The short answer: walking does seem to help people come up with more ideas, but the evidence is narrower than "60% more creative." The best-known study, from Stanford, found a boost on a test of brainstorming-style divergent thinking and almost none on a test that has a single correct answer. The explanations usually given, such as the default mode network and a 15 to 20% rise in brain blood flow, weren't tested in that study.
What the Stanford study found
The research is a 2014 paper by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. It reports four experiments. In the first, adults did two kinds of tests while seated and then while walking on a treadmill. One was Guilford's alternate uses test, where you list as many creative uses as you can for an everyday object (divergent thinking). The other was the compound remote associates test, where you find the one word that links three others (convergent thinking). Walking increased creativity scores on the alternate uses test for 81% of participants, but increased scores on the remote associates test for only 23%. The authors' own conclusion was that walking benefits divergent, not convergent, thinking. The "around 60%" figure that circulates is the average increase in creative output on the alternate uses test in one experiment.
The later experiments added useful detail. Walking on an indoor treadmill also raised scores, and the people who sat down afterwards kept a residual boost. Across the three alternate-uses studies, 81%, 88% and 100% of participants did better walking than sitting. A fourth experiment, on generating analogies, found that walking outdoors produced the most novel and highest-quality analogies, and the authors concluded that the effects of walking and of outdoor stimulation were separable. So the earlier page's takeaway that walking itself matters, with outdoor scenery adding a separate benefit, is consistent with the paper.
What the study doesn't show
These were laboratory tasks. Listing alternate uses for a brick or a button is a standard measure of idea fluency, but it isn't the same as writing a book or solving a design problem, and we haven't seen evidence that the effect carries into real creative work. We also haven't read the paper for its sample sizes or how the order of conditions was handled, and a single research group's experiments are not the same as a body of replications. The sensible reading is that a walk is a cheap thing to try when you need ideas, not that it makes you 60% more creative. If your task has one right answer, the study suggests walking shouldn't be expected to help.
The explanations
The earlier page gave several reasons walking helps: that it activates the default mode network, that it raises blood flow to the brain by 15 to 20%, that it reduces self-criticism, and that its rhythm creates "cognitive flow." None of these was tested in the Stanford experiments, and we couldn't find a source for the 15 to 20% figure. The nearest finding we found is from a 2018 study in the Journal of Applied Physiology (Carter and colleagues) of 15 healthy desk workers, who sat for four hours either uninterrupted or with 2-minute light walking breaks every 30 minutes. Uninterrupted sitting lowered blood-flow velocity in the middle cerebral artery, and the frequent short walking breaks offset that decline. That says walking breaks protect against a sitting-related dip. It doesn't show that walking raises brain blood flow by 15 to 20%, or that blood flow explains creativity. For the sitting-break evidence in a different context, see walking and blood sugar.
History's great walkers
The stories about Darwin's gravel "sandwalk," Nietzsche's praise of thinking while walking, Beethoven's walks with a notebook, and Steve Jobs's walking meetings are well known. They are anecdotes, and they don't show that walking caused good ideas; people with time and freedom to work as they please often walk. The earlier page called them "independent discoveries of the exact mechanism modern neuroscience has since explained," and added that later research confirmed walking meetings produce better conversations. We haven't found a study that supports either statement, so we've dropped them.
How we'd use it
This part is opinion, though it follows from the study. Try a walk when you need to brainstorm, generate options or reframe a problem, and a different approach when you need to find the single correct answer. Go outdoors if you can, since the analogy experiment favoured it. Take a way to capture ideas, such as a voice memo, because they are easy to lose. Whether to leave podcasts at home is untested as far as we know, though audio with spoken words may compete with your own thinking. We haven't verified how long the walks in the experiments lasted, so we can't give you a number; the earlier page's "15 to 20 minutes" wasn't sourced. Walking meditation, walking and mental health and walking desks cover related ground.
Sources
- Oppezzo M, Schwartz DL. Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 2014;40(4):1142-1152. ERIC
- Carter SE, Draijer R, Holder SM, Brown L, Thijssen DHJ, Hopkins ND. Regular walking breaks prevent the decline in cerebral blood flow associated with prolonged sitting. Journal of Applied Physiology. 2018;125(3). physiology.org
Correction note: an earlier version of this page said walking increased creative output by an average of 60 percent compared with sitting without saying that this applied to divergent thinking only, said walking works through the default mode network, a 15 to 20 percent rise in brain blood flow and reduced self-criticism, said later research confirmed walking meetings, and recommended a 15 to 20 minute walk. We could not support those, so they were removed or corrected; the study's finding that convergent thinking was barely helped is now stated. We checked the figures against the published abstract and a summary of the paper on October 2, 2026, and did not read the full text, including the sample sizes. This is general information, not medical advice.