Ben Settle

I ain't exactly running a charity here

"How do I convince my family, who lived under Stalin, that the internet tells me communism is good?"

A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology. Her name is Marily Oppezzo. She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out. She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas. The result was almost too clean to publish. 81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving. The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself. Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held. Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving. The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything. This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time. She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse. Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one. When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up. The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other. When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking. The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving. You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state. The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs. Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path. Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet. Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed. Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot. Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it. The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks. Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to. The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes. The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it. And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.

That’s what @BenSettle did, except to the point that I have two different email addresses because people genuinely don’t know what my name is

Today’s newsletter reveals the unrestrained and wasteful token burn inside one publicly-traded company (Zillow) and breaks down the cold, hard truth that AI is - for hyperscalers, for AI labs, and for customers - simply too expensive to ever pay off. wheresyoured.at/ai-is-too-expe…

She killed his kid. He divorced her.

new girl

I like the way he does bid'niz

When the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson signed off in 1992, 55 Million of America's 250 Million people watched. (More than 1 in 5 Americans) Stephen Colbert's final show drew 6.7 Million out of 342 Million Americans (less than 2%) That's the difference between being an American institution and preaching to a small and dying liberal choir.

Meta is a failed state. Could be dead in a decade. Ad platform is a mess. Tons of fake views. Tens of millions of fake accounts, if not hundreds. Culture is awful. Software is falling apart. Boz Zuck and Mosseri share a single collective brain cell

Guess we have to give it yet another 2 years @FindJimClair

Ip Man taking on 10 black belts in Ip Man (2008) still hits like a shock the first time watching it. Donnie Yen moves with such precision and speed the fight almost stops feeling choreographed and starts feeling inevitable.

Hold up...what!?

Do you blame them? They voted for Trump and got $4.50 gas, an inflated grocery bill, bombs in Iran, and their local Walmart still feels like walking into a third-world country.

Some of you guys have been brainwashed into believing that influencers are living real lives. The truth is most of them are broke. Most of them have no savings whatsoever. The cars and their videos are rented or least and are about to be repossessed. The homes they live in are airbnbs or temporary rentals unless they actually have an actual lease in which case they are about to be evicted. Stop chasing around Lifestyles based on fake people!

@RightNerve Thing?

@BenSettle ... Lady?

Is this lady still living?

I like the way they do bid'niz

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Politics is a crazy game. They just lie about everything and see how many retards they can convince.