The impact of physical exercise on convergent and divergent thinking

Abstract

Anecdotal literature suggests that creative people sometimes use bodily movement to help overcome mental blocks and lack of inspiration. Several studies have shown that physical exercise may sometimes enhance creative thinking, but the evidence is still inconclusive. In this study we investigated whether creativity in convergent- and divergent-thinking tasks is affected by acute moderate and intense physical exercise in athletes (n = 48) and non-athletes (n = 48). Exercise interfered with divergent thinking in both groups. The impact on convergent thinking, the task that presumably required more cognitive control, depended on the training level: while in non-athletes performance was significantly impaired by exercise, athletes showed a benefit that approached significance. The findings suggest that acute exercise may affect both, divergent and convergent thinking. In particular, it seems to affect control-hungry tasks through exercise-induced “ego-depletion,” which however is less pronounced in individuals with higher levels of physical fitness, presumably because of the automatization of movement control, fitness-related neuroenergetic benefits, or both.

The Experimental Effects of Acute Walking on Cognitive Creativity Performance

“…Unlike previous work [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], we did not observe any beneficial effect of acute walking exercise on creativity task performance. This is an important observation as it brings light to the possibility that acute exercise may not robustly enhance cognitive creativity performance.…”

“…Collectively, the current research suggests that exercise prior to a creativity task may help to facilitate creativity [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. This aligns with other work on exercise and memory [3][4][5][6][7][8][9].…”

“…Exercise psychologists have also become increasingly interested in examining whether exercise can enhance other cognitive parameters, namely cognitive creativity. Compared to research examining the effects of exercise on memory, this emerging line of research examining the effects of exercise on creativity has been considerably less investigated [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23].…”

“…As noted, emerging work suggests that exercise may help to enhance creativity [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. The mechanism(s) to explain this potential relationship is not clear.…”

The Effect of the Bodily State on Creative Thinking and the Mechanism

“…也有一些研究关注了身体活动对于创造性思维的影响，且涉及的都为较为剧烈的身体活动 (Colzato, Szapora, Pannekoek, & Hommel, 2013;Gondola & Tuckman, 1985;Gondola, 1986Gondola, , 1987Steinberg et al, 1997) (Lajoie et al, 1993(Lajoie et al, , 1996，走比站占用更多的注意资源以保持平衡 (Lajoie et al, 1993(Lajoie et al, , 1996 …”