My personal assumption was, that walking, always was hunting for us as a species.
So to hunt for great ideas, one must connect the whole experience to what we did once to track down animals.
Look at the ground, when thinking about facts, chains of evidence, the origin of your problems. Walk known routes, when traversing well known approaches, take unknown routes, go off-road, when you are stuck with the usual ways.
Move your body, like you want your mind to move, but most important, do not self-observe while you do it. Forget about yourself, think only about the pray and the hunt.
It may just be superstitious. But it is how my subconscious tries to explain away my endless pacing.
I think it’s also just an activity that preoccupies a portion of your consciousness so that the subconscious can chime in. I get the same effect from mowing grass.
I get a similar effect from assembling lego sets. But I think walking works better - probably to do with the increased blood flow helping thoughts do their thing.
I agree 100% with this article - I do my best thinking when walking. It is the combination of light exercise that gets the blood moving (to the brain!), but not too strenuous that our minds must devote mental energy to the act of phsyical exercise, the oxygen from the fresh air, the feeling of _wandering_ and letting our minds wander.
Sometimes I struggle with deep thinking at my desk - its too quiet / stable. A little bit of distraction helps. Not to say I don’t think while at my desk, I just think walking is a great compliment and in our sedentary lives, better to think on our feet and leave the desk to implementation / coding.
We took in an older dog who had worked for 10 years at a hunting lodge. He’s incredibly well trained, doesn’t need a leash, doesn’t go wild or bark his head off under any provocation, and is happy going for long walks at a slow pace with random pauses.
I’ve lost track number and quality of excellent solutions I have come up with on these walks, including three provisional patents filed and a major contract saved. He’s earned increasingly indulgent treats.
I enjoy walking very much and I can understand that it might increase overall health and therefore the quality of one's thoughts. But I never have good thoughts while walking. My brain seems to be occupied in the state of walking itself. To get into deep thought I need to be sitting down with no distractions.
I have found that I have my best (and worst) ideas by changing mental states. For example I’m usually sober so when I’m intoxicated I usually have garbage ideas, but every now and then I think of something truly incredible/useful that I would never have had insight into sober. The same applies to being sleep deprived, it leads me into a different mental headspace where I can think differently than normal (though I try to avoid being sleep deprived cause it’s miserable)
There is something about sleep deprivation that makes me so vividly visually creative, things and image flow in my mind like they otherwise never do. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to trigger this any other way, so my only real creative moments tend to happen in the middle of the night where they aren't much use to anyone.
AFAIK sleep deprivation is discussed as a short term treatment of depression. I don't have any exclusive papers on hand (I'm not an expert), but if you are interested, please do your own research.
I'm guessing the added visuals come from hypnagogia, the state between waking and sleep where you can see imagery related to dreaming. I'm especially aware of this state because I have aphantasia and thus have no other method of seeing imagery in my head that doesn't pass through my retinas first. I've seen it when I thought I was awake, but later realize I wasn't fully awake. I also used to dabble in lucid dreaming, and spent a lot of time trying to ride the line between being awake and falling asleep. I'd suggest learning how to lucid dream, because that's another environment where you can be visually creative.
Very interesting you said that here. I regurarly walk aimlessly, I regurarly have this impression that i have to skip a day of sleep to be exceptionally productive, and i also used to be obseessed with digging large holes especially when i was younger and able to dig like that in my parents garden.
As a person that often exhibits characteristics and symptoms of depression (but has never been officially diagnosed), I find that staying awake for well over a day can clear my symptoms and reset my brain. I Scott Alexander has written an essay on this [1].
Recently I had to wake up at 3am and drive for a couple of hour. Something I never do. I had the strangest and most interesting insights! It was very similar to what you describe, a different mental state.
However, unfortunately I forgot many of the insights since I was so endlessly tired! Should have taken notes while driving with just 3h of sleep…
I've seen some people using a dictaphone for this kind of thing. I'm sure these days you can get a phone app that would even auto-transcribe your 3AM ramblings. :)
I don’t deny the link. I worked with a programmer/mathematician who would just start ambling about the office without any mission when deep in thought. I think that in his case the thinking actually drives the walking instead of vice versa.
>Oppezzo designed an elegant experiment. A group of Stanford students were asked to list as many creative uses for common objects as they could. A Frisbee, for example, can be used as a dog toy, but it can also be used as a hat, a plate, a bird bath, or a small shovel. The more novel uses a student listed, the higher the creativity score. Half the students sat for an hour before they were given their test. The others walked on a treadmill.
>The results were staggering. Creativity scores improved by 60 percent after a walk.
With everything in the news about reproducibility and doctored data, this seems too staggering to believe. Has this study been tried again?
> With everything in the news about reproducibility and doctored data, this seems too staggering to believe. Has this study been tried again?
Yep, totally! I'm a firm believer in the power of walking to increase thoughts, but whenever I read about studies like this a big red beeping alarm goes of in my brain that goes "replication crisis! replication crisis!"
There are other cases / studies that point to similar cognitive improvements through exercise.
There was a case study I read in the book linked below and it indicated that test scores improved dramatically when they had kids exercise before learning. It states that the improvements occurred regardless of physical ability as long as participants aimed to achieve their personal best during exercise.
I can't speak to the quality of the research but it is interesting and does not surprise me.
For more / additional information, check out Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. Like Jeremy DeSilva, the author of this Lithub article, Pang discusses Darwin and others who consistently walked to think.
The short story is that Pang went and read through the diaries of many notable thinkers, artists and creative types going back to the 19th century. Walking is one tool in the tool box. There are others, including getting enough sleep and taking naps.
Somewhat related, about 10 years ago I was in a tragic situation where someone I loved would be murdered but I couldn't speak out because of possible retaliation against my family.
I found myself compulsively walking randomly in the city every night for several nights. I would walk half way to a random destination only to change directions in 30 minutes convinced I was headed the wrong way forgetting the previous destination and repeatedly heading part way to successive random destinations. I did this night after night convinced there was a place I needed to go but in retrospect they were completely arbitrary and there was no purpose. I recently read the book Crime and Punishment and there is a scene a bit like this which suggests this may be in our DNA. To share further, I eventually spoke out (at some point you have to pick your poison) and the person did die suddenly and unexpectedly. The NYPD coroner eventually ruled out foul play, but the suspects the suspects left the country immediately after his death so it wouldn't have mattered.
Had you plotted my path you would say that it was the walk of a person who is "lost", yet I knew the city perfectly. However it was accurate to say I was hopelessly lost.
Changing subjects to lighten things up, I would assume there would be a metaphor for walking in way that parallels what your brain is doing when it is searching for a solution but I can't think of a word. Contemplative walks are certainly not erratic and discontinuous as described above. They are smooth and differentiable like a gradient descent.
condolences for your loss, an oddly fascinating story
I got into walking due to health reason, and there's a freedom seeking / search in it yes. The internal process of finding a path from idea to idea b is probably linked to the geometry of going from spot to spot.
another thing about walking, is that it's free, and every fork in the road means you get to decide where you feel like you want to go, and that, to me, seems a deep need for our minds.
I can lose my sense of location when walking in an area which I have driven around a lot but then try to walk. Same for an area which I try to walk at night when I have only been there previously during the day. Or the opposite.
I had that situation the first time I smoked weed as an adult while visiting Seattle. The funny part is that I kept rediscovering the fact that I had no idea where I was or where I was going, just the compulsion to walk.
Do you still believe they were murdered? Who were these people? Which country is performing possible assassinations in America? Why would they want to murder your family member? So many questions!
I wasn't sure if my comment was in the spirit of HN given it's overly personal and is now totally irrelevant to the lithub post. But since you asked -- before the PD's conclusion I told myself I would just accept whatever they report. But doing that has now left me with the lifelong burden of falsely accusing two people of murder.
The people were desperately poor in-laws. He was becoming cash poor but was still home equity rich and often commented that if he missed too many remittances he would likely be killed. Poisoning was rumored to be a common way to accelerate the inheritance process in his native country. When this is about to happen, the rumors start but everyone is afraid to do anything. I heard the rumor from a desperate family member but who then ended the conversation with "please don't say anything" and another implying they will take revenge. The in-laws came for a quick visit, he soon became so ill he ended up in the hospital and died, and then they quickly left. I have law enforcement buddies that mentioned poisoning can be extremely difficult to detect and prove and no one in his country could tell me names of poisons that were useful to his doctors. His doctors could not explain why he was so sick, and the coroner mentioned some health problems he found that could have killed him but implied that this conclusion was not strong.
I like walking and have walked around 2-5 miles a day for the last 7 or 8ish years. I also go without a phone and I go every day no matter what the weather is like in NY (hot summers and snowy winters).
There's a bunch of benefits and I'll continue doing it because I really do enjoy it and I do think it helps get clarity but I wouldn't treat it like a magical activity that's going to make you successful on its own in whatever field you're working in.
It's still very possible to feel the pressures of what a non-walker will experience such as procrastination and everything else we all know and experience.
But with that said, I do highly recommend giving walking a shot. It's a really relaxing way to decompress.
Nothing major, especially not by HN standards. Won best game design at one of the Global Game Jam sites a couple times & won a Ford smart mobility app design competition thing. Got a couple minor IndieCade type noms back in the day but didn't win
Would listening to music or a podcast or an audiobook interfere with the generation of ideas while walking? I love running and walking but I always feel like I have to have something playing in my ear during.
I started walking pretty obsessively during the pandemic as a way to get exercise that I used to get by bicycle commuting. Normally I would listen to podcasts during this time.
However a few times when I went without anything in my ears I noticed that I was starting to do real work while walking, and coming up with great solutions to difficult problems.
Now I limit podcasts just as I would with TV, video games or any other passive consumption. Nothing against consumption per se—a lot of ideas are seeded from outside—but in terms of creative work there's huge value to being left alone with ones thought. Anything mentally engaging will disrupt that.
i have the reverse experience. thinking interferes with my ability to listen. sometimes i am distracted by some important topic, work or personal or other, sometimes the story i am listening to is not engaging enough.
but then i spend most of the day working alone, so i have plenty of time to think. and for me the point of going for a walk and listen to a story is to stop thinking for some time and immerse myself into a different world.
A little. I walked on average 6.5 km daily since March, mostly to lose weight and relax, but I also had a lot of ideas regarding my hobby projects. Usually I listen to critical role or programming podcasts but I often stop listening and find out that 30 minutes went by and I have no idea what they are talking about cause I've been lost in thoughts.
Music seems to interfere much less but I'm mostly listening to instrumental. Also going to a new place takes focus so there's a big difference compared to going back.
I wonder if you can discern what type of problem a person is working on based on their path. For example if you give a person two good solutions to a problem but they can only pick one, would they naturally pace back and forth ?
I'm always trying to figure out the ideal way of walking and inputting information into a computer. I purchased a twiddler 2 chording keyboard, but didn't enjoy the concept of figuring out and learning the ideal key mapping (the defaults are terrible). Talking to myself seems silly, but I'm starting to think it might be the ideal way of getting ideas down.
Stopping and pulling out pen and paper was too disruptive. My ideal would be a walking stick with a few chording buttons that would key off different tasks, like start recording, or the next vocal word with be a voice command.
I've recently had some success with a GPD Micro PC, which fits in a back or jacket pocket and has a very thumb-typeable keyboard. It does require you to look at the screen, of course.
I've been using emacs through termux on my phone for this. It's surprisingly usable, but I'd rather have something that works seamlessly with walking.
I'm thinking something like a Zoom H1N field recorder might work for just recording all of my thoughts, but I'd really like it to be automatically transcribed, if not an interactive REPL environment.
I used to really enjoy walking when I lived somewhere with decent parks. I’d wait till early evening, when it wasn’t as hot and head down to one of the river walk near by and just keep walking and thinking about whatever. A little while after things got dark I would walk up into town and grab me something to eat.
I really miss late night walks, but unfortunately where I live now there aren’t so many great options. A few nature trails that close early as hell and are probably moderately unsafe at that time. There are some of paths in the residential area I live in now, but they’re relatively short unless I want to link up to a main road (cars zipping past you at whatever speed does not do well for thinking) and I’m not gonna risk getting harassed because I’m out walking too late.
Can we, for a second, remember that walking-makes-thinking-easier is a classic ADHD/ASD symptom?
And that both ADHD and ASD have been linked to creative, deep thinking?
Charles Darwin, the #1 example in this article, has been long suspected to have had Asperger's (which we classify as ASD today)[1]; and had exhibited symptoms of ADHD (one makes the other more likely)[2].
That link is only a surprise to neurotypicals. The answer is in plain sight:
"On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking: it's ADHD/ASD!”
EDIT: the word obsessive alone should give a clue were to look.
While walking might make thinking easier for everyone, it might be outright necessary for people with conditions like ASD/ADHD.
Please consider this before hitting that downvote button.
Disclaimer: I'm a person with ASD, ADHD, and a PhD
My first job out of college was in an office with a cubicle space floor. After a few weeks, I'd often pace around in a small space outside the main entrance when I'm thinking about a problem at work. People would ask if I'm ok. After ~3 months, I couldn't do any work in that office, so I quit.
I don't know if I have ADHD or not, but whenever I'm stuck at a coding problem or any sort of a creative problem (I do product design work as well), I have to walk. Otherwise I feel claustrophobic or about to have a panic attack. At the very least, I feel very agitated and have shortness of breath.
I'm coming to accept this about myself and after reading this article, I'll embrace walking as a mode for thinking and clearing my head more.
When I worked in an open floor layout, I used to set my working hours to 2PM-10PM, while most of my coworkers were on 9AM-5PM or so.
This gave me an overlap of 3 hours to exchange information with my colleagues, and 5 hours to actually work when the office emptied out.
If you are wondering whether you have ADHD or not, I made a website where symptoms are described from a first-person POV[1]. It's 200+ memes/comics I found on the Net, and a lot of text going in-depth about them.
If you relate to a lot of these, treatment can improve your life.
However, if you find that whatever makes your life easier - walking while thinking, fidgeting/doodling in meetings and phone calls, etc - just do it. It's your life. No need to play it on hard mode.
That the thinking I had when I started taking medication.
Do I need the meds? Irrelevant, and I already got through several decades of my life without them.
Do they make life easier? Absolutely.
Do I have a reason to keep making my life harder? Nope.
Another thought: all the resources and energy (including mental efforts) that are solvable by other, easily implementable means (from medication to changing the way you do things that works for you) — all that time and energy is stolen from your loved ones and people you care about.
Is the time spent doing Boring Difficult Task more valuable to you than time with your friends and family? Perhaps not. Then why choose to maximize the Boring Difficult time?
Fidget, walk, exercise, drink water, take breaks, take Monday off, hire a maid, order takeout, get therapy, get the right meds — it's your life, and you want to spend the most of it on things that matter.
And the time you spend trying hard to do things that are difficult for you is time and energy you can recover by taking the pain out of the process of doing them.
Hope you've found a company that values output rather than presence. I run a small company but given the last 18 months have had to come to grips with the idea that I might have to return to normal employment. Losing my freedom to go for a walk - or go to the gym to work through a problem - is a huge fear of mine.
I'm utterly convinced that long walks in the woods is my secret sauce and that without it I'll degrade as an engineer massively.
I switched jobs after COVID hit, and I realized just how much of the presumed benefits of office culture didn't really exist.
On paper, my previous employer only valued impact, and employees were able to choose their own schedule.
But work from home was explicitly discouraged in very clear terms, and I have been pressured to increase the overlap in office time with my team "for my benefit". That coming from people responsible for my performance evaluation and making hiring decisions felt a lot like "...or else".
It is also for my benefit, I guess, that I got a seat between my manager and my team lead during an office move (open-floor layout). I didn't mind, because they are both excellent people, but it feels a bit weird in retrospect.
We are all remote until 2022 at the very least; I don't expect mandatory office presence 40 hr/week ever coming back.
At some point, the CEOs will have to come to terms with office space being a sunk cost; and either downside, or provide more space for people who do come into the office.
Having in-person discussions with many people at once is still a killer app for physical offices; latency issues inherently make videoconferencing clumsy. But two days a week should suffice for that, at best.
Yes, it's literally one of the diagnostic criteria [1].
Pacing is a form of stimming. It's something that people with ASD might need to do to feel comfortable while thinking.
There are other forms of stimming that aren't as socially acceptable, but even this one is heavily restricted in a school setting.
A child that gets up to pace around the classroom to think better will be reprimanded; the option to take a walk outside is outright not available.
This is why raising awareness is important. It costs nothing to allow people who need to walk while thinking to do just that, yet the society disallows it.
This is why I am looking for a simple AR headset: so I can look at code while walking through the woods in my area. Just a simple translucent IDE is all I need.
I definitely feel that I am better at thinking when walking, but I also need to be looking at source code to get the details, otherwise I can only think about larger architecture.
The application of VR/AR technology to creative office work is generally underrated (with too much emphasis on games/entertainment). SimulaVR is making a portable Linux VR headset which will have an "AR mode" (using cameras), scheduled for Kickstarter release early next year: www.simulavr.com
We have plans to eventually release a proper AR headset also, though not on first iteration.
But it may not fit your face well. I use it without the nose piece, and with the temples down around the middle of my ears. The recurring "we didn't design it for you" China HMD fit problem. I've no idea if the EU release was identical. And some complain of its weight.
It's been variously available in Asia for years, more recently in the EU, but not yet in the US I believe (there was talk of maybe this year). In the US one has been able to ebay it from elsewhere, but US Customs duties have been highly varied and sometimes quite large.
This is sad. Just enjoy walking through the woods, all the different colors and use that as time to reflect. You can still think about work and coding blocks you need to overcome, but spare yourself the IDE in front of your eyes. This is just symptomatic of how we are at an extreme with how we need to be productive, all of the time.
I actually like what I do though, otherwise why would I want to bring it with me? I feel good when I code, I feel good when walking, and I'll feel better if I can code while walking.
It's really a bit patronizing, as an adult without an AR headset I've obviously tried "just walking and reflecting".
I think this is quite the wrong way of looking at Walking. It is the relaxed, ruminative, mind-wandering state that the mind and body get into while Walking that is so essential for Creativity. By providing it with more attention grabbing stimulus you are actually distracting it.
Here's me with a monocular.
https://olin.monster/about.html
The cable broke and the CF interface is outdated so I don't use it anymore. For me it might be best to get into an audio desktop or record my thoughts when walking as the background distracts as it moves like a sinus wave when walking.
http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/
Lots of writers are also runners.
But if you’re collecting walking-thinking connections I’ll add: Kahneman mentions somewhere that many of his ideas with Tversky emerged from long walks the two took together.
I have ADHD and without my medicine begin walking obsessively. In college, i would walk from one end of campus to the other over and over. When i lived in downtown Dallas i would walk from the West End to Deep Ellum (that's petty far on foot) and back over and over as well. It was good exercise i guess but took a lot of time/energy. Plus, on weekdays i would do it at night which is not the safest thing.
Now on medication, I still walk but not near as much, maybe a mile a day. And, like others have said, i've solved many problems while walking so it's not a total waste of time.
This was mentioned before, but the explanation is very simple - walking gets your brain flushed with blood, making you think clearer. That's all there is to it.
To take it further, recent studies suggest that exercise more strenuous than just walking makes you better at dealing with uncomfortable decisions and situations (as exercise forces you to power through discomfort).
Good point. I think we need to be careful in recognizing that strenuous exercise does not enable us to make better considered decisions. It is gentle rhythmic exercise (eg. Walking, Tai-chi etc.) which does not tire out the body that is so important for brain health and better decision making.
> I think we need to be careful in recognizing that strenuous exercise does not enable us to make better considered decisions.
What? Is there any evidence to support this statement?
I know I (personally, anecdotally) am a way calmer, more rational and reasonable decision maker after bouts of intense exercise. - Heavy lifting sessions, hard sports training, etc.
Note that i used the phrase "better considered decisions" which is not the same as making a "quick decision". Decision making is improved during Walking while you need some variable time after Strenuous Exercise when your Arousal state has calmed down to make better decisions.
"Historically, however, walking has been the privilege of white men." Come on...
Anyway, Nietzsche used to walk before writing like Darwin
Long time ago I read that walking or taking a shower make your thinking more effective because it somehow enables automation mode and allow to be more focused
> Long time ago I read that walking or taking a shower make your thinking more effective because it somehow enables automation mode and allow to be more focused
They mention it quite a lot in the "Learning how to learn" coursera course. They call it the "diffuse mode", by opposition with the "focused mode".
The course was quite interesting and easy to digest.
What an extremely dumb statement. When you think this guy is an anthropologist...
> Jeremy DeSilva is an anthropologist at Dartmouth College. He is part of the research team that discovered and described two ancient members of the human family tree—Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi.
Poor walk to survive and work—often hungry, stressed or with a goal in mind. Goes without saying that this is different from strolling a private residence with the freedom to ruminate.
It is true, in the sense that white men were the class that was privileged enough to have the free time to walk and think. Not all, but those who did were predominantly white.
What's a bit disgusting is that yes the privileged nature of thinking is of course accurate, and all the time before the 19th century was very oppressive to the women and other groups, but that's not quite relevant to the story of walking being good for thought. It's like in the USSR where Physics textbooks had to be prefaced with quotes from Lenin and Marx just to check off the current political agenda checkmarks and allow the otherwise completely unrelated to politics text to get published.
This statement is a bit broad and thus debatable in overall accuracy, but it is based on something real. It is probably overly centered on the western and white-centric world, since being white or not doesn't even come into question in many other parts of the world. But in the US/Europe...
Women have been, for valid reasons and patriarchal overprotectiveness, been trained to feel vulnerable and exposed when walking outside. Always half-focused on who may be looking at them or tailing them, it takes away the mental freedom needed for perambulatory reflection.
Black men, brown men, immigrants, similarly, have over time faced a variety of hate crimes and false incarceration, that they must again often pay attention to their perceived "suspiciousness" factor, such as wandering around late at night with a hoodie on, or idly staring into a park where kids may be playing, lest they be mistaken for a latent criminal and get apprehended or worse.
So "walking has been the privilege of white men" is a bit of an extreme, but "justifiably walking thoughts free with impunity" is indeed the privilege of white men in the lands of white men.
>This statement is a bit broad and thus debatable in overall accuracy
the statement is very broad and as such laughable. Basically it implies history is something that has existed in the last few hundred years in the Americas.
It's ridiculous enough it could easily fit in a satirical skit.
>"justifiably walking thoughts free with impunity" is indeed the privilege of white men in the lands of white men
- maybe lose the 'thoughts' there
yes, I can agree that was what was meant and it is correct, it was just phrased so badly that it should prompt guffaws of laughter instead of nods of agreement.
Or maybe, and this might sound outlandish, we are tired of the tendrils of this insidious beast infecting every single thing. Walking. Walking? Yes, walking. "Come on" is right.
Dramatic? Maybe. But definitely not an overstatement, and nowhere near as dramatic as ideas like all social dynamics are oppressor/oppressed social dynamics, or that for example black people cannot walk around and therefore white people have privilege to walk around and therefore think and reason.
I don't mind mention of a racial past, as long as it is actually applicable. Want to talk about slavery in the Americas? Jim Crow and segregation? European colonialism? The Maori genocide on the Moriori people? Sure, we can talk about it. But Walking? Yes, walking apparently. An attempt to cram racism into every facet of life, even where it didn't exist and doesn't belong, is absolutely 100% and evil monster seeking to pervade all culture.
Did you post the correct study? This paper seems more about mental state than any race/gender type research. e.g.
"In particular, this study aimed to explore how the participants’ pre-existing levels of non-clinical depression, anxiety, persecutory feelings and personal resilience influence the in situ judgments they make about the contrasting urban environments."
Did you read any of the study? It's about the respective mental states of walking through good and bad neighborhoods.
Very poor reading comprehension from the posters in this thread.
"Forty-six student participants walked in groups through 2 urban neighbourhoods, separated by a park, in the North West of England, noting responses at pre-determined stops. Significant differences existed in participants’ sense of trust and threat between the 2 neighbourhoods along with differences in perceived resident wealth and sentiments expressed"
46 students put into 2 unfamiliar neighborhoods in the UK with various a level of affluence, and "surprisingly" people feel more positive about more affluent area. This says nothing about how residents feel or how different from their own neighborhoods they were for the students. Put me in an unfamiliar area and I'll prefer it to be affluent too, even when I was quite low on the socioeconomic ladder.
Geez... Go walk around Fuller Park and tell me you're comfortable. Ask residents of Fuller Park if they're comfortable strolling around and ruminating.
I think the "come on" is justified because the article doesn't even expand on it. It brings up race out of nowhere and then trails off somewhere else. It just feels like a grab for woke points.
My words exactly, I even considered leaving a comment on the issue but decided to leave it to you I guess.
The author of this should've taken a walk before writing this, you've got to trudge half way through to finally get to the point, which is apparently "someone who walks to think walked to think on why we walk to think"
A great many of my female friends in [Asian country] basically expect to be harassed or asked to go to a "hotel" at least once when they're out and about.
It's easy to roll our eyes at statements like these but that just feels like adding on to the issue.
This appeals to Marilyn Oppezzo's and Daniel Schwartz's 2014 study on walking and creativity [1], based on an experiment with 48 subjects, a lot of subjective assessment, and a weird constraint which sounds like p-hacking ("The CRA task always followed the GAU task, because pilot work indicated that the CRA could be demoralizing, which interfered with performance on an immediately following GAU task.") Does anyone know whether it has been replicated? My money would be on replication failing.
This is why I built a walking desk. And funny thing is that, I have tested this that my dual n-back scores are marginally better when I do them while walking at the speeds of 1-1.5 km/h.
I built one, too. The only problem is it never remains where I left it. One time the police brought it back, as it had wandered into somebody else's home. Another time, I found it lying in an alley in a pool of machine oil and stinking of WD-40. I'm going to have to stick one of those Apple tracker thingies on it.
In the before time, I'd optimize productivity with a mix of modalities. Some things were best done with technical pen on paper. Others as outline or text files. Others with assorted styles of coding. Whiteboards and discussion. And others with assorted styles of walking. The long slow ponder. The quick brief pace for a minor decision. The "what am I'm missing here?" distracted walking into walls.:) Matching modality to the moment seemed an art form.
I've fond memories of one site, a few cubicles and tables in one corner of a big otherwise-empty floor of a office park building. A floor wrapped with full-height windows looking out on trees. One could variously loop, without bothering anyone, alternating walking and desk work.
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So to hunt for great ideas, one must connect the whole experience to what we did once to track down animals.
Look at the ground, when thinking about facts, chains of evidence, the origin of your problems. Walk known routes, when traversing well known approaches, take unknown routes, go off-road, when you are stuck with the usual ways.
Move your body, like you want your mind to move, but most important, do not self-observe while you do it. Forget about yourself, think only about the pray and the hunt.
It may just be superstitious. But it is how my subconscious tries to explain away my endless pacing.
Horrido.
Sometimes I struggle with deep thinking at my desk - its too quiet / stable. A little bit of distraction helps. Not to say I don’t think while at my desk, I just think walking is a great compliment and in our sedentary lives, better to think on our feet and leave the desk to implementation / coding.
I say this after two productive walks today :)
I’ve lost track number and quality of excellent solutions I have come up with on these walks, including three provisional patents filed and a major contract saved. He’s earned increasingly indulgent treats.
Who rescued who?
[1] https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2002nl/mar/sleep.htm
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-d...
However, unfortunately I forgot many of the insights since I was so endlessly tired! Should have taken notes while driving with just 3h of sleep…
>Oppezzo designed an elegant experiment. A group of Stanford students were asked to list as many creative uses for common objects as they could. A Frisbee, for example, can be used as a dog toy, but it can also be used as a hat, a plate, a bird bath, or a small shovel. The more novel uses a student listed, the higher the creativity score. Half the students sat for an hour before they were given their test. The others walked on a treadmill.
>The results were staggering. Creativity scores improved by 60 percent after a walk.
With everything in the news about reproducibility and doctored data, this seems too staggering to believe. Has this study been tried again?
Yep, totally! I'm a firm believer in the power of walking to increase thoughts, but whenever I read about studies like this a big red beeping alarm goes of in my brain that goes "replication crisis! replication crisis!"
There was a case study I read in the book linked below and it indicated that test scores improved dramatically when they had kids exercise before learning. It states that the improvements occurred regardless of physical ability as long as participants aimed to achieve their personal best during exercise.
I can't speak to the quality of the research but it is interesting and does not surprise me.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-...
The short story is that Pang went and read through the diaries of many notable thinkers, artists and creative types going back to the 19th century. Walking is one tool in the tool box. There are others, including getting enough sleep and taking naps.
I found myself compulsively walking randomly in the city every night for several nights. I would walk half way to a random destination only to change directions in 30 minutes convinced I was headed the wrong way forgetting the previous destination and repeatedly heading part way to successive random destinations. I did this night after night convinced there was a place I needed to go but in retrospect they were completely arbitrary and there was no purpose. I recently read the book Crime and Punishment and there is a scene a bit like this which suggests this may be in our DNA. To share further, I eventually spoke out (at some point you have to pick your poison) and the person did die suddenly and unexpectedly. The NYPD coroner eventually ruled out foul play, but the suspects the suspects left the country immediately after his death so it wouldn't have mattered.
Had you plotted my path you would say that it was the walk of a person who is "lost", yet I knew the city perfectly. However it was accurate to say I was hopelessly lost.
Changing subjects to lighten things up, I would assume there would be a metaphor for walking in way that parallels what your brain is doing when it is searching for a solution but I can't think of a word. Contemplative walks are certainly not erratic and discontinuous as described above. They are smooth and differentiable like a gradient descent.
I got into walking due to health reason, and there's a freedom seeking / search in it yes. The internal process of finding a path from idea to idea b is probably linked to the geometry of going from spot to spot.
another thing about walking, is that it's free, and every fork in the road means you get to decide where you feel like you want to go, and that, to me, seems a deep need for our minds.
The people were desperately poor in-laws. He was becoming cash poor but was still home equity rich and often commented that if he missed too many remittances he would likely be killed. Poisoning was rumored to be a common way to accelerate the inheritance process in his native country. When this is about to happen, the rumors start but everyone is afraid to do anything. I heard the rumor from a desperate family member but who then ended the conversation with "please don't say anything" and another implying they will take revenge. The in-laws came for a quick visit, he soon became so ill he ended up in the hospital and died, and then they quickly left. I have law enforcement buddies that mentioned poisoning can be extremely difficult to detect and prove and no one in his country could tell me names of poisons that were useful to his doctors. His doctors could not explain why he was so sick, and the coroner mentioned some health problems he found that could have killed him but implied that this conclusion was not strong.
There's a bunch of benefits and I'll continue doing it because I really do enjoy it and I do think it helps get clarity but I wouldn't treat it like a magical activity that's going to make you successful on its own in whatever field you're working in.
It's still very possible to feel the pressures of what a non-walker will experience such as procrastination and everything else we all know and experience.
But with that said, I do highly recommend giving walking a shot. It's a really relaxing way to decompress.
I started walking pretty obsessively during the pandemic as a way to get exercise that I used to get by bicycle commuting. Normally I would listen to podcasts during this time.
However a few times when I went without anything in my ears I noticed that I was starting to do real work while walking, and coming up with great solutions to difficult problems.
Now I limit podcasts just as I would with TV, video games or any other passive consumption. Nothing against consumption per se—a lot of ideas are seeded from outside—but in terms of creative work there's huge value to being left alone with ones thought. Anything mentally engaging will disrupt that.
I do long distance cycling and always had an audiobook going. One day my battery died and I had an hour and a half of silence.
I found my thoughts were enjoyable. I now take some rides without any audio at all.
but then i spend most of the day working alone, so i have plenty of time to think. and for me the point of going for a walk and listen to a story is to stop thinking for some time and immerse myself into a different world.
Music seems to interfere much less but I'm mostly listening to instrumental. Also going to a new place takes focus so there's a big difference compared to going back.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1429535366705463298
Stopping and pulling out pen and paper was too disruptive. My ideal would be a walking stick with a few chording buttons that would key off different tasks, like start recording, or the next vocal word with be a voice command.
I'm thinking something like a Zoom H1N field recorder might work for just recording all of my thoughts, but I'd really like it to be automatically transcribed, if not an interactive REPL environment.
I really miss late night walks, but unfortunately where I live now there aren’t so many great options. A few nature trails that close early as hell and are probably moderately unsafe at that time. There are some of paths in the residential area I live in now, but they’re relatively short unless I want to link up to a main road (cars zipping past you at whatever speed does not do well for thinking) and I’m not gonna risk getting harassed because I’m out walking too late.
And that both ADHD and ASD have been linked to creative, deep thinking?
Charles Darwin, the #1 example in this article, has been long suspected to have had Asperger's (which we classify as ASD today)[1]; and had exhibited symptoms of ADHD (one makes the other more likely)[2].
That link is only a surprise to neurotypicals. The answer is in plain sight:
"On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking: it's ADHD/ASD!”
EDIT: the word obsessive alone should give a clue were to look.
While walking might make thinking easier for everyone, it might be outright necessary for people with conditions like ASD/ADHD.
Please consider this before hitting that downvote button.
Disclaimer: I'm a person with ASD, ADHD, and a PhD
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20090221125332/http://www.telegr...
[2]https://www.masters-in-special-education.com/lists/5-histori...
I don't know if I have ADHD or not, but whenever I'm stuck at a coding problem or any sort of a creative problem (I do product design work as well), I have to walk. Otherwise I feel claustrophobic or about to have a panic attack. At the very least, I feel very agitated and have shortness of breath.
I'm coming to accept this about myself and after reading this article, I'll embrace walking as a mode for thinking and clearing my head more.
This gave me an overlap of 3 hours to exchange information with my colleagues, and 5 hours to actually work when the office emptied out.
If you are wondering whether you have ADHD or not, I made a website where symptoms are described from a first-person POV[1]. It's 200+ memes/comics I found on the Net, and a lot of text going in-depth about them.
If you relate to a lot of these, treatment can improve your life.
However, if you find that whatever makes your life easier - walking while thinking, fidgeting/doodling in meetings and phone calls, etc - just do it. It's your life. No need to play it on hard mode.
[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd
I love this sentiment. Thanks for this - I'm definitely going to use it going forward.
That the thinking I had when I started taking medication.
Do I need the meds? Irrelevant, and I already got through several decades of my life without them.
Do they make life easier? Absolutely.
Do I have a reason to keep making my life harder? Nope.
Another thought: all the resources and energy (including mental efforts) that are solvable by other, easily implementable means (from medication to changing the way you do things that works for you) — all that time and energy is stolen from your loved ones and people you care about.
Is the time spent doing Boring Difficult Task more valuable to you than time with your friends and family? Perhaps not. Then why choose to maximize the Boring Difficult time?
Fidget, walk, exercise, drink water, take breaks, take Monday off, hire a maid, order takeout, get therapy, get the right meds — it's your life, and you want to spend the most of it on things that matter.
And the time you spend trying hard to do things that are difficult for you is time and energy you can recover by taking the pain out of the process of doing them.
I'm utterly convinced that long walks in the woods is my secret sauce and that without it I'll degrade as an engineer massively.
On paper, my previous employer only valued impact, and employees were able to choose their own schedule.
But work from home was explicitly discouraged in very clear terms, and I have been pressured to increase the overlap in office time with my team "for my benefit". That coming from people responsible for my performance evaluation and making hiring decisions felt a lot like "...or else".
It is also for my benefit, I guess, that I got a seat between my manager and my team lead during an office move (open-floor layout). I didn't mind, because they are both excellent people, but it feels a bit weird in retrospect.
We are all remote until 2022 at the very least; I don't expect mandatory office presence 40 hr/week ever coming back.
At some point, the CEOs will have to come to terms with office space being a sunk cost; and either downside, or provide more space for people who do come into the office.
Having in-person discussions with many people at once is still a killer app for physical offices; latency issues inherently make videoconferencing clumsy. But two days a week should suffice for that, at best.
Is there scientific evidence supporting this link?
Pacing is a form of stimming. It's something that people with ASD might need to do to feel comfortable while thinking.
There are other forms of stimming that aren't as socially acceptable, but even this one is heavily restricted in a school setting.
A child that gets up to pace around the classroom to think better will be reprimanded; the option to take a walk outside is outright not available.
This is why raising awareness is important. It costs nothing to allow people who need to walk while thinking to do just that, yet the society disallows it.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/autism/stimming
I definitely feel that I am better at thinking when walking, but I also need to be looking at source code to get the details, otherwise I can only think about larger architecture.
When is this coming?
Truly a sign of the passing of time.
We have plans to eventually release a proper AR headset also, though not on first iteration.
Well, there's Nreal Light, with nice 1080p.
But it may not fit your face well. I use it without the nose piece, and with the temples down around the middle of my ears. The recurring "we didn't design it for you" China HMD fit problem. I've no idea if the EU release was identical. And some complain of its weight.
It's been variously available in Asia for years, more recently in the EU, but not yet in the US I believe (there was talk of maybe this year). In the US one has been able to ebay it from elsewhere, but US Customs duties have been highly varied and sometimes quite large.
[1] sunset silliness: https://twitter.com/mncharity/status/1397553615372529668
It's really a bit patronizing, as an adult without an AR headset I've obviously tried "just walking and reflecting".
Here's me with a monocular. https://olin.monster/about.html The cable broke and the CF interface is outdated so I don't use it anymore. For me it might be best to get into an audio desktop or record my thoughts when walking as the background distracts as it moves like a sinus wave when walking. http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/
Now on medication, I still walk but not near as much, maybe a mile a day. And, like others have said, i've solved many problems while walking so it's not a total waste of time.
Was surprised to see my comment initially downvoted a lot.
For all who feel like they need walk to think about things, looking into ADHD/ASD could improve y'all's lives.
To take it further, recent studies suggest that exercise more strenuous than just walking makes you better at dealing with uncomfortable decisions and situations (as exercise forces you to power through discomfort).
https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-exercise-shapes-you-far-b...
What? Is there any evidence to support this statement?
I know I (personally, anecdotally) am a way calmer, more rational and reasonable decision maker after bouts of intense exercise. - Heavy lifting sessions, hard sports training, etc.
The Inverted U Hypothesis (aka Yerkes-Dodson law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law) and https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/inverted-u.htm was the first to posit the relationship between Arousal and Performance. However there are lots of nuances to this. The important one is Cue Utilization Theory (https://www.elitetrack.com/blogs-details-7362/ and https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/sports-psychology/percep...) which is relevant for decision making.
Coming to Exercise Intensity and Decision Making you may find the following papers helpful for some empirical data.
* Influence of exercise intensity on the decision-making performance of experienced and inexperienced soccer players - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19454768/ and Fontana's thesis at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/12206332.pdf
* Effect of Exercise Intensity Level on Choice Reaction Time - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2466/11.03.CP.4.3
PS: I have linked to two relevant books in another post of mine in this thread which you may find useful.
Anyway, Nietzsche used to walk before writing like Darwin
Long time ago I read that walking or taking a shower make your thinking more effective because it somehow enables automation mode and allow to be more focused
They mention it quite a lot in the "Learning how to learn" coursera course. They call it the "diffuse mode", by opposition with the "focused mode".
The course was quite interesting and easy to digest.
> Jeremy DeSilva is an anthropologist at Dartmouth College. He is part of the research team that discovered and described two ancient members of the human family tree—Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi.
Also, as others have aptly pointed out, people who are not wealthy are in fact the ones who will end up doing the most walking.
People who gravitate towards using the word privilege ... just yikes.
Women have been, for valid reasons and patriarchal overprotectiveness, been trained to feel vulnerable and exposed when walking outside. Always half-focused on who may be looking at them or tailing them, it takes away the mental freedom needed for perambulatory reflection.
Black men, brown men, immigrants, similarly, have over time faced a variety of hate crimes and false incarceration, that they must again often pay attention to their perceived "suspiciousness" factor, such as wandering around late at night with a hoodie on, or idly staring into a park where kids may be playing, lest they be mistaken for a latent criminal and get apprehended or worse.
So "walking has been the privilege of white men" is a bit of an extreme, but "justifiably walking thoughts free with impunity" is indeed the privilege of white men in the lands of white men.
Been trained?
“10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A
the statement is very broad and as such laughable. Basically it implies history is something that has existed in the last few hundred years in the Americas.
It's ridiculous enough it could easily fit in a satirical skit.
>"justifiably walking thoughts free with impunity" is indeed the privilege of white men in the lands of white men
- maybe lose the 'thoughts' there
yes, I can agree that was what was meant and it is correct, it was just phrased so badly that it should prompt guffaws of laughter instead of nods of agreement.
I walk 60 minutes a day. 90% of the women walking at any park in the US are women.
Downvote away. Don't let reality get in your way.
What are you including in said “insidious beast?” Any mention of a racial past is representative on an evil monster seeking to pervade all culture?
I think you’ve been watching too much hentai.
I don't mind mention of a racial past, as long as it is actually applicable. Want to talk about slavery in the Americas? Jim Crow and segregation? European colonialism? The Maori genocide on the Moriori people? Sure, we can talk about it. But Walking? Yes, walking apparently. An attempt to cram racism into every facet of life, even where it didn't exist and doesn't belong, is absolutely 100% and evil monster seeking to pervade all culture.
I don't watch hentai.
Dude... go walk around in Compton or Fuller Park and tell me you're able to ruminate like Darwin LOL.
You're trying to ELIMINATE race from every conversation because of your sensitivity. No one is "cramming" race anywhere.
I don't see it today. In fact, in my home city, I'd argue there's more areas where a black could walk freely than a white.
But that's just city life and demographics in a shitty US city. In the world, walking is not a racebound privilege.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095595/
I'm not calling your link untrue, just incomplete.
If you want to visit my hometown and give it a test, I'm more than happy to guide you.
But I also realize my experiences may have been rather different than those in other cities. It doesn't make either of us wrong.
"In particular, this study aimed to explore how the participants’ pre-existing levels of non-clinical depression, anxiety, persecutory feelings and personal resilience influence the in situ judgments they make about the contrasting urban environments."
Very poor reading comprehension from the posters in this thread.
"Forty-six student participants walked in groups through 2 urban neighbourhoods, separated by a park, in the North West of England, noting responses at pre-determined stops. Significant differences existed in participants’ sense of trust and threat between the 2 neighbourhoods along with differences in perceived resident wealth and sentiments expressed"
There's plenty of research on this: https://www.brookings.edu/research/walk-this-waythe-economic...
Seems like the posters in this thread are more concerned with being hypersensitive about "wokeness" than reality.
"Poor people walk more, ergo this article gets it wrong" is the ultimate confluence of idiocy and privilege.
The author of this should've taken a walk before writing this, you've got to trudge half way through to finally get to the point, which is apparently "someone who walks to think walked to think on why we walk to think"
It's easy to roll our eyes at statements like these but that just feels like adding on to the issue.
[1] https://aaalab.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Oppez...
I've fond memories of one site, a few cubicles and tables in one corner of a big otherwise-empty floor of a office park building. A floor wrapped with full-height windows looking out on trees. One could variously loop, without bothering anyone, alternating walking and desk work.