IN PRAISE OF WALKING

The psychology and neuroscience of one of the simplest, most satisfying and sublime of life’s pleasures – something that provides enduring benefits for health, resilience, creativity, mood and well-being – a good walk.

In IN PRAISE OF WALKING, Shane O’Mara, leading research scientist and Professor of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, turns his mind to his own personal passion – the wonder of walking. Here O’Mara uses cutting edge neuroscience to explain how walking - even through cities – can be mind-and-mood-expanding, and how it can improve our working lives and our mental and physical well-being.

This is probably the first popular book that shows why our whole evolution has revolved around walking, how bipedalism liberated hands and minds and allowed us to spread out and colonise the world, how our capacity for thinking backwards and forwards in time gave us extra advantages in wayfinding and survival, and how walking is the bedrock of creativity and social cohesion. And there is also a chapter on shoes, and what they do for us. It’s wide-ranging, and deliberately informal.