Why Walking Helps Us Think
This is an unusually verbose article even for the New Yorker. The TL;DR appears to be simply "increased heart rate," with no real citations to prove it. And it just sounds a bit absurd. Increased heart rates don't have a reliable correlation with creative thought. You can increase your heart rate by watching a scary movie or pornography, but nobody that I know of reports those being prime thinking times. Moreover, you can raise your heart rate <i>even more</i> by running, but people generally think of running as more exhausting and less intellectual than walking. Meanwhile lots of good creative thinking happens in a bathtub, which is sedentary.<p>I would have guessed that walking helps us think because it gets us to a position where our problem isn't directly in front of us, nor are our distractions. But I was really hoping to instead get some science about that sort of thing. I mean, I guess it's cool to know that there are some mental tests which some people are slightly worse at when walking, and the Nabokov quote at the beginning was quite interesting even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the article, but I'm just left... unsatisfied.