In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration

by Shane O'Mara

The larger lesson is clear: brains have evolved for movement. If you’re going to be stuck, unmoving, in one place, with your food all around you, then why do you need a costly brain?

‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’,

as Richard Dawkins has it, a blind watchmaker, evolution is a conservative watchmaker, keeping what works for lengths of time that are difficult to imagine, but which are certainly comprehensible, calculable and measurable, reusing the same recipe time and again in one species after another.12

Walking a city is the best way to get to know it. You can’t get to know the mood of a place, its energy and pace, when you’re driving

Caminar es escanear.

We are still learning the lessons of urbanisation, and how it affects every aspect of our lives. And yet urban design is something owned and practised by architects and city planners rather than by neuroscientists or psychologists. This is a great pity, something to be lamented, because the science and sensibility that psychology and neuroscience can bring to urban design – to improve the liveability and walkability of a city – is significant, as we will see. Urban design that fully and properly takes account of the needs of walkers will make cities much more attractive places to live and work.

In a study conducted on a selection of cities, it was shown that the higher the walkability of the city, the lower the activity inequality (a measure of the degree to which each person walks a similar amount as other people; it is a similar measure to income inequality – the extent to which incomes are the same or different in a population), meaning that overall population obesity was also lower.5

Imagine you have just moved to a new city, one that has extensive urban sprawl and lacks good mass transit. Getting around requires a car. The opportunities for random social interaction are few, because of the design of the transport system. Being in a car militates against easy face-to-face interaction and chanced-upon conversation; every sight of another human being is mediated through glass. By contrast, in a densely packed neighbourhood, where people randomly intersect easily at corners, at cafés, in local shops, people can build a social network quicker and easier.

In 1974 the psychologists Bornstein and Bornstein measured pedestrian walking speeds in fifteen cities and towns in Europe, Asia and North America.15 They found the pace of life varies with the size of the local population, independent of the particular culture. In general, bigger cities across differing countries and cultures had faster walkers.

We speed up our walking, unconsciously competing against others seeking the same resources.

There were three different ideas examined that would predict pace. The first was economic vitality: the faster the rate of economic growth, the more vital the economy is, the higher the pace of life might be. The second was that hotter cities on average would tend to have slower walkers; and the third was that countries with relatively individualistic cultures would have a faster pace of life compared to countries with a collectivist culture.

Factores que influyen en a velocidsd de los peatones

These were all combined to create an overall pace-of-life index. Switzerland was measured as having the fastest pace of life, closely followed by Ireland (then in the middle of a major, decade-and-a-half-long economic boom), followed by Germany and Japan. (Italy, England, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands and Hong Kong completed the top ten, in that order.) Mexico came in last.

Buscar el pace of life index

it may therefore be the case that walking at a speed just below that which requires continual monitoring exerts the best possible effect on creative cognition.

They also suggest that the standard methods of assessing creativity used through the generations by psychologists and neuroscientists may be underestimating our capacity for creativity, because the environments that we test in, and the postures that we ask participants to adopt, constrain how they perform.

Albert Einstein captured this well: ‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.’

Flow is the subjective experience of concentration and deep enjoyment accompanying or arising from skilled performance.

Social walking can be the best of walking, whether towards a common goal, or just sauntering along with no particular place to go.

The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.

As we become an increasingly urban-dwelling species we need to remember this – our cities are for people.

The core lesson of this book is this: walking enhances every aspect of our social, psychological and neural functioning. It is the simple, life-enhancing, health-building prescription we all need, one that we should take in regular doses, large and small, at a good pace, day in, day out, in nature and in our towns and cities. We need to make walking a natural, habitual part of our everyday lives.

Although walking arises from our deep, evolutionary past, it is our future too: for walking will do you all the good that you now know it does.

We need urban planners and engineers to embrace walkability as the core activity that our cities and towns revolve around and depend upon – for all our sakes.