The physical benefits of walking are many: cardiovascular exercise improves circulation, helps maintain stable weight, good digestion, stronger bones, reduces the risk of various diseases, in all, walking is great for keeping healthy.
But you already knew that!
What you might not know, but you have sensed intuitively, is that walking is a way to access higher levels of creativity.
1. It’s in our DNA
Why we became bi-pedalled is unknown.
According to some anthropologists, walking on two feet, may be one of the primary actions that shifted our collective human destiny, separating us from our primate cousins.
The fossilised footprints dating back 3.7 million years found in east Africa in the mid 1970s are proof that even before we had stone tools we had stood up and walked on two feet.
In effect, for millions of years we travelled on foot.
Some anthropologists believe that we became creative from a need to learn as we moved across the planet.
Walking meant we had to learn new environments, new edible plants, new danger. We encountered new challenges, so we solved problems.
Learning and solving problems helped us expand our cognitive ability. It may even be that the reason we are creative is because we stood up, freed our hands, and started making stuff.
We have been making stuff ever since. Walking and making is in our evolutionary DNA.
As Jon Lineen puts it walking has ‘influenced and accelerated humanity’s creative capacity and thus our evolution’.
2. We are starting to prove it
In 2014 Stanford University behavioural scientists conducted four experiments to test the effects of walking on creativity, when compared to sitting.
The 176 participants were given tasks used to gauge aspects of creativity.
They looked at three main areas associated with creativity: divergent, convergent, and analogical thinking.
Divergent thinking is the ability to generate a high quantity of possible solutions and ideas. In this area those walking or who had just walked generated 81% more ideas than those who had been sitting.
Convergent thinking is the ability to discern best solutions out of those ideas. While the increase in this area for those walking was not as high, there was still a 20% increase compared to the sitters.
When it came to generating analogies, that is, similes, metaphors and complex comparisons, everyone who walked came up with at least one novel and complex analogy compared to only half of those seated.
Their results confirmed what many have known for a long time: walking increases our ability to generate ideas and often quality analogies.
3. If they did it…
From Virginia Woolf to Simone de Beauvoir; from the Bronte sisters to Charles Dickens to Friedrich Nietzsche; from Georgia O’Keefe to Daphne du Maurier, from Einstein to Steve Jobs; philosophers and writers; thinkers of many different moulds, have been recorded as being partial to a stroll, predisposed to a promenade, wild about a walk in the park.
Why?
Even before the Stamford experiments proved its benefit on creativity, walking has been an activity attributed with giving us access to a state of ‘flow’ as identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Flow is when we stay in a state of heightened focus, like when we do something we love, and we have some skill in it so that we feel so present, and it seems that time stands still.
Flow is associated with creativity and improvisation.
It requires focus but it’s not so challenging that we can’t think about anything else. Like walking.
Most of us are proficient enough walkers to be able to let the mind wander while we wonder and think, thought after thought percolating effortlessly. While part of our brain is engaged in keeping us upright and putting one step in front of the other, another part is making connections, associations and imagining.
As Rebecca Solnit writes:
‘Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts’
Walking is in our developmental DNA. Walking slows us down enough to let our thoughts travel through unchartered spaces in our minds where they become inklings, ideas and even solutions, where patterns emerge and perspective gain clarity.
How it happens and why is still quite a mystery, but we have some proof that walking improves our ability to be creative.
Through the ages some have known this intuitively.
Today, you might know this too.