours, dance parties) are usually addressed with FM radio and not apps. Perhaps there's a way to do this with a modern bluetooth stack. But none of the offline messaging apps I've seen (Bridgefy, Meshenger) support group audio.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      What's wrong with the reliability of mobile internet? I'd expect that in the target environment (e.g. some building in the middle of a city) mobile internet would be like 100% reliable, that would be a problem only in remote wilderness areas.
      - rahimnathwani 5y ago
        The things I had in mind: 1. I sometimes participate in Zoom/Meet calls when walking around SF. Not often enough to have a representative sample, but I know I've had a non-zero number of 1-2 second drops. 2. Students are often on a budget, and may have data caps on their mobile plans. Running out of data towards the end of the month might be OK if you're mostly in your room or the library. But it might impede you from participating in a lecture if you're walking out of wifi range.
mro_name 5y ago
Kinda near-range walkie, nice. Bluetooth transmission should do, shouldn't it?
Graffur 5y ago
Is this an audio guide available at lots of museums?
bserge 5y ago
Something like SoundSeeder (works via WiFi)
t0mbstone 5y ago
We already have this. Just have the professor start a Zoom call on their phone and have everyone else join it using their phones while wearing headphones and their microphones muted.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  I think the interesting bit is tying a stream to a (moving) location, and not having to scan QR codes, type in codes, or URLs to join.
pc86 5y ago
You just invented poorly implemented radio.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
You need zero-latency for this to be comfortable if participants will be in partial-hearing range a portion of the time. An analog solution (e.g. "walkie talkie") would work well, though.
kerng 5y ago
I think Crowdcast is what you are looking for.
rurban 5y ago
Horrible idea. I want it silent while walking around solving a complicated problem. It's only partially the walking, it's also the silence which brings out the best solutions to think over. But a good idea is to walk along a very loud river, the noise also clears your brain. Random talkers certainly not.
johnchristopher 5y ago
Your comment struck me as odd but then I thought maybe you live in the US or a country like that with a language largely used by everyone. In France and Belgium and Europe it's really common for museums to offer audio guides. Which are either headset with a radio receiver that plays whatever the radio emitter is cycling or a headset with a small media player that plays tracks when you enter a room or switch a button.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
That would be short range FM-Radio.

mercy_dude 5y ago

Whenever I see an article like this in one of the most activist so called news outlet, I can’t stop myself asking - what is their motive for pushing these? May be to increase residential real estate pricing? I mean sure, walking is good - I don’t need salon to tell me it is. But question rather is why are mainstream outlets like salon rather pushing these narratives of benefits of walking lately? The activism real estate these outlets have are valuable and limited so the motives are always something I question.

bawolff 5y ago
Are you really saying that salon is a front for big-real estate?
- Florin_Andrei 5y ago
  It must be the opposite to their own political dogma, so "it must be evil".
asutekku 5y ago
Because it generates clicks and clicks generates ad revenue. A longer answe is that a healthy lifestyle is more and more trendy and people want to know, why does walking help them also mentally. This is as they want to find an easy answer to their problems, such as stress. After reading the article, they will then share the article with their social circle with a message claiming ”This is so true! After I started walking I started feeling so much better”, which generates more clicks, since the other people want to get help too. It’s seriously not that complicated.
- mercy_dude 5y ago
  I disagree it is just for click revenue. Outlets like salon and NYTimes don’t need to worry about click revenues, their ad capital has been growing more than ever. My cynicism comes from the same angle when I see every other week some health benefits from drinking coffee coming out of some studies pushed by the same outlets. Surely it has nothing to do with a billion dollar industry funding and pushing benefits of drinking coffee through these outlets right.

ralfn 5y ago

Does any proof exists that humans think 'rationally' even when they are solving essentially deductive puzzles? Im not an expert about neurological stuff, but did anyone discover any hardware in our brains that does something beyond 'induction'? Is this notion of divergent/converged thinking based on anything objectively measurable? How do I make a machine that tells me if a given thought is convergent or divergent? Or is this all just cultural constructs similar to believe systems? I'm especially tempted to be extra skeptical with anything that attributes a particular metaphysical superiority to human thinking over machines or animals. Is that skepsis an example of convergent or divergent thinking? I'm sorry if my question make an actual expert cringe. But perhaps it can be an opportunity to enlighten simple minds like me further...

Jensson 5y ago
The evidence is that a group of humans can extremely reliably solve plenty of different classes of deductive puzzles, with error margins as close to 0 as you can find in the universe. Without that ability modern society wouldn't be possible.
- webmaven 5y ago
  The question is whether deduction is implemented in hardware or in software (that is: is it neurological or cultural).
krona 5y ago
To make the case for irrationality, you must make the case using truth, objectivity and reason, and therefore you're implicitly committed to them.
OneTimePetes 5y ago
I think what we call rationality is the most likely (aka most active path, when some cost timer in the brain runs out), one can restart it and train it for long periods, but usually its attention is fleeting, because attention is expensive and should be on important things, like food, group, booty and nothing.
5y ago

bob229 5y ago

Salon is garbage

FigurativeVoid 5y ago

We have had a few walking related stories on HN the past few weeks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268136 was interesting.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
must be some submarine pr from big walking
- ruined 5y ago
  clearly the left media is trying to develop a vanguard of hardcore urban communists with calm minds, good cardiovascular health, and detailed knowledge of the local geography. quite sinister if you think about it
  - hkt 5y ago
    The revolution will be pedestrianised

mshaler 5y ago

“Only ideas won by walking have any value.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

spookybones 5y ago

I’ve noticed it’s much harder to walk in my city and generate ideas because there are spontaneous loud sounds and random visuals compared to when I lived more rurally. I’m not sure if there is a way I can reduce this … dark sunglasses and noise-cancelling headphones maybe, but that seems distracting in its own way and potentially dangerous.

the-dude 5y ago
We have got parks.
- spookybones 5y ago
  Unfortunately the only park I’m near is very small, and people frequently blast music at it. I could commute to a larger park, but that wont work for daily walks.

ProjectArcturis 5y ago

That article had a ton of links, but I couldn't find any support for the real factual claim that walking increases spontaneous brain fluctuations. Would love to see that paper. For the most part, spontaneous brain fluctuations are studied in the context of fMRI. Since you can't walk in an fMRI, I'd like to know how they actually measured anything.

abandonliberty 5y ago
I think the article/salon is optimized for clickbait. It's hard to boil down the concept into a couple words. Dr. Huberman mentions 'Optic flow', likely the same concept: >When you move through space, whether walking, running, or driving, you’re in what’s called optic flow. Things are moving past your retina at varying speed, depending on how fast you’re moving, but your brain has knowledge of how fast you’re moving. It cancels out the movement in a way that says, okay, these objects aren’t moving past me. I’m moving past them. All of this boils down to a set of circuits in the brain and body that make it so that when we’re moving through space, it has this property of relaxing us and giving us a sensation that is somewhat rewarding. And so what this translates to is at least once a day, get out and move. Optic flow doesn’t have to be fast. It can be at slow speeds. Ideally, it’s variable speeds, but this, I believe, underlies the sensation, the both calming and invigorating and kind of replenishing feelings that we get from taking a bike ride or a long run or swimming, for that matter. https://findingmastery.net/andrew-huberman/ https://findingmastery.net/andrew-huberman/
superbaconman 5y ago
Every movement our bodies make will show up in the brain in some way or another. This study for example started breaking down brain signal "noise" and basically found that the brain and body are super tightly coupled. The feeling of the pants against your legs and the wind in your hair is gonna show up in a brain scan, so of course you're gonna see brain stimulation while walking. > When researchers studied the spontaneous activity of more than 10,000 neurons in the visual cortex of mice, they were surprised to find it to be rich with information about the animals’ seemingly irrelevant movements. https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-areas-encodes-body-movements-20191107/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-ar...

jvanderbot 5y ago

My mental model is that the brain has some kind of pseudorandom idea generator. Like any pseudorandom generator, it needs a wide array of inputs. I bet walking around provides all kinds of muscular and sensory inputs, as well as increased blood flow and engagement of most parts of the brain which is precisely what is required for pseudorandom creativity.

65 5y ago
Why would it be pseudorandom? If the brain is natural, wouldn't it just be random?
- bigdict 5y ago
  Randomness is an abstraction for "we don't know how it works".
  - tompazourek 5y ago
    So... Random = Pseudorandom?
    - dagw 5y ago
      I mean, maybe. It's a rather philosophical question in the end. Can there be true randomness in the universe or is everything in some way deterministic, but it's just that the underlying system is so complex that it can never be computable. And is a deterministic, but uncomputable, system actually deterministic?
      - ginko 5y ago
        FWIW, the hidden-variable theory, that the universe is deterministic and we just lack all information to predict it, has been considered and rejected by physicists. https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-do-physicists-really-believe-in-true-randomness/ https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-do-physicists-re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

The three times I have my best ideas are: walking, showering, or that state when I'm drifting between awake/asleep.

mtgx 5y ago
I think all of these might have to do with the brain's alpha waves. You get into a "relaxed" mode where much of your brain activity is suppressed, which I guess means your brain's resources can be focused on the thing you need to solve most at the time.
slothtrop 5y ago
I also get ideas reading. Which, really, makes me a bad reader because I get distracted.
- arrow7000 5y ago
  Yes! I get this too. It can make reading books quite difficult. I imagine it's because reading is a much "quieter" brain activity than what I do the rest of the time, which is spending time on dynamic, interactive systems: i.e. my phone and computer, so the background "noise" has a chance to surface without being dismissed by something more dynamic and interesting.
e40 5y ago
I agree with the first two, but for me the latter doesn't produce much. I will literally get a shower if I'm working on a hard problem (and a walk is not convenient). So many times I solve the problem, sometimes after having sat at the computer for hours trying to solve it.

justinzollars 5y ago

In college I took a lot more random walks. I'm going to try to build those into my day.

vadansky 5y ago

I wonder if any of the benefits of walking carry over to biking? I've basically given up walking to always biking but after reading "Deep Work" I'm starting to feel like I'm missing out by not rambling around and zoning out.

pkghost 5y ago
I'm curious about this, too. I love biking for the distance you can travel, the wind, the strength it builds, but I do have a distinct taste for walking, though I'd have to think about it more to have any ideas as to why. P.S. a) It's easier to dawdle when you walk, to enjoy the particulars of the places you pass; biking is so fast by default that you have less time to savor details. b) Biking tends to be higher intensity exercise, which may actually take necessary energy away from mind-wandering; in fact, my mind wanders much less while biking than walking, so I'd guess this is the case, but maybe this isn't true for everyone. Moreover, biking forces external attention more regularly as you encounter pedestrians and traffic at a higher rate
- arrow7000 5y ago
  I've found this too. I love biking and find it exhilarating, but it doesn't let my mind wander in the same productive way it does on a walk.

qez 5y ago

> So while my students are out on their walks, they might be mind-wandering more than in the classroom, but this is a good thing To be a bit flippant, isn't this obvious? Who thinks that mind-wandering is a bad thing? Teachers, I guess. How is it possible to be a philosopher without mind-wandering? > In 2014, a new study showed that walking decreased rational and linear thinking and increased divergent thinking and imaginative mind-wandering The only thing problematic here is the decrease in "rational" thinking. I think in context it means something closer to rigid, concentrated, and well-defined (ie - uninspired).

brainmapper 5y ago

Oh my this article is painful to read on so many levels. It treats as important many phenomena that are either inevitable or uninteresting. (1) The fact that engaging in one task distracts attention from another task is obvious. People derive inspiration from taking a shower, swimming, biking, playing music and yes, walking. All these tasks have something in common, they are different from whatever task one was doing beforehand, and they require less cognitive focus than many of the things that we do for work. (2) The fact that noise in the brain is 1/f is not particularly interesting. Many natural systems have 1/f amplitude spectra. This pattern occurs commonly in multi-scale systems (the brain being one example). (3) The fact that many aspects of brain activity (both signal and noise) are affected by aging, consciousness, mental experiences, memory and so on is not particularly interesting. Assuming that one is not a dualist, every distinct mental state must be reflected by some unique pattern of brain activity. (4) Scientists know quite a bit about where these “spontaneous fluctuations” come from. Many of them are a consequence of changes in blood pressure, which varies substantially and randomly over time (within some finite band, of course). Others are caused by mental states that are difficult to measure and model, and so are unknown to the experimenter. But just because something is noise from the perspective of the experimenter doesn’t mean that it is noise from the perspective of the brain.

m0zg 5y ago

Salon, so probably fake news, but anecdotally, I've had a lot of good ideas while just walking outside (or in the shower, which I suspect could have the same effect). Basically when I'd get stuck on something hard at work, I'd lock my machine, leave my phone behind, and walk around the building a few times. Usually that was enough to figure out how to get unstuck at least, if not outright solve the problem. Try this, if you're able, I'm pretty sure it's not just me. It's kind of aggravating that this is not considered to be "work" by most people. I'd say those are some of the highest value parts of my day.

pazimzadeh 5y ago

Isn't writing the pen going for a walk?

giuliomagnifico 5y ago

Yes I agree with all the article! Sometimes also if I can’t find a solution for something regarding the computer, I go out to make a walk and usually I find the solution thinks while walking, usually with the help of the phone while walking.