If you can’t move freely, the flow of ideas will come to a standstill. However, this is not due to the lack of movement itself, according to the results of experiments at the University of Würzburg. As the neuroscientists Barbara Handel and Supriya Murali write in »Psychological Research«, ideas are absent because the focus of attention is narrowing.
The researchers subjected 60 students to a classic creativity test: They played words to them over headphones, for example chair, table, newspaper, garbage bag and lipstick. After each word, the test subjects had three to four minutes to list original uses for these objects. Sometimes they were asked to walk around freely in the room, sometimes following a marking on the floor, sometimes they could sit comfortably in a chair and look around the room, sometimes fixate on a point on a screen while sitting. An eye tracker followed the eye movements. It was measured how many ideas the students had. Example: turning a towel into a skirt and a t-shirt counted as two ideas, but not two different idea categories. Totally impractical ideas didn’t count.
When walking freely and sitting freely, the test subjects came up with more than ten ideas from seven to eight categories on average, while walking and sitting restricted, they came up with more than nine ideas from three to four categories (or five to six ideas from two to three categories, in a sub-study with less time to think). In short: If they had less freedom of movement, they produced fewer ideas overall, but above all fewer various ideas. It didn’t matter that much whether they walked or sat.