We become more creative while walking than sitting

Researchers have said that taking a walk may lead to more creative thinking than sitting.

While at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education, Marily Oppezzo, PhD, now of Santa Clara University and colleague Daniel L. Schwartz, PhD, conducted studies involving 176 people, mostly college students.

They found that those who walked instead of sitting or being pushed in a wheelchair consistently gave more creative responses on tests commonly used to measure creative thinking, such as thinking of alternate uses for common objects and coming up with original analogies to capture complex ideas.

When asked to solve problems with a single answer, however, the walkers fell slightly behind those who responded while sitting.

Schwartz said asking someone to take a 30-minute run to improve creativity at work would be an unpopular prescription for many people," Schwartz said. "We wanted to see if a simple walk might lead to more free-flowing thoughts and more creativity.

Of the students tested for creativity while walking, 100 percent came up with more creative ideas in one experiment, while 95 percent, 88 percent and 81 percent of the walker groups in the other experiments had more creative responses compared with when they were sitting.

The study has been published in APA's Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.