ΛNDRΞS ILVΞS

6 things a neurologist does to keep his brain healthy washingtonpost.com/wellness/2026/…

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.

heatwave hits 31°C and London transport descends into chaos again. Packed platforms, blocked entrances, unbearable tube temperatures ( dinendra_haria )

#OnThisDay in 1988: Section 28 became law. Passed under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, it banned local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” and stopped schools from teaching that same-sex relationships were acceptable as a “pretended family relationship”. For years, it helped fuel fear, silence and shame around LGBT people in classrooms, councils and public life. Teachers were left scared to support gay pupils. Young people grew up without proper representation. And a whole generation was told, by law, that their lives and families were somehow less valid. Here is Margaret Thatcher speaking in 1987, the year before Section 28 became law, claiming children were being taught they had “an inalienable right to be gay”. Section 28 became one of the most notorious and damaging laws of the Thatcher era. It was finally repealed in Scotland in 2000, and in England and Wales in 2003.

Jacob Collier is a once in a generation talent who is not only a phenomenal musician, song writer and composer, but a man for our time. We are blessed to have him. If you don’t know who he is, you should, you life will be better for his presence. Oh did I mention he’s a Brit? TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRnScjjR/

Dc black pride is actually the FIRST black pride to ever happen .. & For those of you visiting here’s a video of how dc black pride came to be if any one cares

Source: The Artful Parent share.google/s9uvkKZfJm7sc9…

London Underground station flooding has reportedly been reduced by around 90% thanks to a group of engineers: beavers. After conservationists reintroduced a family of beavers into a nearby city park, the animals built dams and restored wetlands that now absorb and slow floodwater naturally. Authorities had planned major man-made flood infrastructure, but the beavers effectively created their own system — while also boosting biodiversity and restoring the ecosystem around them.

This world map reminds us of the multitude of languages that humans created to communicate with each other. Today we estimate that about 25 languages die every year. Fewer modes of human expression...

London 👏👏👏

I will explain and clarify anything

“Books that make you dumb” is a gloriously silly old dataviz by Virgil Griffith, linking favourite books listed on Facebook to average SAT scores. Lolita and 100 Years of Solitude score high. James Patterson scores low. Terry Pratchett fans win. Remember: Correlation, not causation. Don’t burn your beach reads (or The Bible).

This simple gif shows the effect of the Mercator projection on the real size of continents and countries on a planisphere [🎞️ Jakub Nowosad]

Words matter. They especially matter when talking about likelihoods. As it turns out we have different ideas what type of likelihood we link with certain descriptors. Source: jcom.sissa.it/article/pubid/…

https://sxswlondon.comsession/relay-mindset-what-london-can-learn-from-the-estonian-scene-6a87fe34

Another great graphic by @ryanburge shows how different religious groups in the US answer the question about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex. Here's when the "not wrong at all" crossed the "always wrong" line: Evangelicals: Never Mainline: 2009 Black Protestant: 2023 Catholic: 2009 Other Faith: 2000 No Religion: 1992