Hands Behind the Back Linked to Faster Touch Attention, Study Finds

Walking with hands behind one's Back is often associated with a calm, focused stroll, a moment of well-being and reflection. And it turns out, this posture isn't arbitrary. A study published in Experimental Brain Research by researchers Helge Gillmeister of the University of Essex and Bettina Forster of City University London provides a neuroscientific basis for this popular notion of reflection and concentration.

Hands Behind the Back Linked to Faster Touch Attention, Study Finds

The experiment, conducted with participants with their eyes blindfolded, measured brain-evoked potentials (electrical signals recorded via electroencephalography) while volunteers held their hands together or apart behind their back. The results showed that tactile attention activates more quickly when hands are placed closer together than when they are farther apart, a pattern opposite to what's observed when arms are in front of the body.

Gillmeister and Forster interpreted this effect as evidence that the brain "wraps" the proprioceptive space around the body, following the position of the hands as they move from the front to the center of the back. In other words, the nervous system actively reorganizes its attention map according to where limbs are in each moment.

While the study doesn't claim that this reorganization directly produces a state of calm or introspection, the connection between posture and the experience of reflection remains an area of inference that goes beyond the experiment's data. The investigation fits into the field of embodied cognition, a line of research in psychology that asserts mental states and cognitive processes don't occur in isolation in the brain, but in constant interaction with posture, movement, and body position in space.

Other studies have explored this relationship from different angles. Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford University demonstrated in 2014 that walking increases creative idea production by around 60% compared to sitting, both indoors and outdoors. The effect, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, was attributed to the act of walking itself, not the environment.