Dr. Cal Newport

I also walk a lot.

So I wonder if there's something similar going on.

Like when I'm trying to work through an idea for an article or a math proof or something like this, almost always I'm going to do that on foot.

And there might be something similar going on there where you're encountering – it's not entirely exotic stimuli, right?

So it's not, oh, my God, my attention is being drawn.

But you don't quite know what you're going to see and you also have that circuit quieting effect of the walking.

So your motor neurons are going.

You can tell me if I'm getting this right or not.

You are, yeah.

The motor neurons are going and you get some inhibition going on in some of these key networks, which allows you to actually maintain the internal focus on a concept a little bit better.

So I do a lot of my original focused ideating on foot, but a lot of my serendipitous ideating will be with the fire going.

I read by the fire.

It's when I read that I get a lot of my original ideas.

Yeah, it's interesting the way you talk about it, right?

Because when I'm walking, and this is actually something you can train, you know, and I talked about this in one of my books once, that you can actually train yourself to maintain your internal eye of focus more stably while you're walking, right?

So I call this productive meditation in deep work, actually.

And I practiced this in grad school, right?

Okay, so I'm going to work on a particular problem while I walk, and then you actually practice

bringing your attention back to the central problem.

And I don't know exactly what's happening, but you get a little bit more facility working with your working memory, a little bit more efficiency with bringing stuff in and out of the working memory.