Walking May Lead to More Creative Thinking than Sitting, Study Finds

Research published by the American Psychological Association has found that walking can measurably improve creative thinking compared with sitting still. The work was led by Marily Oppezzo, then at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education, together with Daniel L. Schwartz, and involved 176 people, most of them college students.

What the experiments measured

Participants were asked to think of alternative uses for everyday objects and to invent original analogies for complex ideas. On those open-ended tasks, people who walked — whether indoors on a treadmill or outdoors along a set path — consistently gave more creative responses than those who sat, or than those who were pushed outdoors in a wheelchair.

Answers were scored for novelty: a response counted only if it was unique among all the answers produced by the group. The researchers also recorded how many answers each person gave and whether an idea was feasible within the task's constraints. "Putting lighter fluid in soup is novel, but it is not very appropriate," Oppezzo noted.

The numbers

The effect showed up in every experiment. Of the students tested while walking, 100 percent produced more creative ideas in one experiment, while the corresponding shares in the others were 95, 88 and 81 percent. In another experiment, students who walked doubled the number of novel responses compared with the same people sitting down.

The benefit did not extend to every kind of thinking. When a task had a single correct answer — as in a word-association test where "cottage, Swiss, cake" points to "cheese" — the walkers fell slightly behind those who stayed seated.

Walking, not the open air

One experiment separated movement from setting: students walking on a treadmill indoors outperformed those sitting indoors, and students walking outdoors outperformed those pushed in a wheelchair outdoors. The authors concluded that the act of walking, rather than fresh air, drives the effect.

A separate experiment tested whether the boost survives afterwards. Participants who walked first and then sat produced fewer novel ideas than they had while walking, but still more than those who sat through both rounds. The authors say a short walk before a meeting that requires innovation may be nearly as useful as walking during it. More research is needed to explain the mechanism; the team suggests a pathway running from the physical act of walking, through physiological changes, to the cognitive control of imagination. The study appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, with funding from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and a Stanford Graduate School of Education dissertation support grant.