Tolukanni
Please read the following essay, annotating the text, identifying…
Please read the following essay, annotating the text, identifying its thesis, highlighting major/important details, and next outlining its major points/important details. In other words, outline all major points why walking helps us think. Write your outline in the provided space below.
Why Walking Helps Us Think
By Ferris Jabr
Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworthwhose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roadswalked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.
What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organsincluding the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.
The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.
Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wanderto overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”
In a series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated. Another experiment required volunteers to contemplate a metaphor, such as “a budding cocoon,” and generate a unique but equivalent metaphor, such as “an egg hatching.” Ninety-five per cent of students who went for a walk were able to do so, compared to only fifty per cent of those who never stood up. But walking actually worsened people’s performance on a different type of test, in which students had to find the one word that united a set of three, like “cheese” for “cottage, cream, and cake.” Oppezzo speculates that, by setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought, walking is counterproductive to such laser-focussed thinking: “If you’re looking for a single correct answer to a question, you probably don’t want all of these different ideas bubbling up.”
Where we walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spacesgardens, parks, forestscan rejuvenate the mental resources that man-made environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded intersectionrife with pedestrians, cars, and billboardsbats our attention around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to rustling reeds.
Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.
2. Outline Practice Activity
Read the following reading selection carefully and outline it according to the guidelines discussed in class and course modules.
Culture Differences
Cultures differ in terms of their 1(orientation (whether individualistic or collectivist), 2) context (whether high or low), and 3) mas-impact on interpersonal communication (Hofstede). Cultures also differ in their characteristic attitudes toward uncertainty.
Individualist and Collectivist Cultures
The distinction between individualist and collectivist cultures revolves around the extent to which the individual’s goals or the group’s goals are given greater importance. Individualist and collectivist tendencies are not mutually exclusive; this is not an all-or-none orientation but rather one of emphasis. Thus, you may, for example, compete with other members of your basketball team for most baskets or most valuable player award. In a game, however, you will act in a way that will benefit the group. In actual practice both individualist and collectivist tendencies will help you and your team each achieve your goals. Even so, at times these tendencies may conflict; for example, do you pass the ball to another player who is better positioned to score the basket and thus benefit your team?
In the individualist culture you’re responsible for yourself and perhaps your immediate family; in a collectivist culture you’re responsible for the entire group. In an individualist culture, success is measured by the extent to which you surpass other members of your group; you will take pride in standing out from the crowd. And your heroesin the media, for exampleare likely to be those who are unique and who stand apart. In a collectivist culture success is measured by your contribution to the achievements of the group up as a whole; you will take pride of your similarity to other members of your group. Your heroes are more likely to be team players who do not stand out from the rest of the group’s members.
In an individualist culture you’re responsible to your own conscience, and responsibility is largely an individual matter. In a collectivist culture you’re responsible to the rules of the social group, and responsibility for an accomplishment or a failure is shared by all members. In individualist culture competition is promoted; in collectivist culture cooperation is promoted.
Distinctions between in-group members and out-group members are extremely important in collectivist cultures. In individualist cultures, which prize a person’s individuality, these distinctions are likely to be less important.
Write your outline here.
