Why on the go think better

In the Christmas edition of Vogue magazine from 1969, Vladimir Nabokov in an interview offered tips on teaching the novel by James Joyce " Ulysses ": "Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homer's and colorful chapter titles, the instructor needs to prepare a map of Dublin with the Bloom and Stephen routes marked on it". He himself drew a charming map . A few decades later, a professor at Boston College, who taught English, and his colleagues created a Google map with notes that mark the routes of Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The British Virginia Woolf community and students at the Georgia Institute of Technology similarly reconstructed the journey of London travelers from the novel “Mrs. Dalloway.”

These cards confirm the dependence of these stories on the strange connection of the mind and legs. Writers Joyce and Wolfe captured a fast stream of consciousness in paper and ink. To do this, their characters went for a walk around the city. On the move, Mrs. Dalloway doesn't just look at the city around her. She periodically immerses herself in her past, turning London into a highly textured mental landscape, wondering "why you love all this so much, you see and you constantly compose, you build, you break, you build again every second."

Since the days of the Greek peripatetic, many writers have discovered in themselves a deep and intuitive connection between walking, thinking and writing. “How useless to write while sitting, if you have not lived standing up!” Wrote Henry Toro in his journal. "It seems to me that as soon as my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow." Thomas DeQuinsy calculated that William Wordsworth - whose poetry is filled with walks in the mountains, forests and along roads - 290,000 km passed through his life, that is, about 10.5 km every day, starting at the age of five.
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What is there in walking that connects it with thoughts and writing? The answer begins with changes in our chemistry. When we walk, the heart beats faster, driving more blood and oxygen, not only through the muscles, but through all the organs - including the brain. Many experiments have shown that during or after exercise with even a small load, people cope better with tests of memory and attention . Regular walking helps to create new connections between brain cells, prevents age-related drying of brain tissue, increases the volume of the hippocampus (brain area responsible for memory), and increases the levels of substances that stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies, changes the course of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in music for studies have precisely determined what is familiar to many: songs at a fast pace motivate us to run fast, and the faster we move, the faster songs we prefer. In the same way, when drivers hear louder and faster music, they unconsciously press on the gas . Walking with our preferred speed creates a clear loop of feedback between the rhythm of our body and the state of our mind, which we cannot so easily feel while running in the gym, driving a car, riding a bicycle or making any other movement. When we walk, the speed of the steps automatically adjusts to our thoughts, and we specifically go more briskly or slow down.

Since we do not need to devote conscious effort to walking, our attention wanders freely — and imposes on the surrounding reality a number of images from our mental theater. It is this state of consciousness that research associates with innovative ideas and insights. Recently, Marile Opezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published the first set of studies directly studying the effects of walking on creativity. They came up with the idea to carry out such studies on the go. “My curator has a habit of strolling with his students for brainstorming,” said Ozzzo about Schwartz. “And once we were visited by such a meta-idea.”

In the four experiments, Opezzo and Schwartz asked 176 students to undergo several tests for creative thinking while they were sitting, walking the walkway or walking around the campus. In one of the tests, volunteers had to come up with atypical methods for using ordinary objects, for example, buttons or tires. On average, on the go, students were able to come up with 4-6 unusual methods of using objects more than sitting. In another experiment, volunteers had to think about a metaphor, such as “birth of a butterfly from a pupa” and come up with another equivalent metaphor, such as “hatching from an egg”. On the move, 95% of students were able to cope with this, and only 50% were sitting. But at the same time, walking worsened the subjects' performance in other tests, in which it was necessary to find a concept that combines three given words - for example, “cottage cheese” for “pie”, “mousse” and “cream”. Obettso believes that walks that send the mind to the sea of ​​our thoughts have a counterproductive effect on the tasks associated with finding clear answers: "If you are looking for the only correct answer to a question, you do not need to have many different ideas."

It matters where we walk. In a study led by Mark Berman from the University of South Carolina, students who roamed the arboretum showed better results in tests than those who walked around the city. A small set of studies suggests that time spent in green spaces — gardens, parks, and forests — can breathe life into mental resources that are depleted in man-made environments. Psychologists know that attention is a limited resource, and during the day it is depleted. A busy intersection filled with pedestrians, cars, and advertising tires our attention. Conversely, walks along the ponds in the park allow our mind to easily move from the perception of one to another, from water ripples to the rustling of reeds.

Yet urban and pastoral walks offer the mind unique advantages. Walking around the city causes instant stimulation - for the mind there are many sensations with which you can play. But if we are tired of over-stimulation, we can turn to nature. Wolfe enjoyed the creative energy of London’s streets, describing them in her diary as “being on the highest crest of the greatest wave, in the center and in the whirlpool of things.” But she also relied on walks through the hills of the South Downs , " so that my mind had a place to turn ." In her youth, she often went to Cornwall for the summer, where she loved to " spend days walking alone " in the countryside.

Perhaps most strongly, the connection between walking, thinking, and writing manifests itself when we have finished walking and are back at the table. There it becomes clear to us that the letter and the walks are very similar to each other, both physically and mentally. When we choose a path through a forest or a city, our brain must survey our environment, create a mental map of the world, choose a route and transform it into a set of steps. In the same way, writing makes the brain survey its own landscape, build a path through mental terrain, and turn this path into words, controlling hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. And maps, such as Nabokov drew, are recursive: these are maps of maps.