Growing up, I didn’t learn very much about how to live with a body. Everything that happened at school was geared toward cultivating my brain. Growing it. Increasing conscious knowledge. When someone in class would do something physically goofy — spill something or make a mess — the teacher would groan, “For heaven’s sake, what are you doing? Use your head!”
As an adult and a teacher, I now understand the incredible degree to which the needs of the head are privileged over every other body part. But meanwhile, to be successful at a mental endeavor, we need every part of our organism to pitch in and to be included.
Recent scientific research suggests that creativity improves when we have a body that’s given frequent chances to be active. A new study gave activity trackers to 80 adults and then brought them into a lab at the University of Graz in Austria. There, researchers asked participants to let their imaginations run wild as they performed a series of exercises. They were asked to think up new uses for car tires and for umbrellas, and were tasked with finishing up drawings that were only partially complete. Later, the resulting output was rated for its originality, and the creativity metrics were crosschecked with activity recorded on trackers.
The study showed that the people most active over the five preceding days also proved to be the most creative. The findings pointed to “an association between creativity and physical activity in everyday life,” said Christian Rominger, the professor who conducted the study.
Every cell in our body has its own wisdom. But often, we writers treat our bodies like animals in a zoo, where anything that isn’t a brain cell has little to do that’s even the least bit interesting. We pace the same confines of the same small cage — our homes or offices — hour after hour, day after day. If we’re not being productive in writing, instead of going outside to take a walk, we force ourselves to be confined to an even smaller area: the desk.
The brain makes harsh demands: stay here and don’t move until you get something meaningful done.
But next time you want to be more creative, instead of working harder mentally, draw on the parts of your body best suited to help you out. Stop using the brain for every darned thing, and instead, utilize your arms. Use your feet. Use everything everything else.
