51–60 of 237 posts
"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
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. M…
"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
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.
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. M…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"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
> 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.
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.
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.
related: "Perhaps the reason walking helps us think is that we evolved as persistence hunters." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1429535366705463298
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 ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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. M…