I hope that . . . the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind, as the two coequal halves of the higher education, for men and women alike.
—WILLIAM JAMES
IN THE LATE 1950s, UCLA sociologist Bernice Eiduson wanted to understand what separates great scientists from their less-accomplished colleagues. Lots of psychologists had tried to figure out what marked some people for greatness, but no one had found the thing—the single personality trait, the “genius gene,” the cognitive edge—that all successful scientists share. Eiduson thought that by watching their careers unfold over several decades and talking to and testing them at regular intervals, she might see things in successful lives that couldn’t be identified through one-off interviews and short studies. Eiduson found forty young and mid-career scientists at UCLA, Caltech, and elsewhere who agreed to be interviewed about their life and work, sit for psychological tests, and, most crucially, keep doing so. All of them were products of top graduate programs, promising researchers, and young enough to look forward to long, productive careers.
Eiduson followed this group for more than twenty years, and in that time the paths of the forty diverged. Some were elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and received promotions and prestigious chairs at their universities. One became a presidential science advisor. Four won the Nobel Prize; one, Linus Pauling, won two. Others, in contrast, settled into less-distinguished careers. Some continued to struggle to do serious science but couldn’t keep up. They became administrators or focused on teaching.
From a sociological standpoint, it was an ideal outcome. A group that looked roughly the same decades earlier had split into two parts. The challenge now was to figure out why.
The psychological profiles in Eiduson’s group were maddeningly diverse. Their intelligence tests didn’t routinely reveal inborn genius. There were some personality traits that good scientists shared—they had a high tolerance for uncertainty and lots of self-control, saw themselves as intellectual rebels, and maintained strong boundaries between home and work—but these traits aren’t exactly rare. After Eiduson died in 1985, her longtime UCLA collaborator Maurine Bernstein kept the study going, joined by her son, Robert Scott Root-Bernstein, and statistician Helen Garnier. The three added some new questions to the interviews. They started asking the scientists whether they played sports or spent time outdoors. They asked about their hobbies and artistic interests. They asked how nonscientific activities connected or competed with each other. They asked how they managed their time and how pressed for time they felt.
The new questions revealed something interesting. The best scientists showed “an unusual urge to experiment athletically as well as scientifically” and selected “athletic activities that could be carried from youth into old age.” Los Angeles conjures images of endless urban sprawl, but in fact the area is surrounded by hills and national parks, and thanks to its mild climate you can spend time outdoors most of the year. The top scientists took full advantage of the region’s geography: they played tennis and went swimming, hiking, and skiing. This being Southern California, there was also an overrepresentation of surfers and sailors. Lots of them also walked regularly (no surprise). Their less-distinguished colleagues, in contrast, reported low rates of participation in sports. Some had played team sports in high school or college but gave them up after college and didn’t take up something new.
One reason the findings of Bernstein, Root-Bernstein, and Garnier are striking is that they challenge the belief that intellectual activity and athletic ability are mutually exclusive. Terms like “vita contemplativa” or “life of the mind” don’t exactly conjure up images of physical prowess, and they tap into a medieval belief that cultivation of the mind and spirit requires a denial of the body. Economists’ classifications of “white-collar” versus “blue-collar” jobs, “knowledge work” versus manual labor, and knowledge-based economies versus ones that produce mere stuff, all tell us that work divides into neat, separate categories. In the United States, the notion that integrals and intervals don’t mix is reinforced by American stereotypes about collegiate athletics and the unfortunate willingness of some sports-mad universities to tolerate underprepared student athletes while discouraging bright ones from pursuing academically demanding majors.
Despite this, a number of professional athletes have had distinguished academic careers. In the United States, professional football has had three Rhodes Scholars: Byron “Whizzer” White, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Detroit Lions in the 1930s (he later became a Supreme Court justice); Pat Haden, who played for the Los Angeles Rams in the 1970s; and Myron Rolle, who played for the Tennessee Titans and Pittsburgh Steelers from 2010 to 2012 before going to medical school. Frank Ryan, who played for the Cleveland Browns in the 1960s, received a PhD in math from Rice in 1965; more recently, mathematician and offensive lineman John Urschel published his first article on computational mathematics during his second season with the Baltimore Ravens and in 2016 started graduate work in applied mathematics at MIT. The NBA has had two Rhodes Scholars: Bill Bradley, who also won a gold medal as a member of the 1964 US Olympic basketball team and spent a decade with the New York Knicks before entering politics, and Tom McMillen, who played for the New York Knicks and Atlanta Hawks.
Conversely, a number of accomplished scientists have been noted athletes. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his mathematician brother, Harald, were both nationally ranked soccer players; Harald played for the Danish national team that won a silver medal at the 1908 Olympic games. Marie Curie, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and won her own prize for Chemistry in 1911, was an avid cyclist: she and her husband, Pierre, went on a cycling tour on their honeymoon. America’s first Olympic champion (for the 110-meter hurdle in 1896) was MIT electrical engineer Thomas Pelham Curtis, who went on to invent the modern electric toaster and blender. Roger Bannister was a medical student in 1954 when he became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. He went on to a distinguished career as a neurologist. John Bardeen, who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for his codiscovery of the transistor and the 1972 prize for his work on superconductivity, swam and played water polo in college and was an avid golfer. Cambridge biochemist Frederick Sanger, who won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a method for sequencing proteins, and shared the 1980 prize for his work on DNA sequencing, played rugby, football, and cricket in his youth, then switched to squash as an adult. Annette Salmeen won a gold medal in swimming for the United States at the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta before studying neuroscience as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Sarah Gerhardt became the first woman to surf the Mavericks, one of the world’s most challenging and dangerous surf breaks in the world, while completing a PhD in physical chemistry.
The idea that academic and athletic excellence are mutually exclusive is also challenged by the existence of intellectual worlds that took sports very seriously and saw them as mutually supportive.
One of the greatest expressions of this philosophy can be found among the Cambridge “wranglers” during the nineteenth century. Academic accomplishment in nineteenth-century Cambridge was defined largely by performance on the Tripos, a weeklong series of exams required for third-year students. The Tripos was designed to be grueling: its nine exams grew increasingly devilish as the week unfolded, and you were graded both on how well you answered questions and how many questions you were able to answer. In other words, it rewarded accuracy, stamina, and an ability to work fast. A top performance opened the door to college fellowships and plum jobs, and bathed graduates in the glow of a bright future.
It was a system designed to test students; it could also break them. Some cracked in the examination hall and had to be carried out by their friends (who immediately rushed back to their desks). Even future scientific titans found preparing for the exams nerve-racking. William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin (the temperature scale is named for him), and James Clerk Maxwell, who worked out the equations demonstrating that electricity and magnetism are two versions of the same phenomenon, both nearly broke under the pressure. Francis Galton, the future statistician and an influential popularizer of Darwin’s (or as Galton called him, “cousin Charles”) theory of evolution, had a nervous breakdown studying for the Tripos.
To avoid such a fate, ambitious students hired tutors to help them prepare for the Tripos, sometimes working with them for a solid two years. As the exams became tougher in the early nineteenth century, tutors began recommending students take long walks to get into shape before the exams. Walking was hardly unusual in Cambridge, but students aiming for top scores “transformed the traditional afternoon ramble or promenade into a daily regimen of measured physical exercise,” according to historian Andrew Warwick. The most ambitious students became the most dedicated athletes, driven by a belief that “hard study was most efficiently and safely accomplished when interspersed with periods of more leisurely activity and recreation.” Warwick found that for most of the nineteenth century, nearly “every high wrangler . . . participated in some form of regular physical exercise to preserve his physical strength and stamina.” Rowing was especially popular because it taught you how to deliver a consistent, “machine-like regularity of performance” on the river, and in the examination hall. Not only did they see exercise as the “complement of hard study,” students even tried out “different regimes of working, exercising and sleeping until they found what they believed to be the most productive combination.” You don’t self-experiment like this if you want to fit in. You’re trying to stand out. To be outstanding.
The connection between academic study and athletic training lives on in another Cambridge legacy. The tutors came to be famous for driving their students along well-set paths, working on progressively harder problems, with the aim of emerging victorious in competition. A well-run tutorial, students said, was like a team of horses led by a coachman—or, as Cambridge students came to call their tutors, a “coach.”
Another, more informal example of an athletically vigorous world-class scientific community is the laboratory of Oxford neuroscientist Charles Sherrington. Sherrington was one of the founders of modern neuroscience: he coined the term synapse, won a share of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and his students, who came from all over the world, helped create our modern understanding of the brain. They identified and named its major structures, mapped its regions, developed instruments to follow signals as they moved between brain and muscles, and turned brain surgery from a ghoulish last resort into a surgical specialty. Three would win Nobel Prizes.
Charles Sherrington studied medicine at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London and graduated from Cambridge in 1885. Small but powerful, he was a ferocious rugby player and rower; this early athleticism gave him “a strong constitution which enabled him to carry out prolonged researches,” as his Nobel biography put it. As a professor at Liverpool and Oxford, Sherrington displayed a preference for students who were both scientists and sportsmen. This made his laboratory a favorite destination for Rhodes Scholars. One of his first, Wilder Penfield, was class president and football tackle at Princeton; after graduating he deferred his Rhodes Scholarship for a year (until 1914) to coach the Princeton football team. Australian Howard Florey had played tennis, cricket, and football in school. Despite a comfortable childhood, at Oxford he “endeavored to look like the hardened criminal of the bush everyone expected,” Florey told a friend back home. But he quickly proved to be an outstanding student, and at Sherrington’s urging he went on to take a D.Phil at Cambridge. John Farquhar Fulton arrived in early 1923 from Harvard; he quickly proved to be a savvy academic player and prolific writer, speeding through the D.Phil in two years and dazzling Sherrington as “an artist in research.” Sherrington’s last Rhodes Scholar, Australian John Eccles, arrived at Oxford in 1923 with a medical degree from the University of Melbourne and an armful of track-and-field prizes.
Another of Sherrington’s students, Thomas Graham Brown, achieved renown not as a neurophysiologist—Sherrington actually thought him a bit of a disappointment—but as the first person to climb the Brenva face of Mont Blanc. Brown became part of a third community of scientistathletes: mountain climbers. The mountains have attracted many of the century’s great scientists: Marie Curie and Albert Einstein went hiking together in the Alps. Neils Bohr, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller hiked in the Alps as students and in the mountains around Los Alamos while working on the Manhattan Project. For some, the beauty of a summit and the opportunity to commune with nature gave mountain climbing a legitimacy other sports lacked. In high school in Vienna during the 1920s, MIT physicist Victor Weisskopf recalled, the self-styled intellectuals were avid hikers and skiers who rationalized that “they were not really sports” because mountain sports “involved something much higher, the love of nature.” Rosalind Franklin, the X-ray crystallographer whose work helped James Watson and Francis Crick discover the double-helical structure of DNA, discovered mountain climbing as a teen, when her family went glacier climbing in Norway. Later, as a postdoc in Paris, where she mastered X-ray crystallography, she moved from hiking to more-technical climbs during frequent trips to the French and Italian Alps. By the time she returned to England and King’s College, London, she was as confident on peaks as in the lab. The mountains of Southern California attracted émigré astronomers Rudolph Minkowski and Fritz Zwicky (who coined the term supernova) to Caltech. Climbing continues to be a favorite pastime of physicists: UC Santa Barbara physicist Steve Giddings, an expert on black holes and quantum gravity, is an avid mountain and ice climber, while Harvard string theorist Lisa Randall’s climbing exploits have been commemorated with a Lisa Randall Wall in Colorado, a sixty-foot granite climb in the mountains outside Denver.
IRONICALLY, FOR ALL their interest in sports, none of Sherrington’s students ever investigated the effect of exercise on cognitive performance and the brain. However, this has been an active field in recent decades. At first, researchers mainly investigated the benefits of exercise for healthy aging, but studies now show that for people of any age, gender, or athletic ability, exercise can increase brain power, boost intelligence, and provide the stamina and psychological resilience necessary to do creative work.
Studies of the effects of fitness programs on brain structure and health have shown that exercise improves brain structure, just as it does the cardiovascular system and muscles. In a 2015 German and Finnish study, before-and-after brain scans of overweight and obese subjects showed dramatic improvement in the volume of grey matter and white matter over the course of a three-month fitness and weight loss program. Exercise doesn’t just make your brain healthier by reducing cholesterol or improving cardiovascular capacity; exercise actually “induces profound structural brain plasticity.”
Scientists have begun to work out the specific mechanisms connecting exercise and brain development. In particular, they’ve focused on the role that exercise plays in boosting the production of neurotrophins, proteins that encourage the formation and growth of neurons. For years scientists have known that brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, triggers the development of new neurons. But what triggers the generation of BDNF? In 2013, Harvard Medical School researchers found that in mice, the hormone irisin stimulates the brain to produce BDNF; irisin, in turn, is generated by the muscles during endurance exercise. Not long after that, a team at Boston University found elevated levels of BDNF in the blood of physically fit students.
Running seems to be particularly effective in stimulating neurogenesis. Scientists have found that mice running on wheels generate twice the number of new neurons in their hippocampus as mice who are sedentary; they are also better able to identify new objects and distinguish similar objects from one another. A comparative study showed that rats who ran on a running wheel showed higher levels of neurogenesis than rats who went through a program of resistance training (climbing a wall while carrying a weight) and high-intensity interval training (alternately sprinting and walking on a treadmill).
Exercise generally has indirect but positive effects on creativity. Since the 1960s, studies have found that a session of aerobic exercise can have a small but direct effect on creativity among people who are in good shape. In one 2005 study, for example, physically fit college-age students were given the Torrance creativity test immediately after and then two hours after thirty minutes of aerobic exercise; all tested higher than when they hadn’t exercised. But people who don’t normally exercise don’t get the same creative boost from a workout. In 2013, a team of researchers found that athletes’ scores on a convergent-thinking test went up slightly after exercising, but exercise impaired the performance of nonathletes. If you’re a couch potato, a spin class or a 10K right before a brainstorming session will be exhausting, not energizing.
These findings are in keeping with writers’ and scientists’ own reports of the role of strenuous exercise in their creative lives. Murakami took up long-distance running after finishing his second novel, and “it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist,” he says, but he doesn’t think about plotlines while on the road. “What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue,” he says. “I run in a void.” A long walk or hike can stimulate new ideas in the moment; a long run stimulates ideas afterward and improves your ability to turn good ideas into creative works.
Aerobic activity is beneficial in several ways. Exercise strengthens your cardiovascular system and improves your circulation, which means your body can deliver more blood to your brain when it’s working. Because the brain’s demand for oxygen and sugar rises when you’re concentrating hard, this can make the difference between grasping that insight or feeling like it’s just out of reach. A firing neuron uses as much energy as a leg muscle cell during a marathon. Further, sustained aerobic exercise stimulates the body to generate more small blood vessels in the brain, and a better-developed cerebral vasculature can deliver blood to the brain faster and more effectively. A 2012 study found that episodic memory improves as maximal oxygen capacity increases. (Conversely, comparative studies of adults who do and don’t exercise find that couch potatoes have lower scores on tests of executive function and processing speed and in middle age have faster rates of brain aging and memory decline.)
Physical stamina is also as important for creative work as for manual labor. We often underestimate how physically demanding cognitive tasks can be, especially ones that require focus for hours at a time, but as novelist Haruki Murakami puts it, “finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor” and “requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine.” He trains for marathons because it helps build the concentration and stamina to write. Japanese stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka, who compares the challenges of world-class science to marathon running, ran a 4:03 in the Tokyo Marathon in 2012, the same year he won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. MIT professor Wolfgang Ketterle, who won a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on Bose–Einstein condensates, posted a 2:44 at the 2014 Boston Marathon. World-class chess players now work as intensively in the gym as they do on the chessboard. Chess has always been mentally demanding, but in an era of computer-enhanced training and high-stakes international tournaments, players must be able to focus intensely for longer periods than ever. Physical and mental stamina is now essential for world-class play. In 1995, when preparing for a twenty-game match, Viswanathan Anand went on long walks after studying games; twenty years later, his training regimen included cycling, a one-kilometer swim, and a ten-kilometer run. Magnus Carlsen, one of the highest-rated masters in the history of the game, famously spends hours a day on the treadmill and weight machines.
Regular exercise also relieves stress and increases your capacity to deal with the pressures of difficult jobs. A study of the off-hours of self-professed workaholics found that those who engage in physically strenuous activity are happier than those who engage in more passive leisure. In his study of burnout among American surgeons, Tait Shanafelt found that regular exercise is a significant predictor of higher quality of life. Workaholics are more likely than other people to feel anxiety about work when they’re out of the office, and exercise provides an outlet for nervous energy and a different focus for mental energy. For people in high-stress jobs, it can be one of the few factors contributing to recovery that can be easily modified: it’s much harder to change your marital status, family commitments, or income than to sign up for a spin class.
Strenuous exercise can retrain your body’s reaction to stressors. Exposing yourself to predictable, incremental physical stressors in the gym or the playing field increases your capacity to be calm and clear-headed in stressful real-world situations. President Barack Obama maintained a strict fitness routine throughout his political career; according to his personal assistant, Reggie Love, daily workouts “were key to surviving” long campaigns and the rigors of governing. Elena Kagan took up boxing after joining the Supreme Court and is only the latest justice to develop an exercise regimen to deal with the demands of the high court. (In fact, she and Ruth Bader Ginsberg use the same personal trainer.) Mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing ran to get a break from his work: developing the first generation of electronic computers was, he said, “such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard.” UCLA chemist and Nobel laureate Donald Cram was an avid surfer: “being slammed down by a 10-ton avalanche of violent water” provided a “big release” of emotional and physical energy, he said, “allowing me to sit still for long periods of time.”
When he was on Robben Island between 1962 and 1988, Nelson Mandela used exercise to combat the stresses of imprisonment. Prisoners at Robben Island were forced to do hard labor, making gravel and later working in a quarry, but maintaining a boxer’s workout regimen (running in place for forty-five minutes, a hundred push-ups, and two hundred sit-ups) gave Mandela a way to take charge of his own captivity, to resist the government’s efforts to control and break him, and to show that he would remain his own man. More practically, he later wrote, “I have always believed exercise is a key not only to physical health but to peace of mind” and “I worked better and thought more clearly when I was in good physical condition”—a kind of self-cultivation that benefited him and needled his captors. Consequently, “training became one of the inflexible disciplines of my life,” and he continued with his morning workouts even after his release from prison.
Playing sports in your youth and staying athletic in adulthood can also have long-term benefits for your career and health. A study of Swedish military veterans found a positive correlation among cardiovascular fitness and intelligence test scores at eighteen, higher academic achievement a decade later, and higher incomes thirty years later. A 2014 study of the lives of American men who had been in high school before World War II found that veterans who had been athletes in high school went on to make more money, have higher-status careers, and become professionals and managers in greater numbers than those who did not. (They also spent more time doing volunteer work and gave more to charity.) Some of the advantage was self-fulfilling, the product of positive stereotypes: employers who assume that exathletes are natural leaders and have more self-confidence, self-respect, and grit tend to give ex-athletes more opportunities to develop and exhibit those capabilities, which sets them up for more success and more opportunities.
The impact of sports on the careers of businesswomen may be even stronger. In 2014, four hundred female executives were surveyed about their athletic experiences. Ninety-seven percent of the executives who had reached C-suite positions (that is, they had “chief” in their titles) had played sports at some point in their lives, 52 percent had played sports in college, and 53 percent still played some sport. Two-thirds said that they looked more favorably on prospective employees if they were athletes (there’s the positive stereotype again), and almost as many said their athletic experience had been a factor in their success.
A number of large-scale studies have shown that physical activity can also slow cognitive decline. In 2015, scientists at King’s College London published the results of a ten-year study of the relationship between physical activity and cognitive aging in twin sisters. Scientists argue over how much genetic, behavioral, and environmental factors affect things like aging, intelligence, and success; in studies comparing identical twins, genetics ceases to be a factor. The researchers administered psychological, neurological, and health and fitness tests to 324 twins in 1999 and again in 2009, with the aim of understanding how different factors affect changes in cognitive ability (determined using a battery of tests to measure memory and processing speed) and global brain structure. They also took MRI scans of subjects’ brains. The study found that twins who were stronger and more physically active in 1999 did better on cognitive tests in 2009 and had better global brain structure, and that activity and strength had a “protective effect,” slowing age-related cognitive change.
Another recent study revisited an old test to measure the effects of physical activity on the cognitive health of elderly Scottish people. In the summer of 1947, social scientists administered intelligence tests to virtually every eleven-year-old in Scotland. Nearly sixty years later, scientists in Edinburgh tracked down a thousand members of this group, dusted off the old 1947 intelligence test (Moray House Test No. 12), and gave them a battery of new tests assessing their mental health, physical fitness, and so on; a couple years later, they all had MRIs. Now called the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, the group is providing a wealth of information about the factors that affect the aging brain because their current test results can be compared to those of their eleven-year-old selves. In one article, scientists reported a positive correlation between levels of physical activity, connectivity between brain regions, and white matter quantity and density.
Other researchers have tracked the health and behavior of tens of thousands of nurses, British civil servants, and other groups over the course of years or decades, and have consistently observed a positive relationship between physical activity and healthy aging. Many of these studies have demonstrated that staying physically active in your forties and fifties—the period when you’re likely to be busiest with family and work and when excuses to skip exercise come most easily—pays off for decades: exercising in midlife reduces the risk of chronic disease and dementia late in life. But you don’t have to be an athlete in your forties to reap the cognitive and health benefits of exercise in your later years, as the example of Olga Kotelko shows. Kotelko was a Canadian athlete who won hundreds of senior track and field events before her death at ninety-four. Scientists found that her regimen had a dramatic effect on her brain’s structure: compared to other people her age, Kotelko’s brain had greater white matter integrity (which correlates with increased capacity for reasoning, self-control, and planning) and levels of fractional anisotropy (a measure of brain connectivity), and her healthier brain helped her perform better on cognition and memory tests. What makes this more remarkable is that while she had grown up on a farm and spent a career as a teacher, she didn’t start competing until late in life: she started training at seventy-seven.
These studies help explain how some scientists, writers, painters, and architects manage to stay productive decades after the competition has burned out. The architect Le Corbusier was working on four projects when he died at seventy-seven during his regular afternoon swim; Charles Darwin spent his last afternoon on the Sandwalk a few weeks before his death at seventy-two. Sherrington and his students had remarkably long, distinguished careers. Wilder Penfield founded the Montreal Institute of Neurology, pioneered surgical techniques for treating epilepsy, and used electrical stimulation of the brain to develop the first functional map of the cerebral cortex. Howard Florey returned to Oxford in 1935 to run the Dunn School of Pathology, where he and Ernst Chain would lead the development of penicillin as an antibiotic. John Eccles stayed at Oxford until 1937, then returned to Australia, where his research on chemical and electrical signaling in the central nervous system won him a share of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. All three spent long hours in the lab: Penfield sometimes had to spend days monitoring patients after surgery, Eccles’s experiments often ran for thirty-six hours straight, and Florey’s early work on penicillin required keeping the Dunn School working around the clock. But even through their busiest years, they remained avid athletes: they made time for tennis or sailing during weekends and vacations, or had extensive gardens (Florey even has a rose variety named after him). Given the value of midlife exercise in shaping health and cognitive activity in late life, it’s no surprise that several continued publishing well into their eighties. Clearly the popular assumption that youthful genius can’t last is true only if you want it to be.
John Fulton, who seemed the most promising of the group, serves as the cautionary tale. Unlike the others, he didn’t handle the pressures of work by carving out time for rest or exercise; instead, he fell into drinking. By forty he was a high-functioning alcoholic, and eventually he lost his laboratory and professorship. He occasionally displayed some of his old brilliance as a writer, but after years of trying and failing to sober up, Fulton died at the age of sixty-one in 1960.
THE FINDINGS OF Bernice Eiduson and her collaborators and the examples of the Cambridge wranglers, Sherrington and his circle, scientist-climbers, and other scholar-athletes, offer some valuable lessons for people who need to balance busy schedules and creative lives. While Victorian gentleman naturalists, novelists, composers, and surrealist painters are models of creative success, their daily lives can sometimes seem a little too unconstrained to serve as useful models for today. Plenty of these figures were also good athletes (you can’t walk ten miles a day, as Charles Dickens did regularly, without it benefitting you), but many of the lives of athletically inclined scientists, doctors, and politicians bear a more obvious resemblance to our own. Successful scientists are super busy people. At the best of times, you only have to write grant proposals, teach undergraduates, mentor graduate students, manage your lab, and help run your department—and, when you have the time, do science. If you work in a corporate R & D lab or start-up, the stack of obligations is different but just as tall. And the more prominent you are, the more committees, panels, conferences, working groups, and reviews you’re asked to take on.
A successful career in science, in other words, attracts distractions like a magnet attracts iron filings. The daily lives of the scientists in Eiduson’s study look more like those of surgeons or lawyers than of novelists. Their calendars were hemmed in by deadlines, weighed down by committees, and carved up by bosses (not to mention kids, family, and everything else). But the best of them were able to make the time to get out of the lab on a regular basis to go hiking or surfing or rock climbing, to play tennis or run. They defied the stereotypes of nerdy, weak scientists, and they reaped the benefits. Even though it doesn’t directly use muscle power, intellectual and professional labor is physically challenging: staying focused for hours at a time, switching attention from research to administration, moving from surgical theater to meeting room, takes stamina. Likewise, it’s valuable for helping deal with the pressures and disappointments of professional life. It helps you live a longer, healthier life. And it helps you maintain your intellectual edge and creative powers for more of your life.
When we think of work and rest as opposites, or treat exercise as something that would be good to do when we finally have the time, we risk becoming like the low achievers in Eiduson’s group. Exercise helped Eiduson’s stars, and many other high-achieving communities, have long productive lives. We shouldn’t be surprised that people manage to be physically active and do world-class work. We should recognize that they do world-class work because they are physically active.