Posted: Sunday, May 11, 2014 12:00 am
Telegraph Herald
LOS ANGELES -- If you find yourself in a creative slump, scientists have a suggestion: Take a walk.
People generate more creative ideas when they walk than when they sit, according to new research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
"Everyone always says going on a walk gives you new ideas, but nobody had ever proved it before," said Marily Oppezzo, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University and the lead author of the study.
In fact, Oppezzo got the inspiration for the research while she was taking a stroll as a graduate student with her thesis advisor, Stanford University education professor Daniel Schwartz.
To measure creativity, Oppezzo recruited 176 people and gave them various verbal tests. For instance, some volunteers were asked to come up with alternative uses for a common item, like a button. Oppezzo defined a creative response as one that was both appropriate (a button could serve as a tiny strainer or the eye for a doll, but it wouldn't work as a light bulb) and original, meaning no one else in the study had said it.
In the first experiment, volunteers were asked to complete the creativity test twice -- first while sitting at a desk in a small room for four minutes, and then while walking on a treadmill for the same amount of time. Researchers found that 81 percent of the participants improved their creative output when walking.
Walkers were more talkative than sitters, but, Oppezzo said, the increased output of creative ideas while ambulatory was not simply the result of having more ideas in general.
"We took everything they said and divided the total creative ideas by the total ideas mentioned," she said. "Walkers had more thoughts, but they also had a higher density of creative thoughts than sitters."
© 2014 THonline.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Posted in
National world
on
Sunday, May 11, 2014 12:00 am.
| Tags: