In
his new book, The
Geography of Genius,
Eric Weiner proposes that genius is not something resident in an
individual but rather the product of certain conditions in the
person's social, political and physical environment – their
geography. One of the common threads for geography and genius in
Weiner's findings is walking. Charles Dickens walked through London
at night working on plots, Mark Twain was known as a constant pacer.
Many of Greece's most important philosophers walked to the Agora,
into life and chaos, which fed the imagination.
There
is, in fact a wonderful book which documents the role of walking in
the life and work of centuries of great Western minds. A
Philosophy of Walking
is a fascinating work by Frederic Gros. He writes:
Walking
is not sport. Sport is a discipline, "an ethic, a labour".
It is a performance. Walking, on the other hand, is the best way to
go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found. If you
want to go faster, don't walk. Do something else: drive, slide, fly.
The study found that walking indoors or outdoors similarly boosted creative inspiration. The act of walking itself, and not the environment, was the main factor. Across the board, creativity levels were consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting.
"Many people anecdotally claim they do their best thinking when walking. We finally may be taking a step, or two, toward discovering why," Oppezzo and Schwartz wrote in the study published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
Weiner
was interviewed on CBC's The Current a few days ago. Hear the
interview here:
The
Stanford article is here:
Yours
, on the journey,
Ray
In
every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks ~John Muir
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