brettworks

“The deeper you look, the less likely you are to find a moment of sudden breakthrough, rather than a series of small incremental steps.”

Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works

No matter how a run is going, it always does something good for your mind. You might be struggling in the swelter of a summer’s morning or trying to warm up on a sub-zero winter afternoon, limited by too little time or overwhelmed by a long run that’s too long, but still your mind thanks you for getting outside. A run is exercise, but also a cognitive landscape as wide as the imagination in which your mind plays a game of figuring things out, alternately processing the stuff it’s been thinking about and receiving fresh transmissions during today’s outing. How does running affect our minds and is there something unique about how we think on the run?

One way into these questions is to imagine running as a timeline underneath your thinking. In a musical context, the timeline concept refers to a rhythm that repeats for the duration of a piece. An example is the repeating, insistent bell pattern that anchors the drum parts in a West African drum ensemble, giving each drummer a metrical reference point with which to fit in and interact with.

Like a drumming timeline, running is a rhythm, albeit one that articulates itself in the sound of your feet striking the ground. This rhythm is also felt through your breathing and your left-right-left-right arm swinging. It all adds up to your becoming a kind of moving rhythm machine, a piston chugging through neighborhoods or the mountain trails, a mobile drummer of one. As you run, the rhythm of your steady movements is the timeline—a string of unbroken 8th notes that creates a pulsating framework for your thoughts. Running steady has a hypnotic quality that energizes: the timeline inspires our minds to explore and figure out what they want to figure out.

What’s unique about the thinking we do while running is how it interweaves problem-solving and free associating modes, often blurring the lines between past and present, real world and figment, concrete and abstract. One moment I’m puzzling over projects I’m working on this week (What should I name that track?) and the next I’m ruminating on a conversation I had years ago. As you run, bouncing along thinking’s timeline, clarity of mind becomes emotional mind, and empty mind because curious mind. Around and around. Most of the time I don’t know if I’m thinking about anything specific or just experiencing vague thoughts that come and go, as if I’m a radio dial turning towards, and then away from one radio station after another– from noise to signal and back to noise. I often listen to podcasts, but my listening is partial because my mind wanders. When we run if can feel as if our attention is partially everywhere at once.

Most of the time though, running feels like waiting for something to happen. I’m going somewhere, I have a route in mind and intend to return home, but the goal is to extend this process of going without ever arriving. It’s in this way that running’s an ideal way to spend time while waiting for an insight to appear. How does this work? My theory is that running generates and amplifies attention–that is to say, attention is a by-product of movement itself. In his book Wild Problems, Russ Roberts’ description of the virtues of waiting attentively without zoning out captures what it feels like to run:

“Sometimes doing your utmost means merely waiting. But it’s not waiting idly. It’s waiting attentively. It’s about paying attention. Sometimes doing your utmost means doing nothing but being ready for what comes next.”

Running—taking one step after another after another at intensity along a timeline of our own making—is a literal embodiment of being ready for what comes next. More importantly it’s fun, which is its own reward. But once in a while running bestows on us the gift of insight. For me, a run’s most exciting moments are those when new ideas appear out of the blue. It’s when we’re in between solving problems and free associating that a new idea comes to the surface of the mind’s possibility sea. Sometimes I get ideas for writing this way, when a few words appear that suggest a topic. I’ll stop and make a note on my phone, sweat dripping on the screen. The most recent note was “running and mind.”