思考与写作newyorker.com
为什么走路能帮助我们思考（2014）
Why Walking Helps Us Think (2014)
2014 — 2017，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
《纽约客》2014年的一篇文章，探讨散步为什么有助于思考：运动加快血液循环、有益大脑，离开书桌走进户外（尤其是绿地）也能让思绪更活跃。文章结合神经科学与心理学实验，谈论行走与创造力、写作之间的关系。
为什么经久不衰：它把一个几乎人人有体会却难以言说的日常经验——散步时思路更顺——放到科学与文学的聚光灯下，提醒我们离开屏幕、用身体带动大脑。
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走路的价值在于隔绝干扰、给坏想法留出被自己推翻的时间，并打断无效的思维惯性。
只有当不带手机等现代干扰物时，走路才有助于思考。走路对思考的主要好处，是让我们远离这些东西，也远离人群。任何想打扰我们思考的人，得先弄清楚我们在哪，再徒步找到我们，而经验表明这不会发生，除非事情十万火急。走路对解决编程和设计中的难题也有帮助：常常你冒出一个行不通的坏主意，却以为它很棒，而你还有二十分钟的路要走。如果坐在电脑前，你会喊一声“找到了！”然后就把这个坏主意写成代码；走路时你想写也写不了，于是在剩下的路上一直在脑子里反复琢磨它，等走完时你已经发现它错了。如果你陷入“不断试想法看哪个管用”的模式，而当前这个方法不太奏效，走路会在物理上把你从这种状态中拽出来，打破这个模式。
kazinator查看英文原文
Walking helps us think only if we don't bring any modern distraction such as a mobile device. The main advantage of walking with regard to thinking is that we are away from such things and also away from people. Anyone who wants to get a hold of us to distract our thinking first has to figure out where we are and then track us down on foot. Experience shows that this doesn't happen, unless it's a very, very urgent matter. Walking helps with difficult problems in coding and design. It helps because often when you get a bad idea that doesn't work, and you think it's actually a great idea, you still have twenty minutes left to walk. If you were sitting at the machine, you would be saying, "Eureka!" and coding the bad idea. If you're walking, you'd like to code the idea, but you can't; not yet. So you keep juggling the idea in your mind for the remainder of the walk, by which time you figure out that it was wrong. If you get into a mode where you're just trying ideas to see what works, and in the given situation that approach isn't working well (however well it might work at other times) walking will physically remove you from that and break the pattern.
有研究认为，大脑用处理真实地图的同一套认知机制（如心理地标）来处理抽象概念，为走路与思考的关联提供了认知科学解释。
我博士项目的一位同事今年带着相关研究进入就业市场，尤其涉及文章最后一段讨论的写作与行走之间的联系。简言之，他的理论和实验证据表明，我们用同样的认知机制处理真实地图和抽象地图。具体来说，他展示了我们常常有心理上的“地标”：他以数轴作为地图，认为整数就像地标，并证明我们处理公路旅行地标时已知的全部认知特征，在这些抽象地标上同样存在。在锚定与调整的情境下，他用纹理展示了同样的现象。在我看来，他的理论极有说服力，也解释了很多事情。随着环境变得更复杂，我们的大脑演化为用空间认知来处理抽象事物，这很合理。
jtraffic查看英文原文
"our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward" A colleague in my phd program went on the job market this year with research that is related to this, especially to the connection between writing and walking discussed in the final paragraph. In a nutshell, his theory and experimental evidence suggest that we use the same cognitive mechanisms to process real maps as we do abstract maps. In particular, he shows that we often have mental "landmarks." He focuses on number lines as maps, and suggests that the round numbers behave like landmarks. He shows that all of the known cognitive signatures of the way we process landmarks on, say, a road-trip are present for these abstract landmarks. He shows the same thing with textures in the context of anchoring and adjusting (we anchor on an initial texture and use it as a cognitive landmark.) To me, his theory is extremely compelling and explains a lot. It makes sense that our brains, as our environments have become more complex, have adapted to use spatial cognition to process the abstract. EDIT: Here is a link to his CV: http://marketingphdjobs.org/sites/default/files/Gaurav%20Jain_CV.pdf. The paper I'm talking about is called "Presence of Numerical Landmarks and Their Effects on Judgments." He hasn't posted it on the web, I'll see if I can get a copy from him and post it (if he's ok with me doing so.)
文章把走路的好处归因于心率提高缺乏依据，论证冗长且不令人信服。
即便对《纽约客》来说，这篇文章也冗长得反常。它的核心意思似乎只是“心率提高”，却没有真正引用研究来证明，听起来有点荒谬。心率提高与创造性思维并没有可靠关联——看恐怖片或色情片也会提高心率，但我没听说谁觉得那是思考的黄金时刻。而且跑步能更快提高心率，可人们通常觉得跑步比走路更累、更不费脑子。另一方面，很多好的创意恰恰产生在浴缸里，而那是静止不动的。我本猜想走路有助于思考，是因为它让我们离开问题正前方，也离开干扰，但我真希望文章能给出这方面的科学依据。知道有些心理测试在走路时某些人会稍差一点挺有意思，开头纳博科夫的引语也很有趣（虽然和文章毫无关系），但我就是……不满意。
drostie查看英文原文
This is an unusually verbose article even for the New Yorker. The TL;DR appears to be simply "increased heart rate," with no real citations to prove it. And it just sounds a bit absurd. Increased heart rates don't have a reliable correlation with creative thought. You can increase your heart rate by watching a scary movie or pornography, but nobody that I know of reports those being prime thinking times. Moreover, you can raise your heart rate even more by running, but people generally think of running as more exhausting and less intellectual than walking. Meanwhile lots of good creative thinking happens in a bathtub, which is sedentary. I would have guessed that walking helps us think because it gets us to a position where our problem isn't directly in front of us, nor are our distractions. But I was really hoping to instead get some science about that sort of thing. I mean, I guess it's cool to know that there are some mental tests which some people are slightly worse at when walking, and the Nabokov quote at the beginning was quite interesting even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the article, but I'm just left... unsatisfied.
批评文章的统计数据缺乏基准、任务不具代表性，走路未必特殊。
我完全支持走路，也觉得它确实有助于我思考，无论创造性还是其他方面。但文章里“平均而言，学生们走路时比坐着时多想到4到6种物体的新用途”这句话，是极差的伪科学写作的典型。它没有说明两组各自平均想到多少种用途，所以这个数字制造出有意义的假象，实际上毫无意义。如果平均值是5，那翻倍大概有意义；如果平均值是25，那这点差异连一个标准差都不到。同样值得追问的是，文中提到的各种任务有多大代表性。我个人从没遇到过需要“想出某日常物品的许多新用途”的问题，也一时想不出哪个现实中的创造性任务对应这种练习（不过也许我去散个步就能想到……）。同样，“找出一个能统摄一组词语的词”这种事我也从没做过，尽管我是个发表过作品的诗人。文章也没有任何内容表明走路特别特殊。划独木舟和帆船也是我觉得有助思考的事。我可以猜测原因（大概是让身体和心智以某种恰好够分心的方式参与，从而解放思维、看到其他可能路径？），但另一方面，我的猫常常在我还不想起床时把我弄醒，那十到十五分钟……
tjradcliffe查看英文原文
I'm all for walking and find it does help my thinking, creative and otherwise, but the line in the article "On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated" is an example of extremely bad faux-science writing. There is no mention of how many uses either group thought of, so that number creates the impression of meaning while actually being completely meaningless. Was the average number 5? Then doubling it is probably meaningful. Was the average number 25? Then it's barely a one sigma effect. It's also worth asking how representative the various tasks mentioned are. I have never personally been faced with a problem where thinking of many novel uses for an every-day object has come up, and I can't offhand think of any real-world creative task that such an exercise maps to (although maybe if I go for a walk one will come to me...) Likewise, finding a word that unites a group of terms is something I've never done, even though I'm a published poet. There's nothing in the article that suggests walking is particularly special, either. Canoeing and sailing are also things I find helpful for thinking. I can speculate as to why (something about engaging the body and mind in a way that is just distracting enough to free the mind and let it see alternative paths forward?) but on the other hand, my cat often wakes me up a bit before I'm quiet ready to get out of bed, and that ten or fifteen minutes of lying in bed not quite awake are also very productive, mentally. Talking to people about such things, or even reading the comments here, these are not rare phenomena. So studies of this kind should not confine themselves to walking/not-walking but look at a wider range of activities and ideas.
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