Richard Sima writes:

What do Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Stephen King, Henry David Thoreau and Friedrich Nietzsche have in common?
They all credit walking as essential for helping their creative thinking.

Though walking may seem mundane, it has many health benefits, including improving longevity and making your brain younger. Research also shows that walking helps people come up with an essential ingredient for creativity.

“It really helps you generate ideas, novel ideas, original ideas,” said Alex Thabane, a researcher at McMaster University and the lead author of a recent meta-analysis that looked at walking and creativity.

By definition, creativity is a cognitive ability that lets you generate something new and useful. To be creative, you need to use two types of thinking: divergent and convergent.

Divergent thinking is a spontaneous process that generates many different new ideas. Convergent thinking evaluates the quality of these ideas and narrows them down to find the best option.

Psychologists typically test divergent thinking in a lab with the Alternate Uses Task — asking people to come up with as many new uses as possible for common objects in a set time frame. For example, newspapers are not only great sources of information, but can also be hats, boats or airplanes.

In one meta-analysis of 23 studies published in May in PLOS ONE, which included trials involving the Alternate Uses Task, walking was found to have a large effect on improving divergent thinking. [Continue reading…]