CREATIVE NONFICTION 7Let’s look at the simple act of walk-
ing as the first means of transforma-
tion. It was Stanford professor Daniel
Schwartz’s habit to walk around cam-
pus with his mentees as they discussed
projects. And, as one of those mentees,
Dr. Marily Oppezzo, put it, “One day
we got kind of meta.” In 2014 the
pair published a groundbreaking set
of studies that look, possibly for the
first time, at the connection between
walking and creativity.
Oppezzo talked with Dave TeerSteeg
from the The Roadhouse arts and
culture radio show about her article
“Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The
Positive Effect of Walking on Creative
Thinking,” published in The Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition.
She noted that in one of the studies,
participants were given the words
button, tire, and newspaper and allot-
ted four minutes to be creative with
them. Then, one-third of the group
walked on a treadmill for four minutes
while brainstorming, another group
walked for four minutes then sat and
brainstormed, and the third group sat
still for four minutes before trying the
task again. The people who walked or
walked and sat doubled their capacity
to creatively brainstorm. Oppezzo
suspects walking helps dampen down
the filter that normally tells our brains
“that’s not worth thinking about.”
The findings show that walking
helps specifically with brainstorming,
with creativity. A surprising aspect of
the results was that participants could
walk on the worst treadmill, staring at
a blank wall, and something good still
happened in their brains. The expand-
ed creativity from the four-minute
walk continued for eight minutes after
each walking session.
Ferris Jabr’s September 2014 New
Yo rk e r article, “Why Walking Helps Us
Think,” examines how strolling helps
our state of mind: “Walking at our own
pace creates an unadulterated feedback
loop between the rhythm of our bodies
and our mental state that we cannot
experience as easily when we’re jogging
at the gym, steering a car, biking, or
during any other kind of locomotion.”
Researchers have begun to take an
interest in where people walk, as well.
For example, studies suggest that a
walk in green space can replenish brain
power that human-made environments
deplete. Jabr notes that “psycholo-
gists have learned that attention is a
limited resource that continually drains
throughout the day.” Being in nature
replenishes our ability to perceive, to
participate. It helps us connect.
Of course, before psychologists real-
ized this, writers knew it. Annie Dillard
and Wendell Berry. Even Jack Kerouac,
in his rambling way:I felt like lying down by the side of the
trail and remembering it all. The woods
do that to you, they always look famil-
iar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead
relative, like an old dream, like a piece
of forgotten song drifting across the
water, most of all like golden eternities
of past childhood or past manhood and
all the living and the dying and the
heartbreak that went on a million years
ago and the clouds as they pass overhead
seem to testify (by their own lonesome
familiarity) to this feeling.
(The Dharma Bums)A study published in 2015 by
Gregory Bratman at Stanford Univer-
sity shows that there is something to
walking in an untamed environment.
It wards off “rumination,” which is a
specific psychological term that means
our tendency to dwell on negative,
self-referential thoughts in a circular,
obsessive fashion.
Bratman’s study focused on city
dwellers. Half the participants walkedfor ninety minutes through a “grass-
land with scattered oaks and native
shrubs.... Views include[d] neighbor-
ing, scenic hills, and distant views of
the San Francisco Bay.” The other
half walked El Camino Real, a wide,
traffic-clogged street in Palo Alto.
The nature walkers reported less
rumination, and their brains showed
increased activity. The urban walkers
showed no such improvements.
Walking in nature hasn’t been scientifi-
cally connected to increased creativity,
but instead to better well-being. For me,
walking in nature that I don’t yet under-
stand—the High Plains of Wyoming,
the Florida Keys, the Ozarks—has
helped my own observation skills and
opened up my imagination.
It’s a great argument for writing
residencies or visiting state or national
parks. And, of course, this is what the
Romantic poets were shooting for
all along: imagination, nature. It was
nothing for William Wordsworth and
his sister Dorothy to walk twelve miles
in a day.
As Rebecca Solnit notes in Wanderlust:
A History of Walking, the Romantics are
often credited with making walking a
cultural act. Partly, that has to do with
the fact that, as easier transportation and
better infrastructure arose in the late
eighteenth century and people were no
longer forced to walk, they could choose
to walk. Thus, the idea of taking a walk
for walking’s sake was born. English
essayist Thomas de Quincey wrote:I calculate, upon good data, that with
these identical legs Wordsworth must
have traversed a distance of 175,000 to
180,000 English miles—a mode of exer-
tion which, to him, stood in the stead of
alcohol and other stimulants whatsoever
to animal spirits; to which, indeed, he
was indebted for a life of unclouded
happiness, and we for much of what is
most excellent in his writings.