By 
Marily Oppezzo's TEDxStanford talk, "Want to be more creative? Go for a walk," has always felt close to home. I can't say whether I started walking to think before I heard it or after, but the habit is real. Recently, before moving to Germany, I walked through my favorite park in my hometown one last time. My thoughts had been racing about planning, the new home, the goodbyes, and a question I still ask myself about whether this is the right choice. The walk helped me see that I wasn't in a rush and that everything was in its place. When I got back, I did the things I needed to do one by one. It also helped me come up with the idea to finally write about research I had saved a long time ago: the study behind that talk.
One walk proves nothing. But whether walking changes how many new ideas we have is exactly what two Stanford researchers tested in 2014, and the answer is more specific than "yes."
What the 60 percent actually counted
Sixty percent is the kind of number that ends up on scientific posters. Before it gets there, it is worth asking what it counted.
The paper is "Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking" by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. It reports four experiments. In the first, 48 students did thinking tasks twice: once seated, and once walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall, at a comfortable pace of their own choosing. No view to inspire anyone. If ideas showed up, the scenery could not take the credit.
The main task was Guilford's alternate uses test: list unusual uses for an everyday object. Take a button. In the paper, one participant's answers included a doorknob for a dollhouse. The authors counted every idea, then filtered them for appropriate uses, then for uses that nobody else in the sample had thought of. The famous 60 percent is their summary of the average rise in creative output while walking, after those filters. The plain number of ideas rose by about half, from an average of 22 seated to 33 walking. Still a good result for anyone who has ever stared at a button and come up with "a button."
Could it be the scenery, then, or the fresh air?
The other three experiments went after that objection. The boost lingered when people sat down after a walk. It held indoors and out. And in the fourth experiment, which crossed sitting and walking with indoors and outdoors, walking drove more novel, high-quality analogies whether or not people were outside. One group was pushed in a wheelchair along the same campus route as the outdoor walkers: same scenery, no steps. Walking outside did come out on top. The paper says it "produced the most novel and highest quality analogies." But walking indoors was close behind, and the treadmill facing a blank wall worked too. So the view seems to add something, but the walking does most of the work.
The task walking made worse
Here is the detail that tends to get dropped: the same first experiment included the compound remote associates test, in which you find the single word that links three others: cottage, Swiss and cake. The answer is cheese. Walking lowered correct answers on that task (effect size d = 0.38), while lifting performance on the alternate uses task (d = 0.70).
That split is the heart of the science. The alternate uses test rewards divergent thinking: wide, open-ended, a little messy. The remote associates test rewards convergent thinking, the narrowing toward one right answer. Walking helped with the mess and slightly got in the way of the narrowing. A fair deal if the job is brainstorming, and a poor one if the job is finding the single right answer. Oppezzo put the limit plainly in Stanford's release on the study:
"We're not saying walking can turn you into Michelangelo. But it could help you at the beginning stages of creativity."
Why a walk might loosen ideas, and why nobody can say
Why would movement loosen one kind of thinking and not the other?
Confident brain explanations are easy to find. Tested ones are not.
The 2014 authors say their experiments ruled out alternatives without isolating a mechanism, and they list open questions: whether it is walking itself, other mild activity, or the mind-freeing quality of a comfortable, undemanding task such as knitting.
A 2022 meta-analysis of physical activity and creative ideation, published in Sports Medicine - Open, suggests several possible explanations: better mood, less stress, changes in blood flow and in neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine, changes in BDNF, and shifts in activity in brain networks including the default mode network. The authors note that no study has yet confirmed that positive mood is what mediates the link. They discuss these ideas for physical activity in general, not for walking specifically.
For a neuroscience story, that's an unusual place to end up: the effect looks real enough to study, and the reason is still an open question.
Marily Oppezzo, the study's lead author, describes the walking research in her TEDxStanford talk.
Has it held up?
A result from one lab invites the obvious question: does it happen again?
A 2026 meta-analysis in PLOS One pooled 23 studies from 16 articles, covering 1,036 participants. It found a large effect of walking on divergent thinking (d = 0.93, with a wide confidence interval running from 0.44 to 1.42) and no significant effect on convergent thinking (d = 0.16). The studies differed a lot from one another, and the interval is wide. The authors also point out that many of the positive studies came from one researcher, Oppezzo, with similar designs, flag a possible risk of systematic bias, and recommend replication to strengthen the case.
Oppezzo has since shrunk the movement. In a 2025 paper in the Journal of Educational Psychology with Schwartz and colleagues, 32 sixth-graders and 43 seventh-graders took part in two studies. Students free to fidget on a rocking stool produced more novel ideas than students told to sit still, with no difference in a memory task. The second study was cut short by COVID-19 school closures, which the authors name as a limitation. Movement still made a significant overall difference to novel ideas, but the comparisons between individual conditions fell just short of significance.
Where the pacers come in
That leaves a question people often ask.
What about the people who pace?
It is a lovely idea that pacing counts as thinking. The studies never asked. Participants in the 2014 experiments walked on a treadmill or a campus path. No experiment tested pacing, and none tested whether restlessness explains the effect. The Stanford release invites readers to remember times they paced to drum up ideas, but that is an aside, not a finding. What the research supports is narrower: walking at a comfortable pace, compared with sitting.
So should you take a walk before your next brainstorm?
In small experiments and in pooled analyses, walking went with more ideas on open-ended tasks, and the effect seems to last for a short while after you sit down. That is a fair reason to take a walk before brainstorming.
The studies do not show that walking improves focused problem solving, which it slightly lowered in the first experiment. They do not explain the brain process behind the boost, they have not tested solitary walks (the authors list that as an open question), and they say nothing about why some people pace while they think.
As for my walk in the hometown park, so far it remains a study with one participant and no control condition.
And you? Do your best ideas turn up when you're sitting still, or when you're on the move?
Sources:
- Oppezzo & Schwartz, Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2014.
- Thabane et al., The impact of walking on creative thinking: A systematic review and meta-analysis, PLOS One, 2026.
- Rominger et al., Acute and Chronic Physical Activity Increases Creative Ideation Performance: A Systematic Review and Multilevel Meta-analysis, Sports Medicine – Open, 2022.
- Stanford University, Stanford study finds walking improves creativity (news release), 2014.
