Walking helps you think. And it would be enough to think of the ancient Greek peripatetic philosophers, followers of Aristotle, to believe it. Now, perhaps it is legend that Aristotle taught him his lessons by walking, but it is not legend that walking stimulates brain activity and thought, as recent scientific research has shown. Indeed, research and experiments have shown that during and after motor activity, even a moderate one such as walking, abilities improve of verbal and spatial memoryOf Attention e new connections are formed between brain cells. The reason is quite intuitive and all in all trivial: moving, even just walking for a walk and even more with other more intense activities, requires the heart to pump more blood, and this means that more oxygen also reaches all the tissues in our body, including the brain. More blood and more oxygen change the chemistry of our body, stimulating the growth of molecules in the brain that produce new neurons and those that create connections between them. More neurons and more synapses mean in simple terms too less decay of brain tissue and more volume of the hippocampus, which is a brain region critical for memory.
Not only does walking help you think, but the way we move our bodies can affect the nature of our thoughts, and viceversa. It is common experience, but also scientifically proven, that music is a form of sporting “doping”, that high-tempo music (technically with high bpm) induces you to run faster and allows you to better tolerate fatigue. The same goes for the relationship between walking and thinking. Indeed, when we walk the rhythm of our thoughts follows and accompanies that of our steps, and our inner speech affects the movement of the legs. The reason is that walking is a completely natural activity, that we don’t have to think about, that doesn’t require conscious attention, and this allows the mind to wander, especially regarding creative thinking, associations of ideas, innovative ideas and intuitions. Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz of Stanford University have made a real study on link between walking and creative thinking by subjecting their undergraduate students to a series of tests on creative, associative, lateral and even analytical thinking. The tests were conducted in 3 conditions: sitting at a table, walking on a treadmill and walking outdoors, in nature, and the results leave no room for doubt: the tests were passed by 95% of the students when they went out for a walk , by only 50% when they were indoors or sitting. But there’s more: if walking outdoors stimulated and encouraged creative and associative thinkingThis was not the case with analytical thinking, when students had to provide one and only one well-defined answer. As if wandering in space and time, even with the mind, was counterproductive to analytical thinking.
Then also where walking helps to thinkand one also proves it study conducted by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina: In a test conducted on memory capacity, people who walked in a grove performed better than those who walked in an urban environment full of stimuli. The thesis is that spending time in nature, even walking or doing moderate activities, rejuvenates and invigorates mental resources which otherwise are exhausted by the excess of stimuli of an urban and city environment. This is because attention is a limited resource, and if we have to pay it to cross the street, not bump into other pedestrians or look at the shop windows, we cannot use it to elaborate new thoughts.
Credits photo by Alexander Wendt from Pexels
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