Latest / Art of the Question / The Exciting Science of Boredom - Prof. James Danckert - #51

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The Exciting Science of Boredom - Prof. James Danckert - #51 · Art of the Question

• Julius Moorman: Yes, James, thank you so much for coming on the show ⁓ talking about boredom today. ⁓ yeah, which unlike the topic itself, ⁓ I find ⁓ is a really interesting topic. First of all, I was curious to know when did you first get interested in studying boredom and ⁓ what fascinates you about it? Yeah, I think in my late teens and early twenties I started experiencing boredom for the first time really. I didn't ⁓ experience it much at all, at least that I can remember as a child. And so when I started experiencing it at that point, I really didn't like it. I found it very frustrating and agitating and it just was an experience that I I ⁓ could have done without. And at the same time, my older brother had a serious motor vehicle crash. And during his sort of fairly lengthy recovery, he would talk to me about being bored more than he was before his accident. And so that was at a sort of formative time for me. I was early in my university career, I was starting to learn the stories of Phineas Gage that everybody knows about. and starting to get interested in the frontal cortex, this part of your brain that's really critical for all of the more sophisticated things that we're capable of doing. And so it struck me that for my brother, something had changed in his brain, something organic was different now that made it harder for him. to engage well with the world. And so those things came together at all at the right time to make me interested in trying to understand boredom. Took a long time to to actually get around to doing any work on it, but that's ⁓ sometimes how these things go. Yeah, that's very interesting. And you mentioned there that the accident of your brother wasn't just it didn't just cause boredom because he couldn't do what he was used to doing anymore, ⁓ for example, play sports or whatever, or do some other things, but that something had actively changed within his biology that made him more prone to being bored. Yeah, so ⁓ the his passion ⁓ for for all of his life was music and so he was a drummer. ⁓ he did have ⁓ a a wrist injury that made some rehab needs for getting back into doing that. But he was fully capable. So he you know, he lived independently, he was fully capable of playing the drums eventually after, you know, some amount of rehab and and healing of bones and that sort of thing. ⁓ but yeah, it was not the physical capability that was a problem for him, but that mental capacity to sort of engage well and feel like things that used to be pleasurable and fun and engaging for him were no longer as fun. And so I thought that was something that had had changed in his something that sort of reset a threshold for ⁓ how much a thing needs to feel good in order for you to feel like you're engaged with it well. Yeah. Ver very interesting. And if we're if we're talking about boredom, ⁓ how do you define boredom? Because it sounds like an easy definition. When we when we speak about boredom, everyone kind of knows what it feels like. ⁓ but I think it will be interesting to kind of speak about the definition because it is my understanding also based on the article that you sent me ⁓ prior to to our conversation that there are multiple ⁓ definitions that people use so people do use different definitions I think for boredom but really I think there myself and many of my other colleagues would probably agree that there's really only one kind of boredom. When people start to talk about distinct types, I really think they're talking about distinct circumstances and situations that might lead to boredom. So the one kind that I talk about is to give boredom a kind of functional definition. What's it for? What does it do? So boredom is that uncomfortable feeling that you have when you want to be engaged well with the world, but you're failing in that desire. So the quote I often use comes from Leo Tolstoy in Anakarenina where he talks about enui as the desire for desires. That's boredom for me. When you when you're bored You want something, but you don't want what's currently available and you don't know what's going to satisfy you. So it's that very ⁓ it's a motivational state because you you're driven to try and engage with the world. ⁓ it's a frustrated motivational state because you know you're not being successful at that point. ⁓ and it's unpleasant because you know, you have this kind of sense within yourself of agitation and restlessness of wanting to achieve a thing that you're not doing well. So So yeah, the the the simplest explanation is that desire for desires. When we're bored, we want something to engage well with, but we just can't figure out what that's gonna be. Very interesting. And is that also why it is perhaps different than a lethargic state that people may experience when they are depressed, for example? Because when people are depressed, they tend to not have any desires to do stuff. But it seems like it is a different way of not having desires as as being bored because when we don't feel motivated, we we kind of know that there is some things that we should be doing, but we just can't bring ourselves to do it. Whereas boredom is like we literally can't think of anything to do when we wish that we would Yeah I think the the motivational component of boredom so that desire to be doing is something that differentiates it from apathy ⁓ differentiates it from Some of the s the the symptoms and aspects that you describe of of depression. There's certainly a lot of overlap in some of these things, you know, so they're related ⁓ states and experiences. But yeah, boredom as a motivational state, as a desired state, you know, a a sort of unfulfilled desire to be engaged, does differentiate it from apathy, from, you know, the couch potato, not not doing anything it differentiates it from laziness, ⁓ and and may in some ways differentiate it from depression as well. Yeah. And ⁓ is it is it known why we evolved to develop the feeling of of boredom? Because it would seem to me that maybe back in the day boredom was less prevalent, and do correct me if I'm if I'm wrong, ⁓ but that maybe there was something to boredom that nature prompts us to well, I wouldn't use the word creative, but at least try to figure out what it is that we want. Yeah, I I I I think there is an evolutionary account for the the selection of boredom. But if you're going to go down that route, then you have to say, okay, well, is is boredom evident in other species? And I think the answer to that for me is fairly confidently yes, and there's some really great work that that shows that. ⁓ so some of that is, you know, work from Rebecca Meager and and Georgia Mason that showed in Mink that if you put Mink in a cage with nothing to do for two weeks, and then at the end of that two weeks you show them different kinds of objects, objects they would normally avoid, like the smell of a predator or the the silhouette of a predator, objects they would normally approach. Apparently toothbrushes are things that minks go crazy for, so it's like a laser pointer for a cat. ⁓ and then neutral objects, they're things like water bottles that the mink normally don't care about. If the animal after two weeks with nothing to do was depressed, you might see them showing less interest in the toothbrush, which they normally love, right? So less interest in things that are fun. If the animal after two weeks is apathetic, then y they might show no interest in any of the objects. They might not care. But if the animal's bored after two weeks, then they might indiscriminately approach everything, even stuff that's normally something they would avoid, like the predator. And that's what they found in two different studies of of mink is that after that two weeks of nothing, ⁓ that you know, not being able to engage well with the world, ⁓ the animals were desperate for something to engage with. And so they showed that kind of ⁓ approach behavior to to any kind of object. And then there's another one from Iwata and colleagues, I think is a great study in mice. Where they put mice in a room with either some things to do and then a different group of mice are in a room with nothing to do. And in both rooms there's a hole in the wall, and mice are curious creatures, so they'll poke their nose through the hole to sniff around and see what's there. And if they poke their nose through the hole, they get a puff of air to the nose, which mice don't like. They find it aversive. And the animals in the room with nothing to do poke their nose through the hole far more often than the an animals in the room with other things to do. And it's just suggests to me that like doing something, even when that something might be aversive, is better than doing nothing. And this is evident not just in humans, but also in in mice. There's a a human equivalent of that sort of study that ⁓ Timothy Wilson and colleagues did. ⁓ so I yes, I think there is an evolutionary account that says that boredom was selected for, that it's evident in other species. But then the question is, ⁓ what's its function? Why did we select for it? And I think it's the ⁓ ultimately as a signal to explore your environment for something new, something different to engage with. And perhaps to sort of balance these two drives that we and other species have, those drives are to explore for resources in your environment. And then when you find those resources to to exploit them. But you can't just do one or other of those drives. You need to balance them out. And I think boredom is one signal, not potentially not the only signal, that we are not effectively balancing those two drives of exploration and exploitation of resources. So I think that's one potential reason that that the experience would have been selected for. That's so cool. And it makes a lot of sense. And ⁓ the example that comes to mind when when you mention ⁓ the the animal examples is when a pre smartphone era Perhaps when people were using the restroom, that all of a sudden ⁓ the back of ⁓ a bottle of of perfume that was in the area, all of a sudden the instruction manual starts to become incredibly interesting. People start reading stuff that they usually ⁓ wouldn't. ⁓ so it's it's interesting to know that this is also ⁓ that this also happens ⁓ within various ⁓ animals. what would be a way to to to you do a lot of studies on boredom, ⁓ a lot a lot of science on on boredom. ⁓ I'm very curious to know how do you study ⁓ how how do what do these studies look like? How how how do we bore people in the lab? Yeah, I mean there's lots of different ways to bore people. So we do do work ⁓ anything from sort of behavioral tasks we've employed video game type tasks recently to try and understand how people balance those kinds of ⁓ drives of exploration and exploitation when they're bored and when they're not bored. ⁓ we look at psychophysiology, so we measure people's heart rate and their their sort of what's called a skin conductance response, which is essentially the sort of saltiness in your skin which reflects changes in your autonomic nervous system. We've used other functional neuroimaging stuff, so EEG, fMRI, to try and understand what's happening in the brain when people are bored and so on. The so there's lots of different ways to do it and and you might ⁓ quite commonly engage in something like a mood induction. So you make people bored and then you're measuring the consequences of having made them bored. ⁓ and there's lots of ways to do that. We have ⁓ resorted to sort of video mood inductions where we get people to watch a movie of two guys hanging laundry for a period of time. ⁓ it's yeah, the the initial response when you describe that and when people see it is a bit of laughter because it seems like quite absurd. And I think it probably is quite absurd. But after about ten or fifteen seconds the laughter subsides and the boredom sets in. Yeah. ⁓ people have done lots of other things. So ⁓ I know ⁓ Stefan Fatheitch's group has had people watch a movie of a waterfall or or a rock, you know, it's just it it's it's not really a movie because nothing's moving, you know. ⁓ people have ⁓ had, you know, participants copy out phone numbers from a phone book. ⁓ anything that is repetitive, monotonous and meaningless. will induce boredom quite well and effectively. And one of the dirty little secrets of cognitive science, psychological experimentation, is that most of the tasks that we do are actually really good boredom inducers. You know, so when we get people in the lab and we want to examine their memory skills or their attention or even just perception, we often engage them in tasks that also make them bored. And so I think it's really important to try and think about what consequence might be that for those other domains that we're testing. But yeah, that's the kind of stuff that we do. Yeah, that's that's that's cool. And and also the some funny examples there. So we've established that boredom there is some evolutionary benefit to it. But we you mentioned that in the beginning that of course bor we don't like to be bored. ⁓ nobody it's not a pleasant feeling. You could argue that it's also kind of a a luxury to to be bored. I mean, ⁓ it's it's not great, don't get me wrong, but ⁓ being bored also means that probably there there isn't some extremely pressing matter ⁓ going ⁓ going on. ⁓ apart from ⁓ the fact of course if you are ⁓ stuck ⁓ injury, for example, ⁓ like you mentioned in the beginning, that isn't an not a positive way. But it let me just put it away, it can ⁓ can be can be that in in some scenarios. can boredom be it's it's an unpleasant feeling, but can boredom does it have benefits too? What what does the science say about boredom? Because I do feel there is some sort of hype around boredom going on, ⁓ which we'll get into to later. But boredom is getting trendy again. So so what what do we make of it? Unpleasant feeling But ⁓ also perhaps some benefits there. It is lots of different feelings that we have as human beings that might be cast as unpleasant but unness but are nevertheless useful, right? So at low at low levels of anxiety, and anxiety we would say is unpleasant, might actually be very good in a preparatory sense of getting your body ready to act ⁓ i in whatever the circumstances. You know, people thinking about just before you give a presentation at work or even just before you go out to play a game of sport, you might have those we don't c call it anxiety, maybe we call it nerves. And we might say that it doesn't feel particularly pleasant, but it's useful, right? And and and it signals just something about what we're doing or what we're preparing to do. And the same sort of thing goes for boredom. I don't ⁓ you know, ⁓ my co-author, ⁓ John Eastwood and I, would sort of say that boredom is neither good nor bad. It's just a signal. It's just a self-regulatory signal telling you that what you're doing right now isn't working. So you need to look around for something else. Now the consequences of boredom could then be cast as positive or negative, right? So what you choose to engage with in response to boredom could absolutely be some creative outlet and that might be positive. Or you might choose to go for a run or do some other physical exercise. That's a positive thing. You might choose to engage with friends and and that you know is a positive thing. Or you might choose a whole range of other things. We know that people who are chronically exposed to boredom also have problems with drug and alcohol use, problem gambling, and more recently people talking about problematic smartphone use. So I think people mistake the signal of boredom with the responses that we choose to boredom. The signal itself is neither good nor bad, but it's certainly our responses to it can be. Right. So ⁓ and it, you know, is a question that as researchers we need to try and explore and understand a little more of what pushes some people towards good responses and others towards poor responses. Yeah. And I think ⁓ it's you mentioned smartphones there. I think it's ⁓ currently impossible to talk about boredom without talking about smartphones. Because one of the things we do that I do that ⁓ and many people struggle with is that it feels and I feel like it has Changed a little bit, at least if I just speak for myself, that when I compare it to ⁓ maybe 10 years ago, I didn't like to be bored either. But I feel like now when I even get a a slight feeling of of boredomness, the first thing I do is I I grab my phone and I start scrolling Instagram. Sometimes I I close the app and then I immediately open it again and then I have this realization what what am I what am I doing? ⁓ so I think the smartphone plays a huge role in making us making it possible to be engaged in something at all times, but therefore it also doesn't give us the same engagement as it as it normally w would have done. ⁓ so yeah, w what about smartphones? Has smartphones ruined our attention spans and and has it like worsened our situation around boredom? I was thinking a lot about this the other day. people will like to make that claim that this is you know, the the internet smartphones have ruined our brains. Yeah. And in particular the phrase that you use there that they've ruined our attention spans. Yeah. And I suspect that that's not really the case. But first of all, it's it's that, you know, w what are we need define our terms. What do we mean by attention span? The capacity to focus attention over a period of time. Okay. Where's the where's the measure of this? And have we really got the longitudinal data to say that those attention spans are worse now than they were ten years ago? But the other thing about it is that we make intentional choices. I was sitting in a a ⁓ bar with my wife and there were no fewer than four television screens in this bar, all showing something different, right? That's a choice that that establishment has made. Now if they take those four television screens down, then I'm not going to be distracted by them. Right. So I think that There is some sense that we have ownership in terms of how we choose to interact with the things that are around us. And then some sense in which we are bombarded by things that we don't have control over. You know, I can't just go into the restaurant and say, can you just switch all those off, please? Because I'd be a very unpopular person, particularly with the people watching sports. So I'll bring it back to to phones then. ⁓ John Alhy and and others have have done a lot of work suggesting that boredom and boredom proneness are. are an important is is an important factor in what we call problematic smartphone use. And essentially this is addiction-like behavior. So feeling anxious when you're not with your phone, ⁓ ramping up ⁓ how much time you spend on the phone over over time. These are very much addiction like behaviors. But it's important to point out that it's in about four to eight percent of people, depending on the study that you look at. So it's not as though all of us are addicted to our phones in this kind of way. And again, if I if you think back to the the sort of television screens example, we can be intentional about how we engage with the things that are around us. I think it's perfectly fine to turn to your phone and scroll your social media feed if you're standing in line or waiting for something, right? Or you you know waiting for a bus to come or train to come or something like that. ⁓ because you you're just trying to occupy your mind in time that in a in a circumstance where you have no other control, right? You can't make the train come faster. You can't make the line go faster. You just have to wait, right? And I think that's perfectly fine. ⁓ it's in those other times in our lives where we could be doing something, I hesitate to say productive, but we could be doing something that's more meaningful to us that we might reflexively turn to the phone. And that's again the point that I want to make. The these devices that we have in our pockets are extraordinary. The internet itself is extraordinary. We need to be using it in very intentional ways. The more passively we turn to these devices and the more unintentionally we just let the world come to us and flow over us, then I think the more likely we are to not solve the problem that boredom is posing for us, we'll still be bored a lot, even though we're we have the world at our fingertips. And we won't be finding those meaningful outlets. Right. So ⁓ the key for me is not the device, not the technology, but the intention of how we use it and and how we make it work for us. Instead of on us. Right. And y you mentioned earlier that boredom is ⁓ is not good or bad. It's merely a signal that what you're currently doing isn't ⁓ stimulating ⁓ you in in in a way that you'd like to like to. what are what are some of the I mean it depends per person and on on the on the situation, of course, ⁓ heavily, but ⁓ Some people turn to to alcohol, they turn to drugs, they turn to their smartphones like like we've discussed, which are are, depending on the situation again, not always the best outlets. ⁓ wha what are some of the the better outlets? W what when people notice this boredom, what can they do to do something with their boredom but do it towards something more positive? Yeah, so one of the things that we and others have shown recently about boredom and boredom proneness is that it's also associated with the feeling that you lack agency, that you're not really the author of your own life at this point. You're not you're not the one that's sort of choosing the goals that you're trying to pursue. So anything that sort of positively allows you to demonstrate your agency is likely to eliminate boredom. Now that doesn't solve the problem of a good or a bad outlet, right? You could decide to engage in some rampant vandalism. No vandalism is actually I I I I bring it up only because vandalism is going to establish agency. You know, you're the one that took the baseball bat to the to to whatever it was, right? So so it doesn't, you know, establishing agency doesn't solve the sort of moral imperative of doing a good thing, right? ⁓ we don't have a lot of good we don't have very much research at all that really highlights what the best responses are and how to get to those good responses. Certainly we mentioned I mentioned briefly creativity. If you're a person that has creative outlets, turning to those when you're bored, I think is probably a good idea. physical exercise too is a is, you know, that's clearly a positive thing. And if that's something that you are ⁓ are comfortable with and capable of, then that's a good way to get rid of your boredom. We know that boredom's associated with loneliness as well. So establishing social connections and and reaching out to those social connections. And I think doing so you know, ⁓ i i in in sort of in person as much as possible is probably pretty good. ⁓ so there's lots of ways I think that there's i in this way it sort of makes an association between the contents of boredom and the contents of happiness. They're all idiosyncratic, right? What makes you happy is is unique to you and it's and and what makes me happy is not necessarily ever going to work for you. Same thing about boredom. What makes you boredom Board and and what gets you out of your boredom is going to be unique to you. It's going to be the thing that helps you establish both agency and meaning. And there's many, many things that can do that, you know. So ⁓ there's no real single answer, but searching for those two things, things where I feel like I'm in control and I'm driving the bus, that's the agency part. And the thing that I'm doing matters. You know, it matters to me in in you know, big and small ways. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I remember being bored. I was actually bored last weekend. I I was I had an extremely busy week with work and I remember having to go through all this work and I really look forward to just doing nothing th in the weekend and and maybe read a book and then I finish the book and I I was like, ⁓ I'm I'm I'm too tired to go see my friends and I just finished this book, but I don't really want to start another book. But I also don't want to sit inside, but I also don't want to go outside. And it was like a classic case of of boredom. And then I really didn't want to do anything. I didn't want to go for a walk, but eventually I decided I am just going to go for a walk. And eventually as I was walking, it started to inspire some some some new ideas and some newfound motivations and and it solved the boredom because it gave me ideas to do something different. Is there a relationship ⁓ between getting rid of boredom and and movement? ⁓ that's a great question, but we don't I don't know of any research that sort of suggests that that movement per se is the thing that's gonna get you out of this. I mean what you're identifying there is something that we've known for a while with people who are chronically exposed to boredom or chronically bored, ⁓ that they struggle to launch. This so what you were talking about there is having that feeling of I don't wanna do this, I don't want to do that. You're struggling to launch into something and then you got over it, you pushed yourself through that feeling. And in in and in doing so, you are able to sort of solve your boredom. So it seems to me try and again, we just need to do a lot more research, trying to understand why people who are chronically bored struggle to launch is an important thing that we need to do more work on. But that ⁓ the the notion that if you can o overcome that inertia, then whatever you do is probably going to help you get over your boredom. You know, it could be a walk, a run, it could be, you know, moving from one room to the next. To just do something different. ⁓ it doesn't you know, th there's there's no specific sort of thing, but launching into an action, doing something, ⁓ is is likely to to get you over that boredom hump. Yeah, I I I don't know if you've read the book. You've probably heard about the book, ⁓ Atomic Habits from James Clear. ⁓ it's yeah, what's Yeah, it's one of the most f famous self-help books about habits. And of course it wasn't about boredom, but it was about ⁓ creating a habit. And one of the things that he mentions is if you are postponing a task, you really don't you you feel unmotivated to do a task, ⁓ if you just can get yourself to start doing it, just g say j you're only going to do it for five minutes. What you'll usually see happening is that just the mere act of starting it makes you then motivated to keep doing it. So it's like I said, a little different than than boredom, but it it feels ⁓ adjacent to it, ⁓ at least ⁓ on on how to solve it. Would you would you agree? Yeah, for sure. Just that that capacity to just get started. And I think ⁓ you know. in that moment of being bored, and you could see it certainly in young children, ⁓ and you you described it in your own circumstance there, is that you know we can cast our eyes about and see the possibilities, right? I could start a new book, I could go for a walk, I could do I could ⁓ bake something in the kitchen or whatever. Yeah, there's all these possible things. It's not it's not that you can't see them, it's that you can't get motivated by them, that you you don't think that they're going to solve the need that boredom is signaling, which is to do something that matters to you. ⁓ but I do think that if you if you can just get over that struggle to launch, that, you know, nine times out of ten that's going to eliminate the boredom successfully. Yeah. And I I do wanna go back to the phones a little bit because I think it's important to to highlights the trend that I feel is going on. I I see videos of people ⁓ that say ⁓ they're they they're deleting their they have offline weeks, they're deleting their social media for a week, or they're resetting their dopamine by staring at a wall for for an hour or something and then they feel hyper focused ⁓ after again there's people raw dogging airplane ⁓ rides by just staring at the ⁓ the the the flight radar rather than watching movies. ⁓ there's dumb phones ⁓ on the rise. ⁓ there are bricks that you can attach to your phone to block ⁓ certain apps. There seems to be a real trend ⁓ pushing boredom and people pretend that it's it's it's going to give you it's it's going to get you more motivated if you're bored. It's going to make you more Creative. ⁓ do you have a feeling that like boredom is indeed being hyped at the moment? And there is there any truth to it? ⁓ so I see all those same trends that you're talking about. and you know, I'm not I'm not on social media a hell of a lot myself. ⁓ so ⁓ I can't really answer whether or not that's being hyped or overhyped. It it certainly feels like it is, but I don't, you know, I'm just not much of a social media denizen. Mm-hmm. ⁓ and is there truth to it? No, not really at all. Right. So there's no I as far as I know, there's no studies of of, you know, ⁓ what even the notion of resetting one's dopha mean by staring at a wall. I'm not even sure what that would mean, right? So ⁓ and and the the notion of of inviting more boredom into your life is also just I think losing the logic and not really understanding what boredom is trying to tell you to do. Boredom, its ultimate goal is to eliminate itself. Right, so if y i the analogy that I like comes from a philosopher fr a friend of mine, Andreas Alpadoru, and that is to make an analogy between boredom and pain. So pain is not there to make you feel hurt. Pain is there to galvanize you into action, to get you to do something to address what caused the pain in the first place. Maybe it's that you're removing your hand from a flame, or maybe it's that you go into the medicine cabinet to get some medicine for ⁓ the headache that you have. Pain signals something is wrong to get you to act about whatever it was that was wrong. That's boredom. Boredom signals something is wrong. You're not meaningfully engaged to push you to go and do something. And in going and doing something that does get you meaningfully engaged, boredom will disappear. Right? So its ultimate goal is to get rid of itself. Why, if that's the functional definition of this experience, why would you invite more of it in? I think you want to invite more. better responses to boredom, but I don't think you inv invite more of it. So where's this coming from and wh why is it wh wh why is it all happening? I think it's coming from a genuine desire to disconnect from our devices a little bit more and to have downtime. And I think that that's fine and probably really important. It's just that downtime is not boredom. Right? Downtime is genuinely disconnecting from the thrust and parry of your daily life, right? It's to say, okay You described it for yourself. You know, I've had a really busy week. I'm looking forward to a weekend of doing nothing. I'm looking forward to a weekend, not necessarily of doing nothing, but having downtime. And that might mean disconnecting from my phone, which might mean I I you know, ⁓ maybe I feel like I'm on my phone too much, so I might want a dumb phone, or I might want to block a bunch of apps, block them just for the weekend or the day or the afternoon, whatever it is. All of those behaviours, all of those desires, represent a desire to disconnect a little bit. And I think that's great. I think that's fine. ⁓ it's just not boredom. ⁓ and you know, I think it's perfectly good for us to want to disconnect to relax to recharge. I think we need recharge times and we we often don't give a give them to ourselves. ⁓ it's just not boredom. Yeah. No, I agree. I I do think the wall staring thing w ties into something that actually was also prevalent in the in the mice ⁓ study you mentioned is that if we there's some things at work for example I like preparing my podcast I like having the conversations ⁓ for the podcast I ⁓ like doing all sorts of things around the podcast one thing I don't really like about the podcast is uploading it to the internet and and cutting it and and and ch and and enhancing the audio and just doing ⁓ administrative work around it. It's a necessary evil because without it there wouldn't be a show to listen to. So I know I have to do it. But it's for me it's a boring part of the work. And I remember like sometimes when I have have a day that I have to do just this work. It's like okay, I really have to force myself through it. I know it, I have to do it. And I think where people are getting it with these like necessary but boring tasks that they have to do. Maybe if you stare at a wall long enough, then eventually the work becomes interesting again because at least it's sure as hell more interesting than staring at a wall. So I think that maybe where it's coming from. Still, would you say it's r ⁓ a a perhaps weird way to approach things, or or does that make a little sense? so I can see how you might come to that sort of logic. You know, if I if I make things worse than my current situation, then the thing that I'm not looking forward to doing starts to become attractive. certainly not an approach I would take, but it's that's okay. Everybody's got ⁓ different ways to try and tackle their sort of problems. you know, you you talked about atomic habits before. I I I would think instead of just, you know ⁓ ignoring away at little things. Doing the little things that you can get done for two, three minutes might be much more useful to you in terms of of launching into something, getting something started, getting engaged rather than sitting at a a at a wall. And again, it's because I think the logic, the true thing that people are looking for is is not necessarily to make this unbearable task bearable, because my guess is Once you come back to that task, it's still kind of dull and it's still kind of, you know, uninteresting for you to engage in. So r nothing really staring at the wall hasn't really changed that and you'll figure that out within a matter of seconds. ⁓ I'm sorry. No worries. ⁓ I just had a phone call that's just come here, but I never get phone calls, so I'll just you'll have to edit that out. So staring at a wall is staring at a wall is not going to sort of change the nature of a thing that you've got to do. And and you'll figure that out pretty quickly, I would imagine. ⁓ So y you know, I I I I think that it still comes back to this logic of the desire for for disconnection sometimes, the desire for recharging and I think that recharging is important. How you go about that recharging is, you know, probably again another idiosyncratic thing. I think those desires are good, but I think they're being misconstrued as a des or or, you know Not as a desire for boredom, but misconstrued in the sense that you think boredom will be the thing that gets you that. And it shouldn't be the s it won't be the thing that gets you that because it just doesn't feel good. Whereas recharging, relaxing, should feel good. Yeah, no, I agree. I th I think I forgot w which writer it was, but I it's it's a very famous writer. I should look it up after the show. But ⁓ there's an example. I believe it was a writer who would lock himself in a room and tells his his wife ⁓ that he he's not allowed to enter no no phone calls no no no nothing the only thing that was there was a typewriter so for these four hours that he was inside the room there were zero distractions that forced him to ⁓ to write. ⁓ so I think I think that's that's ⁓ similar. I I mean if if there's less distractions then then obviously the thing that you need to do might might become ⁓ more appealing but I think going for a walk ⁓ or or or do something relaxing might be ⁓ might be more productive there. I I wanna ⁓ kinda zoom in on this idea that we that there's somehow the there's this notion in modern society. It also ties into being connected all the time, but ⁓ that we that now we can't be bored anymore, ⁓ and and that people back in the day that they were perfectly capable and perfectly fine with being bored. Is that is that really true? It's one of these things that's really difficult to sort of answer, you know, w ⁓ did were were people happy with being bored in the past. I i i if I want you to accept the definition that I'm giving of boredom, then the answer to that has to be no. But I I mean I don't have data. I can't reach back in time and ask people in the seventies or in the eighteen fifties or the you know, yeah, a couple of hundred years BCE. I can't like I can't I I can't reach back and do that. Peter Tuies wrote a book called Boredom A Lively History. where he does a little bit of that to demonstrate that, you know, you can go back to the ancients and find examples where they actually describe boredom and and Seneca's, you know, night follows day and day follows night and it feels like a nausea, you know, and so describing precisely what we would talk about and and even before that in in Ecclesiastes in in the Bible, again is a this description of phrase that we still use to this day, there's nothing new under the sun. So it certainly says that for a very long time This experience has been described in one way or another, and it's always described as unpleasant. Now, the question of whether or not there was more b there's more boredom now than there was before, that's starting to be addressed. People like Elizabeth Waybright and a few others have collected longitudinal data over the last decade or so to suggest that boredom is on the rise in our current generation. ⁓ so we so we have some recent data that it's potentially getting worse. ⁓ but there's nothing that would sort of suggest to me that in previous times that people were content with their boredom. That doesn't make much sense to me given the definition that we use of it. Yeah, it would be impossible to be content with boredom because then they wouldn't really be be bored. Look that. That's right, it wouldn't be boredom. Just breaks the definition. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ w one of the things that is also one of these popular notions that that gets thrown around is that Boredom is supposed to make you more creative. ⁓ what what do we make of that one? Yeah, so again, I think that this is a a misunderstanding of the logic. So boredom as a state signal, as a as an in-the-moment feeling, is just a prompting you to do something else that's more meaningful to you. Now, if you're a person who has cultivated a creative outlet, then that creative outlet can be a really good way of eliminating your boredom, right? But we can't hope that. The other part of this equation will happen, that being bored will somehow magically make you creative, right? I think what again people want to think about is like if I disconnect my thoughts from the hustle and bustle of the day, maybe I can let my mind wander, and maybe that will lead to more creative problem solving and s and and finding solutions. That I'm willing to understand, but again, boredom's not in that picture. Boredom doesn't exist in that logic, right? It's I let my mind wander. And I came up with a creative solution. Where's boredom in that? Right? So we there there's a study that was published in twenty fourteen or so that suggested that if you make people bored, they came up with more creative solutions on this task that we call the alternate uses task. You give people the everyday object like a brick or a feather or a cup and you say, Tell me how many things you could use this for, how many different things could you use it for? Supposedly if you're more creative, you'll come up with more uses. Well, we tried to replicate that study and failed. So we made people bored and they didn't come up with more uses. In fact, if anything, the more bored you were beforehand, the less creative you were likely to be. So and and and the other sort of problem is that when we're talking about creativity, this extraordinarily complex skill that humans have, right? It's probably one of the few things I might accept that differentiates us from a lot of other species. But as a complex skill, most of the time when we try to measure it, We don't measure it fully. We measure a component of it. So that task that I just described is not really a measure of creativity. It's a measure of divergent thinking. So sort of thinking outside the box, which is a component of being a creative person, but not the only thing about being a creative person. And so, you know, from an experimental point of view, we have troubles with the definition, we have troubles with measuring the construct. And then I think the logic just doesn't work. Boredom won't make you creative. If you're creative, That'll work to squash your boredom. Yeah. And we've we've ⁓ talked about boredom in an acute sense of the sensation, of the of the emotion, of the feeling. ⁓ is there also something that is how would I describe it accurately? Like a prolonged sense of boredom. People Talk about a burnout on their their jobs, but people also talk about a bore out. So if they're not being challenged enough. ⁓ I like to travel a lot. So usually when I'm in the Netherlands for for for for months and months on end, I get this I I feel like I'm kind of bored with seeing the same streets every again that I know where everything is, and then I feel like I wanna see something new. And it's it's different than I'm bored and I don't know what to do right now, but it's just a feeling that that goes over weeks and it's it's more subtle, it's more in the background, but it does feel like boredom. Is is this distinction being recognized in in the science and and how do we go about that one? Do do you know what I mean? Yes. ⁓ I I think so. So the the Distinction that we would make in the literature at the moment in science is between state boredom as you identified, that sort of in the moment transient feeling, and what we call trait boredom or trait boredom proneness. ⁓ essentially someone someone who is trait boredom prone experiences the state more frequently, more intensely, and feels like their life lacks meaning. So those are the sort of triumvirate of things that make for a chronically bored person. But I think you're asking a question about something that's in between those two. Right. So this is a notion that's not just the transient feeling, it's not the chronic personality trait to disposition to being bored, but something more like a mood that is a sort of a malaise, if you like, of boredom but that lasts longer than the the in the moment. I'm not aware of a lot of research that's looked at boredom in that way. it's kind of difficult. It's not the sort of thing that you can easily ⁓ you know, induce in the lab. And so it would be something you would have to measure with people's own self reports and I'm not aware of whether or not people have done that. You know, whether or not you can have a kind of low level background boredom that that sort of influences behavior in some ways. Yeah, no that I I I do understand why that would be ⁓ what why that would be difficult. I I also like to ⁓ look at inverse to to inverse things. ⁓ what is the opposite of of feeling bored? The opposite of boredom. How would you describe that? Yeah, so there isn't one. there are many. There isn't really one state that's the opposite of boredom. There there are tons. So I mean, maybe to sort of backtrack on myself, the opposite of boredom is being engaged. And the reason why I say then there's ⁓ there are many is that there are so many different ways that feel very different that I think if you are in these states you can't also simultaneously be bored. So for example, if you're relaxed, you probably can't be bored, right? If you're on a beach somewhere with a you've you know, reading a a crime thriller that doesn't matter that much to you or whatever, you're relaxed, you're engaged, you're not bored, right? But you could also ⁓ be curious and not bored, right? So if you're and curiosity is a very different state than relaxation, but if you're curious about a thing, it's kind of impossible to imagine being simultaneously bored by it, right? So why? Because when you're curious, you're engaged, you're you're active, you're you're you're trying to learn more. Right. ⁓ people talk about the state of flow. So this is a kind of intense state of concentration. There are no fewer than nine factors that need to be present for flow to occur. So it's quite a rare state. ⁓ and people often sort of mistake it with being in the zone, which is not quite what flow is. ⁓ but I think about that as a sort of an intense state of engagement, an intense focus of your attention. ⁓ and and so that's you you it's hard to imagine being in a flow state. And also simultaneously being bored. But the point really is that, you know, these these things, you know, relaxation, curiosity and interest, ⁓ flow, you know, i the exploratory sort of states, these are all very different experiences. But what they have in common that makes them opposites of boredom is that they are engaging and meaningful, right? So if you can achieve that, then you will you you won't be bored. We'll go back to the conversation in just a second, but first I have an important announcement to make. If you've made it this far, I'm going to assume that you're enjoying the show. If you want to support the show, you can do so by leaving a like or a comment if you're watching on YouTube, or by rating the episode if you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. However, the single biggest thing you can do to support the show is by sharing it with someone you think might enjoy this episode. This could be a friend, it could be a family member, it could be a colleague. It doesn't really matter. If everyone who's currently listening to this episode would share it with just one person, the show would blow up in no time. Which also means that I could go full time. That means more episodes, it means better episodes, and it also means a happy host. So Please consider sharing the episode. It really helps me a lot. And I thank you. Now let's get back to talking. What's the relationship to boredom and the perception of time? Because you mentioned flow state there. And ⁓ what I l like about, or not necessarily like, but when you are in a flow state, time ceases to exist. You are unaware of time passing. You Only notice that time has passed when you exit out of the flow state, and then you are you kind of wake up like whoa, was I gone for for an hour, for two hours? And boredom is actually the the exact opposite. The the the perception of time is very acute. Every second ticks away almost. Has there been any any science to done or or any any questions about the the yeah, the perception of time basically? Yeah, actually that was the very first paper that that I ever published on boredom was on boredom and time in two thousand five and we showed that people who are highly boredom prone tended to overestimate time. So we just did a a fairly s fairly simple sort of time estimation task and people who are highly boredom prone ⁓ tended to feel like time had been dragging along. ⁓ and then there's ⁓ there's other work too that shows much the same kind of thing that when you're bored, time sort of dilates and as you point out, you're paying a lot more attention to it. You're you're thinking about and focusing on time in ways that in other states you don't. ⁓ and you know the important point to to put it in context in the contrast that you make with flow, time in a flow state can either dilate or constrict. Right. So it is, as you point out, that in the flow state, time doesn't really impinge upon the experience until after. Yes. But at after the the the flow state, when you exit it, you can either have felt like you were in the state for hours when it was only minutes, or you can felt like you were in it for only minutes when it was hours, right? So time can time can either constrict or dilate. ⁓ and and highlights the fact that you were not attending to it when you're in the flow state. Whereas as you point out again, when you're in that bored state, time is one of the key things that sort of captures your attention and makes the experience sort of torturous. Yeah, I love that you mentioned that about the that it can go both ways because When I was editing or or working in side of Blender, that's this a three D animation software that I used to work in quite often. And the thing about Blender is that I was able to do it while playing music. So the combination of playing the music and being in the software, and this only occurred when I was good enough so that I didn't have to to look at tutorials every five minutes, but that I could have like consistent bouts of work, that made me lose track of time. immediately but but I also used to ride BMX bikes where ⁓ there's these dirt jumps back to back and then you are also in flow state essentially but then the opposite happens where you are really like time really slows down because you're so hyper focused on not crashing ⁓ essentially ⁓ but still even though time seems to stretch, definitely ⁓ definitely not bored. That's that's for sure. yeah, is there is there some w we we've we've discussed ⁓ we we've talked about a lot, but is there something ⁓ that you feel like a lot of people get wrong about boredom that that well, I wouldn't say annoys you but you think ⁓ should be cleared up Well, we've talked a little bit about the creativity ⁓ misconception and and you know the notion of sort of raw dogging boredom being kind of absurd. ⁓ I I think one of the other things that there's a there's a kind of moral component to boredom that we have. We judge people who are bored. And so we'll you know, there's a phrase, at least in English, that gets used a lot by parents to say only boring people get bored, which is to sort of prompt their children to get out of the state and go and figure it out themselves, right? But I But having said that, you know, it's like this is a judgment on you. It's your fault that you're bored and it's your fault that you can't find meaningful engagement. And I just don't think that that's particularly helpful, right? So, ⁓ you know, we wouldn't blame people for other kind of affective experiences that are challenging, you know. We wouldn't blame people for their anxiety or the depression. So I don't think we should blame people for their boredom either. No, no, I I agree. Now I was thinking about the Dutch phrase, but I was being that was more towards lazy people rather than bored ⁓ people. I'm I'm not sure if ⁓ if we have ⁓ have an ⁓ equivalent of that one. ⁓ is is there is there anything ⁓ James that we we haven't touched on that you think is is relevant to mention perhaps some of your studies that will be cool ⁓ to discuss ⁓ while we're on the topic of boredom? Well we just actually had one study that's gonna be published soon ⁓ in the ⁓ cognitive and affective behavioral neuroscience journal. I did some work with ⁓ Natasha Taylor and Max Schein, who are colleagues of mine in Australia, where we looked at brain imaging data from the Human Connectome Project, and this allows you to look at a large group of people. You look at the brain and its activation at rest. So people are not doing anything. They're just in the magnet being scanned. And you can look at the brain in terms of how connected it is from one moment to the next. So you're looking at what we call functional connectivity. ⁓ and we contrasted people who reported being bored all the time with people who reported being never bored. ⁓ and interestingly in the measure measures that Mac and N Natasha used, the the bored brain showed a higher level of what we call neural integration and flexibility. Now, those two words like sound like a good thing, right? Like so isn't this isn't this a good idea that you have more integration and more flexibility? But there's reasons why ⁓ that's just ⁓ I think it the sort of ⁓ problems of the language and the labeling that we use. What it actually means is that the board brain is sort of broadly active when in some circumstances you need to be more focused in your activity. Right? And so more too much you can have too much of a good thing and more integration across the whole brain is not always what we want. What we sometimes want is segregated activity so that specific networks in the brain can focus attention. And it looks like the board brain Is not doing that well. It's not segregating its activity when needed and and has this general level of too much activation across the whole brain. The flexibility measure is about, you know, how how commonly different brain states sort of switch in and out of one another. How commonly do you bounce from one state to the next? And again, flexibility sounds like a good thing. But if you're bouncing from one state to the next too frequently, then you're struggling to focus your neural resources. And so I think that's what we're trying to claim from this data set is that the broad brain is sort of ⁓ highly integrated in a way that's not useful in terms of the kind of ability to focus and sustain our attention. ⁓ so that's coming out pretty soon. I'm really excited by that work. I think it's really quite cool. We also in that work we contrast that. board brain with an ADHD brain and there's lots of similarities, but they're quite distinct as well. So these these measures that I've just talked about are more unique to the board brain than they are to the ADHD brain, which I think is really quite an interesting thing to be able to show. Aaron Ross Powell It's incredibly interesting and it it ties into what we discussed earlier, at least I think so, regarding the the indecisiveness. So whenever we know that we want to do something, we have one strong desire to to do something, perhaps usually that also activates a more particular part of the brain that is necessary for that activity. But part of being bored is that we don't really have a desire to do any one specific activity. So it's interesting to to hear that Everything is basically active but but no specific regions are being active. It sounds it sounds logical ⁓ to me when you when you spell it out like that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's super interesting. ⁓ finally I was interested in ⁓ is there any difference between ⁓ cultures, perhaps? ⁓ are are we as a Western society ⁓ more prone to boredom than for example ⁓ Asian or or perhaps African any ⁓ any other ⁓ society or or isn't there any good data on that? ⁓ there is some data for sure. ⁓ there so actually there's a lot of work that comes out of China looking at boredom in second language learning. So you know a ton of people, most people perhaps in China, ⁓ attempts to learn i ⁓ I guess mostly English, but maybe other sort of s languages. And as anyone who knows, and you know you would know this yourself, I'm sure, that trying to learn a second language is hard, especially in the early stages, and especially if you try to pick it up in adulthood. ⁓ and so because of that, they there's a lot of work showing that, you know, people get bored during that second language learning. ⁓ what it sort of says as well, to forget the kind of context there, is that certainly, you know, is boredom occurs in much the same sort of way in China as it does in North America, as it does in Europe. ⁓ we tried recently actually, and we we still haven't been able to publish this. We ⁓ we're in the process under consideration in a journal at the moment, ⁓ where we looked at boredom and agency. So I told you before that people who are chronically bored tend to feel like they lack agency. They don't feel like they're in control of how they pursue their goals. So we looked at that in a North American sample, Canadian sample, ⁓ a Chinese sample, and a sample from the UAE. We had a connection over there. ⁓ And the idea was to sort of look at different cultures to see whether or not agency and boredom were related in the same way. Because one might think that in individualist cultures like North America, that agency is more important than it is in collectivist cultures like China. And it turns out the answer was no. And and this is actually probably why it's a bit difficult to publish, because it's cross-sectional work that p ⁓ people don't always like and it's also a null effect and which is difficult to to publish. But the point for for for our purposes here is that, you know, a a very prominent aspect of boredom proneness, this feeling that you lack agency, is the same across those three cultures at least. Which suggests to me that it's a pretty universal thing. And if you think that it has this sort of evolutionary history, it's ⁓ that helps explain its function, then yeah, of course it should be evident in in all cultures, right? ⁓ and so I think that that Yeah, there's no I there's no sense that I know of in any of the literature in different parts of the world that have explored boredom that there's any real cultural difference to it. No. No, yeah, I mean it it it makes sense given that some animals also experience ⁓ boredom. It it it would be logical that that ⁓ that that all humans do experience it. But I thought perhaps one one thing that I had to one example that I had to think about was ⁓ monks, for example, who spend their entire days in some perhaps meditating or without ⁓ talking to anyone. And I don't believe they consider it as ⁓ th they I I at least they don't seem bored because they are spiritually engaged by ⁓ mm doing a lot of meditation and and by not conversing with anyone, but it is something that would seem boring to perhaps many people from from a Western ⁓ society. So I thought maybe ⁓ they have a different relationship ⁓ to boredom from a from a cultural sense in in in that regard. They may. I mean th I I I think ⁓ some people ⁓ d do find meditation sort of difficult and boring and I think that that's the point to make about this kind of thing, particularly for for Monks, I mean, it takes years and years of practice to get good at it. Right? Like and why? Because it's hard to meditate. It's not simple to sit for long periods of time with just your thoughts. It gink brings me to the a quote that I like, I usually paraphrase it poorly from Thomas Huxley, who was known as ⁓ as Darwin's bulldog. You know, he defended Darwin's ideas when they first came out. He said that the great end of life is not thought but action. Right? And so I like that quote because we we don't want to sit around navel gazing. We want to be doing and to be engaged with the world in meaningful ways. And I think boredom's the signal that you're not doing that. And it's gonna be a fairly universal signal. Beautiful. I think that's a great way to to end it on that ⁓ great quote. ⁓ James, that was ⁓ incredibly interesting. Thank you so much. I know you said that you are and very active on social media. ⁓ if people do wanna go somewhere to follow your work, perhaps that new paper ⁓ that's coming out soon, or a website or some other places where they can find ⁓ the things you publish, ⁓ what would be a good place to go? Yeah, you can certainly look on my website. So that just that's just my name, James Dankert.com, and you can just search that up again. So the one social media that I am on very briefly is Blue Sky. So I used to be on Twitter but ⁓ gave that up for good reasons, I think. ⁓ and so those would be the two places, just my own website and ⁓ and Blue Sky. Perfect. I'll make sure to ⁓ to put it in the in the show notes. And ⁓ yeah, thanks again for coming on the show, ⁓ James. This was ⁓ very, very interesting. I appreciate it. No worries, it was my pleasure.