Physical activity is not only beneficial for our cardiovascular health, but benefits the brain as well. Marily Oppezzo, from Santa Clara University (California, USA), and colleagues enrolled 176 people, mostly college students, in a study to explore whether walking may promote creative thinking. The researchers found that those who walked instead of sitting or being pushed in a wheelchair consistently gave more creative responses on tests commonly used to measure creative thinking, such as thinking of alternate uses for common objects and coming up with original analogies to capture complex ideas. Further, the team investigated whether walking could temporarily improve free-flowing thought. Of the students tested for creativity while walking, 100% came up with more creative ideas in one experiment, while 95%, 88% and 81% of the walker groups in the other experiments had more creative responses compared with when they were sitting. In another experiment involving 48 participants, each student sat alone in a small room at a desk facing a blank wall. When a researcher named an object, the student came up with alternative ways to use the object. And, to see how walking might affect more restricted thinking, the researchers also had the students complete a word association task with 15 three-word groups, with participants repeating both tasks with different sets of words first while sitting and then while walking at a comfortable pace on a treadmill facing a blank wall in the same room. Submitting that: “Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after,” the study authors report that: “Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.”
