Walking helps in Creative Thinking!

Walking for 30 mins can improve not only our fitness but also our creative thinking as per the new research by Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, United States.

The Researchers conducted the study among students whose responses confirmed the person who walked gave more creative response than  compared to sitting.

The researchers explain their decision to focus on walking, rather than more strenuous exercise: “Asking someone to take a 30-minute run to improve creativity at work would be an unpopular prescription for many people,” said co-author Dr Daniel L. Schwartz. “We wanted to see if a simple walk might lead to more free-flowing thoughts and more creativity.”

In one test, researchers named an object, then asked a subgroup of 48 students to think of alternative ways to use it. So, “button” might lead a student to say “as a doorknob on a dollhouse”.

In another test, 48 students were asked to complete word associations involving three-word groups – for example, “cottage-Swiss-cake”, for which the correct answer was “cheese”.

Of the students tested while walking, 100% came up with more creative ideas in one experiment, while the other experiments saw 95%, 88% and 81% of the walkers come up with more creative responses than when they were sitting.

This study would confirm people’s faith on an early walk which has been a tradition among the fitness candidates for centuries.