Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was known for his walking meetings. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has also been seen holding meetings on foot. And perhaps you’ve paced back and forth on occasion to drum up ideas.
New research seems to back up the impulse. Experiments show that creative thinking improves when a person is walking—indoors or out—and for a time shortly thereafter.
It’s the act of walking itself, and not the environment, that is the main factor, researchers say. Across the board, creativity levels are consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting.
“Many people anecdotally claim they do their best thinking when walking. We finally may be taking a step, or two, toward discovering why,” write study authors Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford University in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
Other research has focused on how aerobic exercise generally protects long-term cognitive function, but until now, there did not appear to be a study that specifically examined the effect of non-aerobic walking on the simultaneous creative generation of new ideas and then compared it against sitting, says Oppezzo, a doctoral graduate in educational psychology.
A person walking indoors on a treadmill in a room facing a blank wall or walking outdoors in the fresh air produces twice as many creative responses as a person sitting down, one of the experiments finds.
“I thought walking outside would blow everything out of the water, but walking on a treadmill in a small, boring room still had strong results, which surprised me,” Oppezzo says.
The study also shows creative juices continue to flow even when a person sits back down shortly after a walk.
SITTING: The research comprised four experiments involving 176 college students and other adults who completed tasks commonly used by researchers to gauge creative thinking. Participants were placed in different conditions: walking indoors on a treadmill or sitting indoors—both facing a blank wall—and walking outdoors or sitting outdoors while being pushed in wheelchair—both along a pre-determined path. Researchers put seated participants in a wheelchair outside to present the same kind of visual movement as walking.
