To Be More Creative, Let Your Body Lead the Way

These physical experiences will nudge your brain into a more creative state.

Why do we get our most creative ideas while going for a walk, or while taking a shower? Scientific research has generated some potential answers. Studies suggest that the increased blood flow to the brain that we experience while walking may sharpen our thinking. And a recent study on the so-called “shower effect” finds that moderately engaging activities like showering promote creativity by permitting just the right amount of mind-wandering (we have to pay some attention to what we’re doing, but we don’t need to focus so intently that daydreaming is pushed aside).

There’s another possibility that’s worth considering: a notion that goes by the name “embodied creativity.” Activities like going for a walk or taking a shower—among other creativity-promoting pursuits—may exert their effect by triggering a a deeply ingrained but mostly unconscious mental metaphor for creativity.

Laboratory experiments have demonstrated how this might work, showing that people can be placed in a creative state of mind by physically acting out creativity-related figures of speech—for example, “thinking outside the box.” 

Psychologist Angela K.-y. Leung and her colleagues designed an experiment in which participants were asked to solve a problem that required creative thinking. Some participants carried out the assignment while sitting inside a five-foot-square cardboard box; others completed the task while sitting next to the box. The participants who did their thinking literally “outside the box” came up with a list of creative solutions that was, on average, 20 percent longer than the list produced by those who brainstormed inside the box.

Leung and her coauthors also tested the generative effect of enacting another metaphor: the use of the phrase “on one hand . . . on the other hand” to convey the consideration of multiple possibilities. This time, participants were asked to come up with novel uses for a new building complex; half of them were asked to hold one hand outstretched as they engaged in brainstorming, while the others were instructed to alternate holding out one hand and then the other. The study subjects who (unwittingly) acted out the metaphor “on the one hand . . . on the other hand” generated nearly 50 percent more potential uses for the building, and independent judges rated their ideas as more varied and more creative.

Such experiments suggest that we can activate a particular cognitive process by embodying the metaphor that has come to be associated with it. And—fear not—we don’t have to carry out the somewhat stilted exercises described above in order to reap the benefits of embodied creativity. 

Simply moving the body through space is itself a loose kind of metaphor for creativity: for new angles and unexpected vistas, for fluid thinking and dynamic change. The activation of this metaphor may help account for the finding that people are more creative during and after walking than when they are sitting still.

Think about the words we use when we can’t seem to muster an original idea—we’re “stuck,” “in a rut”—and those we reach for when our creative work is going well. Then we’re “on a roll,” our thoughts are “flowing.” The language we use is full of metaphors that borrow from our experience as embodied creatures; metaphorical movements reverse-engineer this process, inducing the body to make metaphor-evoking motions as a way of prodding the mind into the state the metaphor describes. 

“Moving the body can alter the mind by unconsciously putting ideas in our head before we are able to consciously contemplate them on our own,” the cognitive scientist Sian Beilock has written. “Getting a person to move lowers his threshold for experiencing thoughts that share something in common with the movement.”

Give these embodied experiences a try, and see how they influence your state of mind:

1. Create an experience of fluidity. Psychologists Nalini Ambady and Michael Slepian found that leading people to make fluid movements with their bodies enhanced their ability to generate creative ideas, to think about ideas in a flexible way, and to make unexpected connections. Practicing tai chi or yoga could produce these same benefits, as might standing under the flowing water of a shower or watching the tumbling water of a stream or river. 

2. Create an experience of forward movement. A recent investigation of the effects of movement on creativity discovered that people who experience the sensation of moving forward—a common metaphor for making progress—perform better at tasks that require creativity than do people who experience the sensation of being at a standstill. 

3. Create an experience of spontaneous, unconstrained choice. A study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that people who were directed to walk freely, choosing the paths they wished to take, showed better performance on a task requiring fluency, flexibility, and originality than did people directed to walk a prescribed rectangular path.

4. Create an experience of dissonance. Psychologists Li Huang and Adam Galinsky reported that people who cultivated an experience of mind-body dissonance—for example, listening to sad music while smiling, or recalling a a happy memory while frowning—showed increased performance on creative association, insight, and generation tasks. “Such awkward clashes between mind and body can be useful: they help us think more expansively,” wrote philosopher Jesse Prinz of this study. “When we think expansively, we think about categories more inclusively, we stop privileging the average cases, and we extend our horizons to the atypical or exotic.

Many of us lead with our brains. We expect our thinking minds to take command, and the rest of our selves—including the movements and sensations of our bodies—to follow. The science of embodied creativity suggests that we can reverse the direction of this process, manipulating our physical experience in order to achieve the mental state we seek.

How about you? Have you found that the movements and sensations of your body influence how creative you’re able to be?