Does walking help you think? Absolutely, I would say!  In my experience, walking gets the mental juices flowing.  Problems sometimes get reframed on a walk.  Or a new question pops out at me.  I walk for the exercise, but equally because it turbo-charges the way I think.  Or is it that walking physically calms me down so that I don’t get in my own way? Exercise is suggested for people like me who sometimes seem to struggle with ADD. My own routine is 10,000 steps per day, usually divided up into 2 or 3 sessions of walking.  My Fitbit keeps me honest (about both my walking and my sleeping).

Jeremy DeSilva’s “On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking” perambulates the topic of walking and thinking. He begins with the story of Charles Darwin, who took many walks along his “D” shaped path. Then he moves on to the science. Here’s an excerpt:

A group of Stanford students were asked to list as many creative uses for common objects as they could. A Frisbee, for example, can be used as a dog toy, but it can also be used as a hat, a plate, a bird bath, or a small shovel. The more novel uses a student listed, the higher the creativity score. Half the students sat for an hour before they were given their test. The others walked on a treadmill. The results were staggering. Creativity scores improved by 60 percent after a walk.

Wow! Here’s one more: Half of 65 couch-potatoes were put a moderate exercise routine (treadmill walking 3 times per week). The result? “[T]he walkers had significantly improved connectivity in regions of the brain understood to play an important role in our ability to think creatively.”

So get out there and take a walk! Perhaps the cheapest form of exercise–and it might get your brain revving.