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“All truly great thoughts are conceived
while walking.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Do you walk when you need to think? You’re
in excellent company, if you do. Many of the world’s great thinkers took a
stroll when they needed inspiration. Luminaries as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi, Virginia
Woolf, Ludwig van Beethoven, Charles Darwin and Steve Jobs believed in the
power of walking to clear the mind, allow the walker to reconnect with
themselves and their principles and parse out humanity’s problems.
Walking and Thinking, a Very Partial History
The connection between walking and thinking
great thoughts has existed since ancient times. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit explains that in ancient Greece,
philosophers gave lectures in the colonnade (or peripatos) of the school in
Athens. It could have been that architectural feature, she posits, or it could have been the
teachers’ habits of walking up and down it while lecturing that gave the name
to the philosophers that emerged under Aristotle, but they were called the
peripatetic philosophers.
Whether walking helped them to teach better
is unclear but walking was linked to superior reasoning in Grecian culture. In
fact, the incomparable Cynic philosopher Diogenes solved one of Zeno’s paradoxes
by walking. He proved that motion does, in fact, exist, by walking away from
the people explaining the paradox to him.
In the Middle Ages, the figure of the itinerant
scholar was a common one, wandering from place to place in search of a steady
income, be it from pupils or patronage. While these wandering scholars were often
better known for their bad behaviour at roadside taverns than for the quality
of their ideas, the link between philosophy and mobility continued.
The 18th and 19th
centuries were a golden age for thinkers who walked. 18th-century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant famously walked every day at exactly five in the
afternoon and always took the exact same route. In A Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros says that according to rumour, “he
only ever altered the route of this daily constitutional twice in his life,”
once to get a book and once to get the news when the French Revolution started.
For Gros, this regularity is a sign of Kant’s
discipline – a discipline that allowed him to create his great works not “in a
flash of inspiration,” but “stone by stone,” step by step. Walking, to Gros, is
the mechanism by which Kant’s discipline could fuel the expression of new ideas
because the rote, monotonous nature of walking frees up the mind. “During that
continuous but automatic effort of the body,” Gros writes, “the mind is placed
at one’s disposal. It is then that thoughts can arise, surface or take shape.”
The more boring the walk, the freer one’s attention can be.
By contrast, Henry David Thoreau, one of the
19th century’s keenest advocates of walking to develop one’s
thinking, wanted something much more dramatic: the bursts of genius he thought
only a good, adventurous ramble could bring. “I have met with one or two
persons in the course of my life,” says Thoreau in his essay “Walking,”
“who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks.” For him, walking in the natural world “is a sort of
crusade,” in which the walker reconnects with the wilderness around and inside
of themselves and thereby creates freer and more daring ideas. It’s one of the
reasons he wrote so passionately about protecting wild spaces – for him it was
the American wilderness that would sustain “poets and philosophers for the
coming ages.”
Thoreau’s belief in nature walks as the best
way to generate ideas has close affiliations with the English Romantic poets, who
generally held that wandering the natural world gave one all the inspiration
one needed to create one’s art. Those who love walking but aren’t as keen on trees
and swamps as Thoreau was can take heart, though. This is also the century in
which poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire gave us the figure of the flâneur,
the artist of the modern age who wanders the streets of the new urban
metropolis, watching and taking notes on the world around them, one with the
crowd but not of it.
Charles Dickens was a prolific urban walker,
sometimes distressing his dinner guests by suggesting a pre-dinner walk that
often turned into an excursion of many miles. If “I couldn’t walk fast and far,”
Dickens told his friend John Forster, “I should just explode and perish.” He was known to walk the
streets of London all night to calm his restlessness and the details of the
people and places he met with in his nighttime strolls permeate each of his
novels.
The Science Behind Thinking and Walking
Did walking really help these great
thinkers? There’s some evidence to suggest that it did. A 2014 Stanford study tested creative divergent thinking and convergent thinking
while participants were seated and while they walked. The study’s authors,
Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz, state that the results showed that “walking
boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after.” Those who walked
rated higher on tests of creative thinking. Even after completing a walk and
sitting back down, participants still benefitted from “a residual creative
boost.”
You should know that while creative,
divergent thinking was boosted, convergent, focused thinking actually got a
little worse, so maybe save your strolls for times when you need to think
laterally and not for when you need an exact right answer to a pressing
question.
In 2018, a review in Frontiers in Neuroscience theorized that the “numerous protective and cognitive
benefits” of exercise result from neurogenesis, or the creation of new neurons
in the brain. Neurogenesis is a key element of brain plasticity, the brain’s
ability to grow, change, learn and remember things. One of the proteins that regulates
this process is brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that research
has shown to be activated during exercise.
Review authors Patrick Liu and Robin
Nusslock state that “higher levels of BDNF expression are associated with
enhanced spatial and verbal memory and recognition capabilities, and may also
counteract the effects of chronic stress and cognitive decline.” A 2018 study on stroke patients found that 30 minutes of moderate intensity walking was enough to
boost BDNF levels in the brain. So getting your steps in is building your brain
as much as it’s building your body.
If you feel yourself getting stuck in your
thinking, a walk is probably exactly what you need to clear your mind so you
can get back to creating your next great work.
feature image: Yogendra Singh; image 1: SciTechTrend History Of Walking Philosophy Of Walking Thinking Walking
