On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
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Re: On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
#2[deleted]
Re: On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
#3Re: On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
#4lithub is good
Re: On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
#5My 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.
Horrido.
Re: On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
#6I 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.
I say this after two productive walks today :)
Re: On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
#7I 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)
Re: On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
#8I 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?
Re: On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
#9I 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 use…
I'm more interested that the walk was before the test. I thought the point was to think while you're walking.
Re: On the link between great thinking and obsessive walking
#10I 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 tr…
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.