Editorial NexoScience
Albert Einstein took long walks around Princeton almost every day. Friedrich Nietzsche went further, writing that only the thoughts reached while walking have any real value. Neither man had any hard data to back up the claim, they just noticed it worked. A century later, science has finally gone looking for the evidence.
The case for walking as a creativity trigger now rests on real numbers, not just anecdotes from famous thinkers. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in PLOS One pooled 23 studies from 16 articles, covering 1,036 participants, most of them university students. Researchers searched PsycINFO, MEDLINE, Scopus and ProQuest, pre-registered their protocol with PROSPERO, and screened more than 5,600 unique citations before landing on the final set of studies.
Creativity, for scientists, actually splits into two separate skills. One is divergent thinking, the ability to generate a pile of novel, useful ideas, typically tested by asking people to list as many unusual uses as they can for an everyday object like a paperclip. The other is convergent thinking, the ability to sift through options and land on the single best or correct answer, tested with puzzles that only have one right solution. Most previous research lumped these together or only looked at divergent thinking. This review measured both separately.
Walking’s effect on generating new ideas turned out to be large. Across the studies, walking produced a Cohen’s d of 0.93 (95% confidence interval: 0.44 to 1.42) on divergent thinking, a size researchers classify as large. Translated into plain terms: the average person, right after a walk, tends to out-perform more than 80% of people who didn’t walk when it comes to generating original ideas. The effect held up even in a stricter sensitivity analysis that used only randomized controlled trials, where it measured d = 0.82 (95% CI: 0.35 to 1.28), very close to the main result.
It didn’t seem to matter much whether the walk happened indoors or outdoors. Walking outdoors produced a numerically larger effect (d = 1.19) than walking indoors on a treadmill (d = 0.92), but the difference wasn’t statistically significant (p = 0.676). The boost also showed up regardless of which creativity test was used, and regardless of whether the study compared different people (some walked, some sat) or the same people before and after walking.
But walking did nothing for the other kind of creative thinking. On convergent thinking, the ability to zero in on the single best solution, the pooled effect was small and not statistically significant (d = 0.16, 95% CI: -0.31 to 0.63), based on just 6 studies. The researchers rated this evidence as very low certainty. In practice, that means a walk might flood your head with new ideas, but it won’t necessarily help you decide which one is actually worth pursuing.
This is a rarer case where the evidence goes beyond simple correlation. Twelve of the 23 studies were randomized controlled trials, meaning researchers randomly assigned some participants to walk and others to sit, then compared results, a real controlled experiment rather than just an observed link. That’s stronger footing than most nutrition or lifestyle research gets. Even so, the authors flag real caveats: most participants were college students, which limits how well this generalizes to other ages and backgrounds; a large share of the strongest randomized evidence came from a single research team (Marily Oppezzo and colleagues), so independent replication still matters; and the studies varied enough from each other that researchers couldn’t fully explain why some found bigger effects than others.
The practical takeaway is refreshingly low-tech. None of this requires special equipment, a gym membership, or even much time. Several of the strongest trials used walks of 15 to 20 minutes, some even shorter, and plain treadmill walking worked about as well as strolling outside. The authors point to walking meetings, already shown to improve mood and productivity among office workers, as a simple way to put the finding to use before a brainstorming session.
Source: Thabane A, Arora V, et al. “The impact of walking on creative thinking: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” PLOS One, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0347878.
