Michael Zoltowski

Thrill to meet Megan Moroney @_megmoroney who performed an awesome set last night at the @ruoffmusicenter opening up for @kennychesney ! So talented & such a great songwriter! ACM New Female Artist of the Year for 2024 & CMT Female Breakthrough Video for 2023! @lexkielczynski

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.

@unseen1_unseen Yes, this was ridiculous!

Where was the outrage by these people when: "The (Biden) Justice Department has agreed to pay a total of $2 million to settle legal claims brought by former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page over the DOJ’s release of text messages the pair exchanged."

Sorrento is the kind of Italian town that makes you understand the obsession with the Amalfi Coast. Lemon groves, cliffside views, old streets, and sunsets over the Bay of Naples all make it hard to leave.

📍 Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany 🇩🇪

@carolmswain Thinking of you today! You are greatly appreciated!

May 20th was not the first time I testified before Congress. My 2010 appearance was memorable as well.

Los Angeles, 15-year-old Clara Daly from California, was travelling with her mom. A flight attendant asked if anyone knew sign language. Clara, who had studied ASL for about a year, volunteered. The passenger was 64-year-old Tim Cook, who is deaf and blind, flying alone. Clara knelt in the aisle and fingerspelled into his hand to communicate. She helped him order water, check the time, and speak with the crew. For the rest of the long flight, she stayed with him, chatting until landing and bringing comfort to his journey.

Here it is: A seditious conspiracy to disrupt the official proceedings of the United States Congress and the overthrow of the United States government. 🚨Newly hidden FBI documents released by @FBIDirectorKash CONFIRM: Not only did the FBI staged January 6 five months before it even happened the DNC planned —to overthrow the United States government on January 6. A memo shows the FBI conducted a secret “January 6 tabletop exercise” in the summer of 2020 — embedding 274 undercover agents and informants, including rehearsing post-Jan. 6 mass prosecutions of Americas 5 months before it even occurred. @jsolomonReports The FBI’s Boston office ran a secret tabletop exercise in August 2020. It included embedded informants — 274 undercover FBI agents — and even planned “mass prosecutions,” including for minor offenses, the very same tactics later used against Jan. 6 defendants. —— B: The DNC’s plan—to overthrow the United States government: Top DNC officials—including former chair Donna Brazile and Pizzaman John Podesta—discussed how to overthrow the U.S. government if Trump won. The exact phrase was: “Provoke a breakdown on January 6 to disrupt the proceedings and prevent the vote from going through.” @MikeBenzCyber “All of the major DNC apparatchiks, including Donna Brazile, the former head of the DNC, and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager—who was later promoted to a $375 billion slush fund inside the Biden White House—planned a simulation about how to overturn the election results if Trump won, in, quote, ‘a clear Trump win.’ “As part of that plan, they planned to—I think the exact phrase was—‘provoke a breakdown on January 6 to disrupt the proceedings and prevent the vote from going through.’ “The addendum to that war-game exercise, called Will Trumpism Survive Trump Even if He Loses?, clearly laid out a necessity to create a predicate to go after Trump’s entire base—to, quote, ‘demobilize them, that they won’t automatically demobilize on their own.’ Some legal predicate was deemed necessary to target the entire base.” “They already had the instruments in place in the event that Trump had won the election, and then when it looked like Trump was contesting things in court, it looked like the country was not buying what was happening with these mail-in ballots. They said, We already have the assets in place. We already have military assets going to the walkway entrance. We already have back channels with Nancy Pelosi and Mark Milley, so we can use this to take down Trump. In other words, they overthrew the United States government at exactly 4:30 in the morning on November 4th after they deliberately stopped counting—followed by a 138,000-ballot dump (138,000 for Biden, 0 for Trump)—and they rehearsed the ‘overthrow of the United States government’ five months before it even happened.” Now, designate every single member of the January 6 Committee as domestic enemies of the United States.

🚨 The real masterminds and backstage geniuses behind the rose petals falling from the Pantheon’s oculus on Pentecost Sunday? The Rome firefighters! Italy at its finest 🇮🇹🔥

How a mother of triplets has to sneak out of the house 😂❤️❤️❤️

Today at noon thousands of red rose petals will flutter down through the oculus of the Pantheon in Rome. This spectacular tradition is held each year on the feast of Pentecost.

WIBC spoke with WIBC as @IndianaFever guard Lexie Hull was stepping onto the red carpet

19,000 ballots were officially counted from ONE ballot drop box over a 3-day weekend, but surveillance video shows only 24 people repeatedly approaching and stuffing ballots at that specific location during the Georgia 2020 election. The margin of victory in Georgia was less than 12,000 votes. Stuffing ballot boxes and harvesting are felonies. This is clear evidence of coordinated fraud. The Georgia 2020 election was stolen.

The Boilermakers band is Indy 500 ready 🙌

"Drivers to your cars!" Gainbridge℠ Ambassador Caitlin Clark gives the command for the 110th running of the Indy 500 🗣️

Lexie Hull live from the #Indy500 red carpet 🤳

A man or women should never be incarcerated on false testimony.. The officer did taunt , provoke and strike me in the head, ALL caught on the security camera, all denied by the officer at trial ,, he never wanted to press charges on me. !!!!!! A week after j6 when asked by a MPD det. why he didnt report the incident or any injuries related to the incident,, the officer responded " i dont recall the incident" BOOM !!!! ,,,, my case went from active to suspended a week after j6 ... Ref. My case, UNTIL The scum/DOJ picked it up. They had the officer on the ropes ,, he was involved in a questionable fatal shooting .. The security video wasnt revealed to me until a year and a half after the j6 ,, three days before the trial would begin ... Dont ever criticize third world countries FEDERAL justice systems we have a rotten apple right here ,, your constutional rights are gone !!! I could go on and on ,, i never struck him ,, i defended myself and others, most importantly I forgive the officer for his perjured testimony that almost put in jail for 17 years ( thats what the scum/DOJ wanted to give me , im grateful to judge Mehta for reducing that sentence to 10 years ,,, if u know the "FEDS" u know that no one gets a break like that Never ...... My trial was like a monty python movie,, what a joke .... Thank you tim ,, and other patriotic j6ers ,, Sign - Big brother can't brain wash everyone...

on location with Caitlin Clark at the #Indy500 🙌

My favorite photo from yesterday: A powerful sight as the latest iteration of Starship climbs through Texan skies. Captured via a sound-triggered camera, this camera captured the chaotic scene far better than I could from a safe distance. Prints available in the reply.

Caitlin has arrived for the Indy500!

Taylor Swift made one young fan’s night inside Rocket Arena after stopping to snap a photo at halftime #cavs #letemknow #taylorswift