Gillian Judson, PhD

Associate Professor, Educational Ldrship @SFU 🇨🇦
Researching imagination in teaching, learning & leadership
Fllw: #imaginED #walkingcurriculum #getoutside

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

My @TEDxWestVanED talk is ready! #imagination matters for all learners: learn why
https://t.co/ZekFLTUd8X #imaginativeEd #imaginED #story

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Great first day at CSSHE @umanitoba with Dr. Dougherty! Presenting research on how leaders use imagination to navigate challenges in HE (and it's hot! 🔥)

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology.

Her name is Marily Oppezzo.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

The result was almost too clean to publish.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves.

On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision.

She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it.

Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes.

The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs.

Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path.

Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet.

Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed.

Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot.

Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks.

Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to.

The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes.

The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it.

And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Happy to support my colleague and this great work in the DTES.
Eastside Rumble 2026 #crowdfunding @FundRazr Support and Retweet https://t.co/MVrdqp4yca

[Centre For Imagination In Research, Culture, & Ed @CIRCE_SFU]

Imaginative Ecological Education practices shaping Place- based learning for secondary students in the Bulkley Valley, BC 🌿🍃
@perfinker 💕
#imaginED #walkingcurriculum

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Feeling grateful after a day of exploring Imaginative Ecological Education practices with elementary and secondary teachers. Tomorrow: PD day conference 🌿 📚 ☕

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Arrived in beautiful Smithers, BC. 🌿
Dinner with district leaders tonight. Excited to start my work with Bulkley Valley educators tomorrow! #imaginED #walkingcurriculum #getoutside

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

@HargreavesBC @deanfink1936 @TobyGreany @DennisShirley16 I love this! Thanks for sharing!

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

@brdngswtgrs 🙏

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Feeling grateful to talk about my inspirations and imagination at the @takemeoutside annual conference! Thank you @jnovakowski_ 🙏

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Next adventure: The Bulkley Valley School District. 🌿🍃
@Leona_Prince1 see you there! 🙏

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Feeling happy after reconnecting irl with these (outdoor) educational rockstars! @takemeoutside @stokedonscience @pineponderout +Karine Céré

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

OLC 2026 did not disappoint! Thank you @takemeoutside @TheOLStore @stokedonscience

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Fantastic experience keynoting and work shopping at the Alberta ECEC conference this past weekend. The views were as fantastic as the people and the learning!

[Prof. Carl Sagan @ProfCarlSagan]

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Love this

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

The most important skill for creativity is no longer original thinking. It’s taste and tenacity.

In the age of AI, ideas are abundant. Good judgment and execution are scarce.

The future belongs to those who excel at finding and amplifying the signal in the noise.

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

📣 Major Announcement! @_CreativeEd has acquired World Creativity & Innovation (WCI), home of #WCIW and #WCID. This partnership will expand global access to Creative Problem Solving in 160+ countries. 🌍✨ Learn more: https://t.co/ttbgpxwiq1

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

Just published @EmeraldGlobal Journal of Leadership Education (JOLE)

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

NEW!

Imaginative (un)learning in leadership education: how cognitive tools and community-based collaboration cultivate imaginations

Just published online:
https://t.co/3Kkpx976ah

[PDiE Journal @PDiEjournal]

Just published online - Designing transformational professional learning opportunities: understanding participants’ experiences in an on-line and in-place imagination-focused self-study by Gillian Judson & Beverley Bunker. More information @ https://t.co/zC9oDC9CRB

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

World Creativity & Innovation Week is a worldwide community dedicated to celebrating all forms of creativity. Check out the celebrations and register your own for 2026!
https://t.co/1xkZd0BFOd

[Gillian Judson, PhD @perfinker]

NEW!

Imaginative (un)learning in leadership education: how cognitive tools and community-based collaboration cultivate imaginations

Just published online:
https://t.co/3Kkpx976ah