We're All Cognitively Impaired Now
We've spent seventy years bricking up the way back to smart mode
“Sit still! Don’t fidget!”
We’re taught that repressing movement leads to intellectual greatness in our earliest school days. But the ass-in-chair approach to thought and work that holds up stillness as a state of excellence looks creakier than ever.
Our modern brain fog, trouble concentrating, and a lack of ideas won’t be banished no matter how much coffee we mainline. We’re stuck in low cognitive gear, failing to reach our potential. We are less than we were.
In the end, it wasn’t the much-maligned television that dumbed us down. It wasn’t the gossip rags, social media, or precipitous decline in reading.
Our cognitive impairment crept in one step at a time. Literally.
Americans now spend most of their lives in “dumb mode.” The only way they’ll discover what “smart mode” feels like is so inconvenient and often dangerous that few bother — walking.
The claim I’d like to explore: Locomotion is a critical piece of cognition, and modern humans of the American mold often haven’t a clue how much better they’d think, create, and problem-solve with strategically employed walking as a cognitive enhancer so effective it makes coffee seem like a placebo pill.
An Ancient Thought Elevator
“We should take wandering outdoor walks so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing.” — Seneca, On the Tranquility of Mind
For a scientific genius, Charles Darwin gave a surprisingly large amount of attention to walking paths.
He planned a ring of trails around his estate at Down House, oversaw its construction, and planted it with the trees and shrubs he wanted to walk through. Soon, these trails were an integral part of his days.
Stuck on a scientific problem? He often went out walking till he cracked it. Later, annoyed when rainy weather turned his paths into mud pits and kept him from thinking straight, he upgraded them into four-season affairs with gravel.
But the father of evolution’s devotion to better thinking through walking was hardly original and stretches back at least as far as antiquity.
Socrates strolled around Athens with his friends, hashing out interesting ideas.
Stoicism’s founder, Zeno, lectured students while pacing under the painted murals of the Stoa Poikile, a kind of long, covered arcade.
Aristotle’s school, the Lyceum, was so heavily connected with walk-thinking that its adherents became known as peripatetics after their outdoor gymnasium’s peripatoi "walkways."
Walking’s connection to better thinking and problem-solving endured through the Middle Ages and into the 20th century. Then came the car.
A Land Without Walking
"Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow."
— Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Aug. 19, 1851
Humans have domesticated themselves. We’re an indoor species now, and like pampered and pudgy lap dogs, we’re reluctant to stir from our cushions and hoof it. While working and commuting, we like to sit. Many defer walk-shopping at the grocery store, or any store, and have things delivered.
For comparison:
The Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania, walks 13,000 — 19,000 steps per day.
The average American walks 3,000 — 4,700 steps per day, depending on the study.
If biologists found a group of pigeons flapping their wings 75% less than their neighbors because they’d invented rocketpacks, they’d assume major implications for the species. Decades of research has proven this about modern “sitting culture”. But concluding the harm ends with disease and obesity risk is a disastrous failure of imagination. Our brains are hobbled too.
Lacking an exercise urge to match our drives for food and sex probably isn’t a deal breaker. Our ancestors didn’t have one either.
But the Hadza will die unless they move, so they move. Americans needed to walk a lot as recently as the 1930s. Then we started building an ever-expanding guided cage called suburbia to insulate us from inconvenience and discomfort.
The tyrannical ease of the car, the lack of sidewalks, and the long stretches between home and everywhere else mean walking for utility or necessity is so inconvenient that it’s impracticable outside a few major cities and downtown cores.
But I’ve covered this in my piece on exercise, and you already know what suburbia is like.
Seventy years of bad zoning policy and stupid subsidies built our exercise-free sprawl towns. Even if those factors disappeared overnight and Americans started wanting something saner (they mostly don’t) it would take decades to fix things.
So we’re left with yet another societal bifurcation. The “cognitive elite,” — by which I mean anyone with ambition and some discipline — will realize what’s to be gained by returning to smart mode and find a way to make it work. Everyone else will cognitively stagnate because their environment won’t force them to move.
Dumb Mode and Smart Mode
Dumb Mode: Brain fog, failure to notice important things, reaching for a word without finding it, making stupid mistakes, inattention, and never having the plot/argument/thesis pieces click into place. You feel stagnant.
Smart Mode: Things click into place. Ideas appear from nowhere. The right “lead” for your writing unfurls in your mind halfway through a park walk. You spot the glitter of powerful nuance buried deep in commonplace ideas. You’re thinking clearly and it feels pleasurable and exciting.
Smart vs Dumb, Quantified:
"I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out." — Ernest Hemmingway, A Moveable Feast
Some of the best research on walking and creativity is from Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz at Stanford University.
In a series of experiments, they found 174 college students experienced 60% more creativity while walking than sitting, and that this creativity lasted for some time after they sat back down1.
Walking Works Anywhere:
Given nature’s well-known benefits, we might assume outdoor walking works better than indoor walking. It doesn’t seem to. The same research showed a person walking indoors – on a treadmill facing a blank wall – and walking outdoors in the fresh air produced twice as many creative responses as a person sitting down, but there was no significant difference between them.
Acute and Long-Term Benefit
Walking creates creativity spikes that last for a time after returning to seated work, but there’s a more subtle long-term cognitive benefit from walking and other exercise persisting after exercise stops2. This may work via another pathway, such as improved health. Both acute and chronic exercise seem to improve attention and idea generation3, but acute cranks things up for specific tasks. It can be used like a stimulant to make cognitively demanding tasks easier.
Memory:
In a study of undergraduate actors, a few minutes of instruction on walking around and “acting out,” their role while memorizing lines lead them to remember 76% of their lines. Those who sat down recalled only 37%, suggesting that information is better remembered when we’re moving, and perhaps when integrating physical cues into the memories4.
Noticing:
The chief job of radiologists is noticing. There’s an image of a body part on their monitor, and if they spot abnormalities they save lives.
If radiologists could take a pill to spot more life-threatening abnormalities, hospital systems would pay lots of money for them. One pilot study suggests that the pill might be a treadmill5.
A year after interpreting 100 images while seated, two radiologists reexamined them while walking at 1 mph on a treadmill. The first radiologist’s mean detection rate was 99.0% while walking and 88.9% while seated. The second radiologist’s mean detection rate 99.1% for the walking technique and 81.3% while seated. Several other studies have found treadmill and peddle workstations outperformed seated work6.
However, other studies have only found an increase in work speed for treadmill walkers, but no spike in mean detection, and some participants find it harder to type and use a mouse while walking.
My experience is that I do better actual work while seated after walking than while walking, but I consider that opinion tentative and the science unsettled.
Kick Your Mind Into High Gear
I find idea generation, problem-solving, and the dissipation of brain fog/inattention while walking to be the most valuable benefit. Often, I need to scribble notes to myself so I don’t forget. I take these ideas and my clearer thinking and bring them to my seated work.
A Few Suggestions:
The 15:30 minute rule: If you’re stuck on your work for 15 minutes, go for a 30-minute walk. Repeatedly hurling yourself against cognitive brick walls is usually a waste when solutions so often pop into our heads while we walk. We save time by wasting time.
Prime the work: Priming a session of work with walking works well for me. But for whatever reason, I find my mind is already primed for good work first thing after waking. I tend to use walk-priming later in the day.
Minding the problem: You won’t be as effective at solving problems if you’re listening to a podcast while walking or otherwise distracted. I suggest spending at least a significant chunk of the walk letting your mind play over what you’re working on.
Running vs walking: I find slow walking to be frustrating and it doesn’t do much for my thinking, though the scientific evidence suggests it should. This may have to do with relative fitness levels. On the other hand, ramping up to running speeds also doesn’t seem to work. See my notes on running here7.
Carry: Rucking with weight in a backpack is a great way to improve thinking while getting in a more significant workout.
A World Made For Sitting:
Our world isn’t set up for walking and movement; we’re supposed to stay still and behave. Though it wasn’t the intention, the modern status quo is designed for stagnancy. If you want your mind to work well, you may have to fight an uphill battle.
Most employers don’t want workers disappearing for walks as they hash out problems. They want asses in seats where they can be monitored. Similarly, school recess time is dwindling throughout the US, and this likely hurts student performance.
I have no great answers for a society intent on staying in dumb mode. All I know is that when I can’t move my mind is a shell of what it can be. If I want to thrive, I’ve got to go walking.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
If you enjoyed this article, please like and share it, which helps more readers find my work.
Oppezzo M, Schwartz DL. Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2014 Jul;40(4):1142-52.
Bollimbala A, James PS. Impact of chronic physical activity on individuals' creativity. Psychol Res. 2024 Mar;88(2):684-694.
Rominger, C. et al. Acute and Chronic Physical Activity Increases Creative Ideation Performance: A Systematic Review and Multilevel Meta-analysis. Sports Med - Open 8, 62 (2022).
Noice H, Noice T. Learning dialogue with and without movement. Mem Cognit. 2001 Sep;29(6):820-7.
L. Fidler, Robert L. Feasibility of Using a Walking Workstation During CT Image Interpretation. Journal of the American College of Radiology, Volume 5, Issue 11, 2008.
Frodsham KM, et al. Does type of active workstation matter? A randomized comparison of cognitive and typing performance between rest, cycling, and treadmill active workstations. PLoS One. 2020 Aug 7;15(8):e0237348.
Running Isn’t A Panacea
Multitaskers will read this piece and think: “Running is simply walking done fast, and it’s so much better. I’ll get it done in half the time and with twice the benefit!”
I spent most of my twenties doing long-distance running, maxing out at 32 miles in one go, and while I liked the relaxation it brought and several other benefits, It never generated many creative ideas or allowed me to solve problems like walking does
In his book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami reached a similar conclusion:
“As I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”
Scientists call Murakami’s void “transient hypofrontality,” or a temporary diminishment of activity in the frontal region of the brain responsible for planning, analyzing, and critiquing, and general thinking. Intense physical activity temporarily ramps down this part of the brain, and that often feels glorious. The state may be similar to what’s achieved during drug trips. But there’s no rich body of evidence showing that it helps with cognition like walking does. Your mileage may vary.
My 103-year-old stepfather still says that movement is most important, and takes short walks.
Much of my book was composed while I was hiking and then written down once I returned.
In the pre-email era, I found a good way to insert walking into my working day was to hand-deliver my memos. The walking and the serendipitous interactions helped my thinking.