An MLB manager found value in long walks. Research suggests it's a ‘brain-changing power'

New York Times

2 days ago

For most of his adult life, Bruce Bochy has been a walker. Long strolls, short saunters, usually along water. When he managed the San Francisco Giants to three World Series championships, he often wandered the city's steep hills with his wife, Kim. On the road, he kept a daily routine: An afternoon walk to the ballpark, no music, no podcasts, just his thoughts.
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'Sometimes we get caught up in the game,' Bochy said. 'We let that define us. That's a very important part of our life, but I don't want that just to be my sense of significance. It's family and health. So that's part of my way of trying to stay healthy. Not just physically, but on the mental side.'
Bochy, 70, isn't as nimble as he once was. He possesses two new hips and an artificial knee. In his third year with the Texas Rangers, he walks slowly, a hitch in his deliberate gait. But he still believes in the power of a good walk — an hour of exercise, fresh air and contemplation, a peaceful break to mull lineup decisions, brainstorm tactics and ideas and think through tough conversations with his players.
'I felt like I did something,' Bochy said.
When it comes to walking, Bochy is one of sports' biggest enthusiasts; he even wrote a whole book about walks. But he's hardly alone. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was famed for his walking meetings. Ernest Hemingway was said to walk around the Seine in Paris to solve writer's block. And the famed psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky sharpened their biggest ideas while on long, meandering walks.
'I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with Amos,' Kahneman wrote in the 2011 book, 'Thinking, Fast and Slow.'
In a world of Fitbits, iPhone health apps and other tracking devices, it might seem that walking's benefits are properly appreciated and understood. But Shane O'Mara, an Irish neuroscientist and writer, maintains that walking is a 'brain-changing power' which remains overlooked.
At the very least, O'Mara is something of a walking evangelist. Whether you're an MLB manager, an executive, an elite athlete or anyone else, it can meaningfully improve your life.
And if walking leads to more creativity and clearer thoughts, O'Mara pushes forward the following idea: Maybe it's something we should all be thinking about more.
Bochy's walking habit has a familiar origin story. It started when his family got a dog, a black lab named Jessie. Bochy was managing the San Diego Padres and the task of walking the dog fell to him.
Soon enough, he came to love the walks around nearby Poway, Calif., as much as he loved the dog. (And he really loved the dog.)
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When Bochy joined the Giants in 2007, the ritualistic walks came with him. The benefits were consistent. One summer night in Milwaukee, after a brutal collapse against the Brewers, Bochy found himself sitting alone in his office, ruminating over the loss.
Finally, he thought: I'm gonna walk home. It was maybe four miles, and it was late, and the Brewers' stadium is not exactly pedestrian-friendly. But when Bochy reached the team hotel, he felt better.
Bochy kept up the routine as the Giants made World Series runs in 2010 and 2012, exploring cities and taking in San Francisco's neighborhoods. As it happened, those championship seasons came just as another Bay Area resident started thinking deeply about the value of walking.
Marily Oppezzo was a dietitian and health researcher at Stanford in nearby Palo Alto, working on her PhD in educational psychology. Her doctoral adviser, Daniel Schwartz, was a believer in the 'walking meeting,' opting for discussions during strolls around campus.
Oppezzo was interested in finding ways to integrate more exercise into the workplace. One day, during a conversation about her dissertation topic, Oppezzo asked Schwartz a question: 'Why do we do walking meetings?'
Schwartz said they helped him think through new ideas. Oppezzo thought for a moment. Had anyone ever tested that?
The question planted the seed for the first set of studies to measure if walking produces more creativity. In a series of experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked 176 college students to complete different creative-thinking tasks while sitting, walking on a treadmill, walking outside through campus or being pushed in a wheelchair.
In one example, the students had to come up with atypical uses for random objects, like a tire or a brick, a common marker of creativity. On average, the students' creative output increased by 60 percent when they were walking.
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What made the results even more interesting was that it wasn't just about the environment surrounding the students. For years, writers and thinkers had theorized that the benefits of a walk stemmed from the stimuli we experience in nature — the changing views, the fresh air, the green space. But Oppezzo found something different. Yes, people saw an increase in creativity when being pushed through campus in a wheelchair. But people saw an even bigger increase when walking indoors on a treadmill.
'Walking beat it,' Oppezzo said. 'There was something about pushing through the space.'
There were limits, though. While walking was ideal for divergent thinking — idea generation, daydreaming, making narrative connections — it was mostly useless when it came to convergent thinking, or the kind of focused thinking one needs for quick math in your head.
It was an idea that Kahneman described in 'Thinking, Fast and Slow.' The next time you're on a walk with a friend, he wrote, ask them to do 23 x 78 in their head. They will almost surely stop walking.
Oppezzo found the same in one unpublished study. The participants could not do quick math. 'People were just garbage at it,' she said.
When Oppezzo and Schwartz's research was originally published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition in 2014, it inspired a short cycle of media attention. Oppezzo eventually gave a TED Talk. But there was also a second response.
'Everyone was like: 'Oh, we already knew this,' ' Oppezzo said.
Scientists, though, were still trying to understand why.
One day earlier this year, not long after speaking to Bochy, I went for a morning walk.
The conversation with Bochy had sparked an idea for a story, but as I walked and listened to music, sipping from a cup of coffee, my mind began to wander, and a familiar process took root. A series of ideas began to collide, and a mental mapping process began, constructing the scaffolding for a basic story structure in my head.
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As a writer, it's hard to describe how or why this happens. One of my friends, a fellow writer and walking enthusiast, once told me he thought of this experience as 'inactive work.' O'Mara, the Irish neuroscientist, says that 'walking is, paradoxically, a form of active idleness.'
You are not focused on unlocking an idea; it just happens.
Neuroscientists describe being in this mind-wandering state as part of the default mode network, one of the brain's primary networks. It's active when we reflect on our pasts or imagine our futures. It helps us conceive narrative and make sense of the world.
A second major network is the executive control network, which is active when we are using more focused thinking and problem solving. We use this network when we are solving a math problem or searching for one correct answer.
'The ability to think creatively seems to be the combination of these two systems working together,' said Roger Beaty, the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University. 'So it's not just super spontaneous, random thinking, or all focused, logical thinking. But the synchrony of those two systems.'
According to O'Mara, there are reasons that walking enables this toggling between mental states. Mild exercise can increase blood flow, boost our mood and enhance alertness. And bodily movement itself drives activity all over the brain.
'This activity allows ideas just below the level of consciousness to come into consciousness,' O'Mara said.
But in most cases, walking is not the kind of exercise that can spike our heart rate. Nor are we overwhelmed by stimuli. There is a reason, after all, that we rarely daydream while sprinting or amid an intense basketball game. It's also why our minds don't wander as much if we walk while listening to a podcast or an audiobook.
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O'Mara described the dynamic in his 2019 book, 'In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration.' The part of the brain that is active when we are walking, jogging or moving is the extended hippocampal formation, which is also the section that is active when we access memories.
'Mind-wandering allows the collision of ideas, while mind-focusing allows you to test whether it is nonsensical or interesting and new,' O'Mara wrote. 'The more we look, the more we find that the hippocampus plays a central role in both these activities.'
Put another way: There are other possible inputs — or ways — to generate ideas. But walking acts as a useful catalyst.
'It is a simple hack,' O'Mara said.
Scientists have continued to examine the relationship. In 2023, a creativity researcher at the University of Graz in Austria led a study that reinforced the findings from Stanford. Using sensors to track movement and mobile phone prompts to test a group of college students, the group was able to take research out of the lab and into a real-world environment.
The group found that, on average, people who were more physically active had more creative ideas. In addition, a person's number of steps five minutes before doing a creative task was associated with an increase in the originality of their verbal ideas.
'If a person was walking more,' said Christian Rominger, the creativity researcher and lead author on the study, 'they were more creative.'
In his prime, Bochy usually cruised past 10,000 steps per day. The number has become a benchmark for millions around the world. The origins were more marketing than science.
The target dates back to the 1960s in Japan, according to I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard who has researched step counts. After Tokyo hosted the Olympics in 1964, a company in Japan produced a pedometer device called a Manpo-kei, which translates to '10,000 steps meter.'
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It was a nice round number — roughly equal to 5 miles — but research has shown that a better target may be 7,500 steps. O'Mara offers another guideline: 5,000 more steps than you're doing now. As the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, 'Every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.'
For those who do it daily, walking is more than exercise. It is a time machine to the past, a window to our possible futures, a tool to sharpen our thoughts and ideas, our hopes and desires.
For Bochy, it has always been a time to decompress. When he managed the Giants, he lived in a condo not far from the ballpark. His walk to work was short, less than 10 minutes. After games, win or lose, he would head into the night and walk home.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Mitchell Layton, Brace Hemmelgarn/Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)