Jobs’s constant roaming wasn’t just about a love of the outdoors or physical exercise. The late Apple boss intuited something that neuroscience is now proving — walking makes your brain work a little bit better, helping you crack problems that stumped you while sitting. (View Highlight)
That’s why at least one modern neuroscientist recommends we all make like Jobs and follow the 10-minute rule: If you haven’t solved a tough mental problem after 10 minutes of trying, stand up and go for a walk. (View Highlight)
Brains aren’t like muscles, she explains. If you do a physical job like screwing in widgets on an assembly line, you can just push your muscles to keep screwing in widgets until they become fatigued. More effort generally leads to more results.
But for jobs where we rely more on our brains than our muscles, this more-is-more approach often backfires. Sure, for routine busywork, heads-down focus is often best. You do not need to be creative to power through emails. Just sit at your desk and get it done. (View Highlight)
Whenever you have to come up with a new idea or solve a problem, however, you need a more open, loose mental state where your mind can make novel connections and discover paths around obstacles. Just sitting there struggling for long periods of time leads to frustration, not eureka moments. (View Highlight)
Taking a walk “keeps you in the right alert mental state, so you don’t just drift off, you don’t just fall asleep, or feel lethargic, or [look] at your phone. But at the same time, it keeps your attention moving, because your surroundings are moving while you walk, so your attention can’t really fix on anything. So it drifts into your head and explores your problems and tries to solve them from different avenues,” she says. (View Highlight)
Walking nudges you to think about many new things. But it also blocks you from thinking obsessively about any single idea.
“You can’t ruminate, because your attention can’t stick to one problem for too long because you also have to pay attention to where you’re walking,” Storoni continues. (View Highlight)
When you go for a walk, you physically move through the landscape, paying light attention to your surroundings so you don’t crash into a streetlight or fall in a pothole. Which encourages your mind to pay light attention to various thoughts and ideas passing through it, too. And that, it turns out, is the ideal mental state for coming up with new ideas. (View Highlight)
