Walking enhances creative thinking, a latest research by Stanford University shows.
The study conducted on 176 college students and other adults found that participants who walked rather than who sat or were sedentary had more creative responses on tests.
"Many people anecdotally claim they do their best thinking when walking," lead researcher Marily Oppezzo, PhD, of Santa Clara University said in a news release. "With this study, we finally may be taking a step or two toward discovering why."
"Asking someone to take a 30-minute run to improve creativity at work would be an unpopular prescription for many people," co-researcher Daniel L. Schwartz said in a news release. "We wanted to see if a simple walk might lead to more free-flowing thoughts and more creativity."
The researchers tested the participants' thinking through two experiments. The researchers included not more than 48 participants for both the trials. For the first test, the participants were told to sit alone in a small room at a desk facing a blank wall. They had to suggest alternative ways to use objects researchers named. For instance a respondent would say "doorknob" or "dollhouse" for the word "button".
Researchers made the participants take a word association test with 15 three-word groups like "cottage-Swiss-cake," for which the correct answer was "cheese." Participants repeated both the tasks with different sets of words first while sitting and then while walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall in the same room.
For the second experiment, some participants were made to sit for two different sets of the tests. Some had to walk during two sets of the test and some walked and then sat for the tests.
"This confirmed that the effect of walking during the second test set was not due to practice," Oppezzo said. "Participants came up with fewer novel ideas when they sat for the second test set after walking during the first. However, they did perform better than the participants who sat for both sets of tests, so there was a residual effect of walking on creativity when people sat down afterward. Walking before a meeting that requires innovation may still be nearly as useful as walking during the meeting."
Researchers stated that further studies are required to understand how walking enhances creative thinking. However, they say the physical act of walking might modify cognitive control of imagination.
"Incorporating physical activity into our lives is not only beneficial for our hearts but our brains as well. This research suggests an easy and productive way to weave it into certain work activities," Oppezzo said.
The findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
