Between classes this morning, I was checking out the blogs I subscribe to and I read something really interesting about a correlation between creativity and exercise. I haven’t had time to read the original study yet, but I’ll browse over it when I get a chance. Basically, the study shows that Aerobic exercise increases creativity (not sure how they measured that) up to two hours after completing the exercise.
Here’s the abstract:
The potential effects of aerobic exercise on creative potential were explored both immediately following moderate aerobic exercise and after a 2-hr lag. Sixty college students participated in an experiment consisting of 3 regimens varying the time when a Torrance Test of Creative Thinking was taken in relation to exercise completion. The results supported the hypotheses that creative potential will be greater on completion of moderate aerobic exercise than when not preceded by exercise (immediate effects), that creative potential will be greater following a 2-hr lag time following exercise than when not preceded by exercise (residual effects), and that creative potential will not be significantly different immediately following exercise than after a 2-hr lag time following exercise (enduring residual effects). Limitations and implications for future research were discussed.
So I tried it out today by exercising and then heading over to Steve’s to get my writing in for the night. I finished exercising at 8:30, came home, took a shower, did the dishes, and went over to Steve’s at 9:30. Then, I dinked around watching youtube for half an hour (man! wasting my window of enhanced creativity opportunity!) and sat down to write. And…it worked! It took me only a couple of minutes to jump into where I’d left off before, and once I got started, the words came out really easily! I got to 500 words in a little less than an hour (faster than I usually do) and then, after a few distractions, got down another 700 to finish for the day at 1,302 and (more importantly) finish the chapter I’m on so I can move the story along! Very nice!
So, not only will exercising help me to get in all the fiction reading that I want to do (I read books while I use the exercise bike–that’s how I finished Mistborn, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Citizen of the Galaxy), it will also help me to be a better writer! Excellent! It’s all coming together!
I started rereading The Neverending Story today–unquestionably my favorite book of all time. I decided to do it because I was browsing through it a few months ago and realized that the whole thing is really metaphorical about fiction and storytelling. That, and I’m just way excited to reread it! It is my favorite book of all time because it is loaded with so much meaning, and when I read it as a 4th grader, it pointed out some really amazing truths to me in ways that made me cry. Even today as I started it, there were parts that made me cry–like how Ende describes how Bastian’s relationship with his father changed after his mother died. And I haven’t even started chapter D yet! Man, I’m excited to reread this book! I will definitely review it here on this blog!
So, starting The Neverending Story again gave me a desire to listen to the theme song from the movie, which is SO 80s it’s funny! What an awesome song! I’ve been listening to it all night!
