Walking, even if it's on a treadmill, in front of a blank, boring wall, can at least double a person's creative output, when compared to sitting or remaining stationary, asserts new research from Stanford University.

According to a study co-authored by Marily Oppezzo, a Stanford doctoral graduate in educational psychology, and Daniel Schwartz, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, creative thinking improves while a person is walking and for a short period thereafter.

The research determined walking indoors or outdoors similarly boosted creative inspiration -- and that it was the action itself, not necessarily the surrounding environs, that made the biggest difference.

"Many people anecdotally claim they do their best thinking when walking. We finally may be taking a step, or two, toward discovering why," the co-authors wrote in the paper published recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.

Oppezzo noted other research has focused on how aerobic exercise protects long-term cognitive functions generally, but, until the latest study there hadn't been an effort to specifically examine the effect of non-aerobic walking on the simultaneous creative generation of new ideas, as compared to the creative process while sitting.

"I thought walking outside would blow everything out of the water, but walking on a treadmill in a small, boring room still had strong results, which surprised me," Oppezzo said.

The research also found creative juices continued to flow at a similarly-elevated rate even after a person sat back down shortly after a walk.

The research was comprised of four experiments that involved 176 college students and other adults who completed tasks commonly used by researchers to measure creative thinking.

Participants were placed in different conditions: walking indoors on a treadmill or sitting indoors -- both facing a blank wall -- and walking outdoors or sitting outdoors while being pushed in wheelchair -- both along a predetermined path on the Stanford campus. Researchers put seated participants in a wheelchair outside to present the same kind of visual movement as walking.

Three of the experiments relied on "divergent thinking" creativity testing, which measures a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring a variety of possible solutions; an overwhelming majority of the participants in these three experiments were more creative while walking than sitting.

The fourth experiment evaluated creative output by measuring people's abilities to generate complex analogies to specific phrases when prompted. The result: 100 percent of those who walked outside were able to generate at least one high-quality, novel analogy compared to 50 percent of those seated inside.

"This isn't to say that every task at work should be done while simultaneously walking, but those that require a fresh perspective or new ideas would benefit from it," said Oppezzo, now an adjunct faculty member at Santa Clara University, also in California.

Said Schwartz: "There's work to be done to find out the causal mechanisms... this is a very robust paradigm that will allow people to begin manipulations, so they can track down how the body is influencing the mind."