Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People thinking creatively will shift their bodies, wander around, move. Why? Here we investigate one explanation: Movement is a canny strategy for changing the information that is available visually, in ways that facilitate insight. We first analyzed video footage of mathematicians engrossed in creative thought. We found that sudden "aha" insights were reliably preceded by movements away far from the blackboard, as if mathematicians were stepping back to "see the big picture." To confirm the causal impact of changing proximity on creativity, we conducted an experiment that manipulated proximity to a whiteboard while participants worked on insight puzzles represented by diagrams. Participants had greater creative success when they could survey the entire whiteboard from a distance. Whether in real-world expert reasoning or a controlled experiment, movements away and toward visual representations facilitated insight. Wandering is sometimes a kind of epistemic action, facilitating the discovery of novel connections.