Need to get your creative juices flowing? Get moving. A long line of influential thinkers have instinctively moved their bodies to open their minds, from Darwin, who advanced his theory of evolution while accumulating laps of his “thinking path”, to Nietzsche, who in 1888 warned: “Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.” And now scientists are not just confirming the link between exercise and creativity, but unpicking precisely how it works.
Often, when we hear about the benefits of physical activity, researchers are really referring to the benefits of fitness – the product of regular and repeated physical activity. But what’s interesting about creativity is that it appears to be enhanced through the very act of moving the body.
“Even a single, brief bout of aerobic exercise can ignite creative thinking,” says Dr Chong Chen, assistant professor in the department of neuroscience at Yamaguchi University, Japan, and author of a new review on the topic. How brief? One study that Chong was involved with looked at the effects of climbing four flights of stairs – an activity that took just a few minutes.
Alex McIntosh has seen that first-hand. He’s creative director of Create Sustain, a consultancy that helps businesses to be more sustainable. “I pretty much rely on running and walking to create space and clarity and to come up with ideas,” he says. “If I don’t exercise, I can really feel the difference. My body starts to feel sluggish and then my brain follows suit – I feel blocked and frustrated. Sometimes all it takes is a quick walk to knock that feeling on the head.”
Researchers generally look at two aspects of creativity. Coming up with ideas – drawing associations between diverse and unrelated things (think “apple falling to ground and gravitational theory”) – is classed as divergent thinking. Weighing up which ideas are worth pursuing requires a more controlled and deliberate mental process – a kind of narrowing in – known as convergent thinking. (Think “solving crossword clue”.)