Abstract
Human walking is a socially embedded and shaped biological adaptation: it frees our hands, makes our minds mobile, and is deeply health promoting. Yet, today, physical inactivity is an unsolved, major public health problem. However, globally, tens of millions of people annually undertake ancient, significant and enduring traditions of physiologically and psychologically arduous walks (pilgrimages) of days-to-weeks extent. Pilgrim walking is a significant human activity requiring weighty commitments of time, action and belief, as well as community support. Paradoxically, human walking is most studied on treadmills, not ‘in the wild’, while mechanistically vital, treadmill studies of walking cannot, in principle, address why humans walk extraordinary distances together to demonstrate their adherence to a behaviourally demanding belief system.Pilgrim walkers provide a rich ‘living laboratory’ bridging humanistic inquiries, to progressive theoretical and empirical investigations of human walking arising from a behaviourally demanding belief system. Pilgrims vary demographically and undertake arduous journeys on precisely mapped routes of tracked, titrated doses and durations on terrain of varying difficulty, allowing investigations from molecular to cultural levels of analysis. Using the reciprocal perspectives of ‘inside→out’ (where processes within brain and body initiate, support and entrain movement) and ‘outside→in’ (where processes in the world beyond brain and body drive activity within brain and body), we examine how pilgrim walking might shape personal, social and transcendental processes, revealing potential mechanisms supporting the body and brain in motion, to how pilgrim walking might offer policy solutions for physical inactivity.
Highlights
Human walking is a socially embedded and socially moderated biological adaptation, conferring on us a singular upright posture, with a mobile head and eyes atop the spinal column (O’Mara, 2019)
Human walking is social, and social walking is Biopsychosocial Functions of Human Walking demonstrative: our walking with others signals to yet others our participation in shared intentions and collective goals
Participatory immanence is the name we give here to the feelings experienced of a ‘supernatural’ manifestation arising from the pilgrim walkers (PWs); we extend the concept to the majority non-religious walkers, because feelings of existential communion and universal connectedness may arise in the non-religious
Summary
Human walking is a socially embedded and socially moderated biological adaptation, conferring on us a singular upright posture, with a mobile head and eyes atop the spinal column (O’Mara, 2019). We humans walk together to demonstrate adherence to behaviourally demanding belief systems; to source food we will share; for social display; to try and change the world; we walk together to find better lives for ourselves and for each other. O’Mara (2019) suggests regular and sustained walking facilitates the mental time travel central to creating personal narratives – constructing our autobiographical stories and the meaning of the wider (social) world within which we live Walking, on this view, facilitates activity in the brain networks processing memory and meaning, in part, because whole-body locomotor movement activates the hippocampal formation and related structures and, in part, because information sharing during social walking readily enters into our individual memories (Adolph et al, 2008; Webb et al, 2017; O’Mara, 2019). Which direction does causality run? Do you walk more because you are socially active, or are you socially active because you walk more? PWs offer a way to untangle correlation and causation, with implications for a key problem for behavioural change, viz., countering the general reduction in physical activity apparent across the world
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