How a few minutes’ exercise can unleash creativity – even if you hate it

Can exercise boost creativity? Illustration: Tim Bouckley/The Guardian

If you often find yourself dawdling away the day, frustrated that your brain won’t click into gear, then the answer to your mind’s logjam may well actually lie in your legs. Need to get your creative juices flowing? Get moving. A long line of influential thinkers have instinctively moved their bodies to open their minds, from Darwin, who advanced his theory of evolution while accumulating laps of his “thinking path”, to Nietzsche, who in 1888 warned: “Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.” And now scientists are not just confirming the link between exercise and creativity, but unpicking precisely how it works. In this investigation, Sam Pyrah speaks to the experts drawing ever-stronger links between physical exercise and creative output. “Even a single, brief bout of aerobic exercise can ignite creative thinking,” Dr Chong Chen of Yamaguchi University, Japan, tells her. Creative thinking can be divided into two aspects – the drawing of associations between unrelated things that is the creation of ideas, known as divergent thinking, and the weighing up of the value of such ideas, known as convergent thinking. Studies have demonstrated that the former is stimulated by everything from dancing and running to simply walking up stairs. As Amir-Homayoun Javadi, a reader in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Kent, explains: “When performed regularly, aerobic activity can trigger structural changes, such as increased brain volume, particularly of the hippocampus, which benefit many aspects of cognition. This gives the brain more potential to be creative.” + Read more: All it takes is a quick walk’: how a few minutes’ exercise can unleash creativity – even if you hate it