Why Walking Helps us Think by Ferris Jabr
In Vogue’s
1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”:
“Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and
visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with
Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston
College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together
an annotated Google map that
shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf
Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, have similarly
reconstructed
the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”
Such maps
clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet.
Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness
into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about
town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her.
Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly
textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it,
creating it every moment afresh.”
Since at
least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have
discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing.
(In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about
walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it
is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David
Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin
to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with
tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as
a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average
of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.
What is
it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and
writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a
walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the
muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown
that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better
on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new
connections between brain cells, staves off
the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume
of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of
molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit
messages between them.
The way
we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa.
Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified
what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us
to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music.
Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit
harder on the gas pedal. 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. When we stroll,
the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our
inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts
by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.
Because
we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our
attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of
images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that
studies have
linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this
year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely
the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking
changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a
walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students
to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”
In a
series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and
seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking
while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s
campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses
for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students
thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were
walking than when they were seated. Another experiment required volunteers to
contemplate a metaphor, such as “a budding cocoon,” and generate a unique but
equivalent metaphor, such as “an egg hatching.” Ninety-five per cent of
students who went for a walk were able to do so, compared to only fifty per
cent of those who never stood up. But walking actually worsened people’s
performance on a different type of test, in which students had to find the one
word that united a set of three, like “cheese” for “cottage, cream, and cake.”
Oppezzo speculates that, by setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of
thought, walking is counterproductive to such laser-focussed thinking: “If
you’re looking for a single correct answer to a question, you probably don’t
want all of these different ideas bubbling up.”
Where we
walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South
Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance
on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but
growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green
spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mental resources than man-made
environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited
resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded
intersection—rife with pedestrians, cars, and billboards—bats our attention
around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift
casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to
rustling reeds.
Still,
urban and pastoral walks likely offer unique advantages for the mind. A walk
through a city provides more immediate stimulation—a greater variety of
sensations for the mind to play with. But, if we are already at the brink of
overstimulation, we can turn to nature instead. Woolf relished the creative
energy of London’s streets, describing it in her diary as “being on the highest crest of
the biggest wave, right in the centre & swim of things.” But she also
depended on her walks through England’s South Downs to “have space to spread my mind out in.” And, in her youth, she
often travelled to Cornwall for the summer, where she loved to “spend my afternoons in solitary trampling” through the
countryside.
Perhaps
the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals
itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent
that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and
mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey
the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a
way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise,
writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through
that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding
the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our
thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they
are maps of maps.
