8 ms·
Why Walking Helps Us Think
- chippy 12y agoI find walking incredibly useful when programming - for those moment where a bit of lateral thinking is required, to think outside the box a little box, or step out of the function and look at things anew. As the article states, it's not very good at helping you solve a particular logic problem though.
- dllthomas 12y agoYou're a fire hazard. Do your thinking inside your box. Edited to add: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-09-09/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-09-09/
- tracker1 12y agoHey, the box is there for a reason. I like thinking inside of it. I feel safe in there. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Red_vs._Blue http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Red_vs._Blue
- chippy 12y agoOh I spend most of my time thinking in the box. I find that when I'm out walking I can see that box more clearly - I think that's part of the "out of the box" thinking.
- Nav_Panel 12y agoI agree. I can recall a few relevant instances when I was working on my OS (for a class). I would get stuck on a problem (sometimes design related but also sometimes debugging), give up for the evening and head home. By the time I'd walked halfway across the football field, the answer would come to me. Not sure if it was the walking or the fresh air, but this happened at least twice throughout the 7-week project.
- eastbayjake 12y agoIt's been a summer for walking at The New Yorker -- the author mentions Adam Gopnik's piece, but David Sedaris also wrote in June about his obsession with FitBit: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/30/stepping-out-3 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/30/stepping-out-3
- lukifer 12y agoI've found that this synergizes well with a standing desk: it becomes trivial to pace for a few moments while thinking, and then jump right back in.
- mhurron 12y agoWalk farther, then all the ways that people can interrupt you go down.
- jrapdx3 12y agoI've tried out just about every chair/stool made for the purpose and none satisfactorily fit my body's construction. I keep thinking I might have to invent something that works for me. Meanwhile I make do with an adjustable stool that's sorta OK at a desk height greater than usual office furniture. I don't sit too long, getting up to stand or move around pretty often. Not sure how much this has to do with problem solving vs. dealing with malformed bones and warped body structure. Maybe it just shows seeking comfort is overrated. Though I do like to walk and enjoy the scenery, the hectic crowds, or especially the wonderful companionship of my wife. If inspiration strikes, I'll try to hang on to it, though I rarely do. Amazing how often the idea recurs when I can at last recapture it.
- saraid216 12y agoThe thing about standing desks is that you're supposed to stand at them.
- jrapdx3 12y agoStand, of course, but manufacturers produce a number of seats or stools designed to make it easy to transition from standing to seated to standing. Makes sense. For some tasks standing all day at one spot would be too tiring. This furniture is not cheap, obviously designed and sold for serious purposes. There is a market, so I imagine there's reason for it.
- bramgg 12y agoI love walking. I enjoy long purposeful walks, but I also often find myself pacing around the house when I hit a creative stump. That's when I get my best ideas.
- freehunter 12y agoI've been trying to find long, purposeless walks, but invariably I always end up walking a circuit, so the purpose becomes "finish the circle and get back to work". And I feel that takes something away from using a walk to get away from stress, instead it becomes one more task I have yet to finish. There's an arboretum here in town but it's a drive to get there. I wish I lived next door to a forest.
- chippy 12y agoAny coffee shops or bars that sell coffee on the way? Or perhaps a bus route where you walk to the bus stop and get the bus back?
- freehunter 12y agoThere's an idea. I'll look into that, thanks.
- recalibrator 12y agoIf going on a nature walk with a coffee in hand, people need to be prepared to hold on to the empty cup until they get to a garbage can.
- noir_lord 12y ago> Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. As a keen cyclist I find the opposite I do my clearest thinking on a bike not while walking (with the proviso I'm on a quiet road). If I get really stuck on a problem I'll whip out for a quick 15 mile bike ride then if I solve it great and if not at least I feel more relaxed when I get back.
- tamersalama 12y agoAny experiences with a walking-desk setup anyone would like to share ?
- epaladin 12y agoMaybe some kind of AR workspace setup based on the new Samsung Gear VR would be feasible? Would look pretty crazy, and still might be a bit of a safety hazard, but it might work. I love standing desks but the closest I've been to a walking desk is trying to type while rolling the laptop cart through the datacenter. It kind of works.
- gwern 12y agoI've experimented a bit with a treadmill+laptop, but the first thing I tested was my spaced repetition performance, which went down while using the treadmill: http://www.gwern.net/Treadmill#treadmill-effect-on-spaced-repetition-performance-randomized-experiment http://www.gwern.net/Treadmill#treadmill-effect-on-spaced-re... So I'm not sure if I want to continue trying to use it or reserve the treadmill for winter when I can't take my usual daily walks.
- icelancer 12y agoI use one built out of an old treadmill and a plywood desk I made. Works fine enough though the motor overheats at about an hour, even when I use silicone spray on the track and a fan blowing on the motor. Treadmills aren't usually made to run for an hour at very slow speeds (1 MPH or less).
- diminish 12y agosoon google glass will ensure you can't think while walking neither.
- smacktoward 12y agoProgress!
- drostie 12y agoThis is an unusually verbose article even for the New Yorker. The TL;DR appears to be simply "increased heart rate," with no real citations to prove it. And it just sounds a bit absurd. Increased heart rates don't have a reliable correlation with creative thought. You can increase your heart rate by watching a scary movie or pornography, but nobody that I know of reports those being prime thinking times. Moreover, you can raise your heart rate even more by running, but people generally think of running as more exhausting and less intellectual than walking. Meanwhile lots of good creative thinking happens in a bathtub, which is sedentary. I would have guessed that walking helps us think because it gets us to a position where our problem isn't directly in front of us, nor are our distractions. But I was really hoping to instead get some science about that sort of thing. I mean, I guess it's cool to know that there are some mental tests which some people are slightly worse at when walking, and the Nabokov quote at the beginning was quite interesting even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the article, but I'm just left... unsatisfied.
- matthewowen 12y agoYou objections seem to spring from an incorrect tl;dr. I quote: "The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa" "Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander" "Where we walk matters as well." The validity of those claims might be up for debate too, but the article in no way claims that it is "simply" increased heart rate. The answer only "begins with changes to our chemistry".
- drostie 12y agoThe reason that I'm optimizing those sentences away is, they aren't pulled back into the central question. I take as my central question: why is walking better than sitting for some kinds of intellectual problems? That first quote doesn't connect to that question (it says that there may be differences between different sorts of locomotion), nor does the second quote (which doesn't distinguish walking from sitting), nor does the third (it tries to distinguish city-walking from garden-walking but not walking from sitting). Heart rate was the only thing I saw which actually seemed to answer that question of, "why does walking help us think?" as opposed to "how should I walk, so as to think better?" But my point was more, "I was hoping for some science," really.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoI'm all for walking and find it does help my thinking, creative and otherwise, but the line in the article "On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated" is an example of extremely bad faux-science writing. There is no mention of how many uses either group thought of, so that number creates the impression of meaning while actually being completely meaningless. Was the average number 5? Then doubling it is probably meaningful. Was the average number 25? Then it's barely a one sigma effect. It's also worth asking how representative the various tasks mentioned are. I have never personally been faced with a problem where thinking of many novel uses for an every-day object has come up, and I can't offhand think of any real-world creative task that such an exercise maps to (although maybe if I go for a walk one will come to me...) Likewise, finding a word that unites a group of terms is something I've never done, even though I'm a published poet. There's nothing in the article that suggests walking is particularly special, either. Canoeing and sailing are also things I find helpful for thinking. I can speculate as to why (something about engaging the body and mind in a way that is just distracting enough to free the mind and let it see alternative paths forward?) but on the other hand, my cat often wakes me up a bit before I'm quiet ready to get out of bed, and that ten or fifteen minutes of lying in bed not quite awake are also very productive, mentally. Talking to people about such things, or even reading the comments here, these are not rare phenomena. So studies of this kind should not confine themselves to walking/not-walking but look at a wider range of activities and ideas.
- phkahler 12y agoThere is a relationship between walking and EMDR http://www.emdr.com/general-information/what-is-emdr.html http://www.emdr.com/general-information/what-is-emdr.html Since walking involves alternate motion of opposite sides of the body, and was part of the activity someone was doing when EMDR was discovered. Some think that alternately engaging the two sides of the brain causes an increased activity in the corpus callosum, or something along those lines.
- rem7 12y agoOr just jump in the shower if I'm too lazy to walk
- doctorstupid 12y agoWalking occupies the body and thus releases the mind.
- Shivetya 12y agoI walk daily at work, years ago my work published two different "hearth walks", quarter mile and full mile. The first is easy, walk through entry and do the full length of the deck. Having done this for years people comment when they don't see me. Its a quick little breather that serves two purposes, it lets me soak in nature - the deck is bordered by dense woods - and I get a reprieve from my desk. throw in a good heartbeat app and I can push myself to 120+ beats for a good burst of morning and afternoon energy.
- pbw 12y agoI think having no immediate stressors is what frees the mind. Part of our brain loves stimulation but to function with massive amounts of stimulation our brain has to work hard to surpress our impulses. Walking is just one way to do that. Another is to just know all the time that things are going to be fine.
- bpodgursky 12y agoTotally unscientific, but my personal theory is that exposure to different visual / audio stimulation can make the brain jump to different paths when working on different problems, and taking a walk makes me experience more stuff than I will by sitting in the same chair all the time. The brain doesn't seem to work well in a vacuum, so if you spend all day staring at the same four walls, it might let you focus, but there's not a lot of entropy coming in to make you think in different ways.
- melipone 12y agoIt's funny that dogs love to go on a walk too. All the different smells are so stimulating for them.
- vijaykumar13 12y agoWow no wonder, I feel good and relaxed after the morning walk around the park, looking at the green plants and happy people.
- anakha 12y agoNassim Taleb of Black Swan book fame talks at length about being a flâneur and how long walks help him think through ideas. He wrote an essay on the topic also but it no longer appears to be available from his web site.