The positive effect of walking on creative thinking (2014) [pdf]
I listen to audiobooks while walking and it makes it easier to focus and overall more enjoyable.<p>I also discovered that human memory is weird as heck. When I walk my mind is somehow mapping my physical location in the world to the content, down to the sentence. If I rewind an audio book I can fairly often remember where exactly I heard a particular sentence. The precise street corner or park trail I was on, to like a 10 feet precision. I do not otherwise have strong memory. WTF brain.<p>Does anyone else have this experience? I guess this is a peak into how 'memory palaces' work and how people memorize huge volumes of information?<p>I spend most of day in a single location and it really makes me want to try and change that. If my brain is spending all this freaking effort maintaining an index of knowledge mapped to GPS coordinates <i>anyway</i>, probably I should try to leverage some of this indexing.<p>I wonder if this applies on different levels. Is a one-classroom school possibly less effective than a school where each subject is learned in a different room, for example? If it is, what if you amped this up and had very fine-grained physical location changes. Alternatively does it actually need to be a different location? If I had projectors on all the walls in my room so it felt like a different location, could there be a similar effect? Or what about studying in a VR environment, a virtual walk?