Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

by Manoush Zomorodi

“When we’re bored, we’re searching for something to stimulate us that we can’t find in our immediate surroundings,” Mann explained. “So we might try to find that stimulation by our minds wandering and going off someplace in our heads.

Boredom is the gateway to mind-wandering, which helps our brains create those new connections that can solve anything from planning dinner to a breakthrough in combating global warming.

turns out that in the default mode, we’re still tapping about 95 percent of the energy we use when our brains are engaged in hard-core, focused thinking.

The areas of the brain that make up the default mode network—the medial temporal lobe, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the posterior cingulate cortex—are turned off when we engage in attention-demanding tasks. But they are very active in autobiographical memory (our personal archive of life experiences); theory of mind (essentially, our ability to imagine what others are thinking and feeling); and—this one’s a doozy—self-referential processing (basically, crafting a coherent sense of self).

“Daydreaming reflects the need to make sense of complicated aspects of life, which is almost always other human beings.”