Walking Enhances Creativity

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Found a study that reports, walking enhances creativity.

Here is a summary:

  • People have noted that walking seems to have a special relation to creativity
  • Among the 48 participants, 81% improved their creative output when walking
  • If we ignore the criteria of appropriateness and non-repetition, a notable finding is that participants produced roughly 50% more total ideas when walking
  • While the long-term effects of aerobic activity may be general, the concurrent effects of mild physical activity were selective to divergent thinking
  • For Barron’s symbolic equivalence task (BSE), 100% of those who walked outside generated at least one novel high-quality analogy compared with 50% of those seated inside

TLDR: Walking had a large effect on creativity. Most of the participants benefited from walking compared with sitting, and the average increase in creative output was around 60%.

“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)

Photo by Liz Pullan Pattathy on Unsplash

Dileep Kushwaha Dileep Kushwaha's μ-blog.