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

by Manoush Zomorodi

Mann devised an experiment wherein a group of participants was given the most boring assignment she could think of: copying, by hand, phone numbers from the phone book. (For some of you who might never have seen one of those, Google it.) This was based on a classic creativity test developed in 1967 by J. P. Guilford, an American psychologist and one of the first researchers to study creativity. Guilford’s original Alternative Uses Test gave subjects two minutes to come up with as many uses as they could think of for everyday objects such as cups, paper clips, or a chair. In Mann’s version, she preceded the creativity test with twenty minutes of a meaningless task: in this case, copying numbers out of the phone book. Afterward, her subjects were asked to come up with as many uses as they could for two paper cups (the kind you get at an ecologically unscrupulous water cooler). The participants devised mildly original ideas for their cups, such as plant pots and sandbox toys. In the next experiment, Mann ratcheted up the boring quotient. Instead of copying numbers out of the phone book for twenty minutes, this time they had to read the phone numbers out loud. Although a handful of people actually enjoyed this task (go figure) and were excused from the study, the vast majority of participants found reading the phone book absolutely, stultifyingly boring. It’s more difficult to space out when engaged in an active task such as writing than when doing something as passive as read...

Boredom is necessary We need to reclaim this word. Boredom has been hijacked and equated with mediocrity. “Only boring people get bored,” parents love to say. But clearly that’s not the case. When you’re bored, you are, in reality, opening the gateway to feeding, nurturing, and cultivating your thoughts. Your mind needs boredom to do some of its most important work.

Boredom is a state of mind In scientific terms, when you get bored, you activate a neural network in the brain called the default mode. Some scientists even refer to it as the imagination network, because our most original ideas can take shape there. Throughout the ages, artists, builders, and thinkers of all kinds have engaged in what Jerome Singer calls “positive-constructive daydreaming” in order to tap into new ways to look at the world around them.

Boredom is productive We think of being bored as a waste of time, and yet boredom can spark goal-setting, strategizing, and essential autobiographical planning. So while it may not feel productive at first, boredom helps us find meaning at every level of existence.

Boredom is a wake-up call Sherry Turkle put it best when she said, “Boredom is telling you that this is a moment for your imagination, for your creativity, for your identity. Boredom is telling you to pay attention to the world.” It’s telling you it’s time to put down the cell phone and lift up your head to the great wide world around you!

Brilliance is humble Brilliance doesn’t have to look like Nobel Prize–winning work on quantum electrodynamics or a painting from the Renaissance. It can be finding a way to help your child make friends at school or pinning down what aspect of your job makes you happy. Though brilliance may be small and simple, that doesn’t make it any less powerful.

Brilliance is subversive Anyone who puts together a complex Lego kit needs smarts. But building an intricate, one-of-a-kind structure with thousands of Lego pieces requires unconventional thinking. Brilliance has a twinkle to it. It’s spirited, and sometimes even a little bit naughty. You may need to keep those brilliant flashes of insight and inspiration to yourself because they may not always be socially appropriate. As one of my favorite writers, Walter Kirn, explained to me, “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing going on.” Without an interior life in which to blossom, thoughts are flat, unremarkable. Not brilliant in the slightest.

Brilliance is predictable Ideas seem to spark when we least expect it, such as while walking the dog or brushing our teeth. That’s the default mode at work; when our body is at rest, or doing a menial task, our mind is at its busiest. By building our capacity for boredom, instead of trying to escape it, we can give brilliance an opportunity to flash more often (with the added perk of getting the laundry done).

Brilliance is slow Combining disparate ideas into a wholly new entity takes time, solitude, and a tolerance for tedium. And yet we rarely give ourselves these conditions at work, at home, or even in our own minds. By rushing to get things done and accomplish more tasks (sometimes simultaneously) we actually come up with fewer novel solutions that have real lasting impact.

Brilliance is sometimes very mundane Doing something better, faster, or more safely is definitely brilliant. Surgical teams in eight hospitals adopted a simple pre-procedure checklist and reduced death rates by 40 percent. On the home front, loading each type of silverware into its own compartment in the dishwasher makes unloading faster and life a little easier. Originality counts, but sometimes a small tweak makes a big difference.

“There are things in our lives, whether they be novels, short stories, mortgage documents, that actually need our slow reading.… But all the researchers I talk to say you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” Slow reading, cracking open a book, stopping and thinking about a sentence, maybe going back and reading it again. Giving each word a chance to wow or impress or educate you. Is it possible to be a deep and thoughtful reader—and an efficient online skimmer? Can’t we do both? This feeling that there’s a battle going on between those two skills in our brains comes as no surprise to Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. Her groundbreaking book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, was published nearly a decade ago. Thanks to screens, reading has changed a lot since then. So when I reached Maryanne, she was hard at work on an update (Letters to the Good Reader: The Future of the Reading Brain in a Digital World), perched next to a small lake in the embrace of the French Alps with very spotty Wi-Fi. The perfect place to concentrate.

Wolf did one amazing experiment on herself but said, “It was a rather disquieting and actually emotional experience for me.” She reread one of her most beloved and challenging books, The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse’s final novel, set in a distant utopian future where all knowledge, from music and art to science and mathematics, has been encapsulated in a complicated game. “I couldn’t do it anymore!” Wolf said of reading her old favorite. “I couldn’t slow my reading down to really allocate sufficient attention to what is basically a very difficult and demanding book!” She may be a neuroscientist, but Wolf’s brain had changed as well. She decided to begin a regimen of slow reading to rebuild her similarly atrophied muscle. Every day, for two weeks, she forced herself to read and reread The Glass Bead Game until she had built back up her tolerance for deep, difficult reading. As Wolf put it, “I had to learn how to read again.”

Perhaps students already intuitively understand the importance of print. Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor and researcher at American University, found that 92 percent of university students from within the United States, Slovakia, Japan, and Germany preferred paper books to e-books. Sure, e-books are cheaper, some of the students surveyed allowed, but they also mentioned loving the smell of a paper book and the sense of accomplishment they felt when they flipped the final page.

HOW TO TAKE A PHOTO TO ENHANCE YOUR MEMORY Even if you can’t bear to face a computer hard drive that’s nightmarishly filled with photos, in Henkel’s experiments, there was one way in which taking pictures did not erode people’s memories. Back on that tour of the art museum, “When participants zoomed in to photograph a specific part of the object, their subsequent recognition and detail memory was not impaired, and, in fact, memory for features that were not zoomed in on was just as strong as memory for features that were zoomed in on,” the professor wrote in her study. “This suggests that the additional attention and cognitive processes engaged by this focused activity can eliminate the photo-taking-impairment effect.”

if you’re trying to calm your mind and body, and return to the world with more mindfulness, twenty minutes of game play time is recommended.” Looking to squash cravings, stop an anxiety attack, or remove unhelpful, ruminating thoughts? Set your timer to ten minutes. “If you’re trying not to overeat, smoke, or consume a drug, studies have found that ten minutes of certain types of games are really effective for that,”

To steer children into becoming players who don’t use games to escape real life but instead become more confident, focused, social, and creative problem solvers, there is one thing no parent should ever do. “Do not shame your children about the games they play,” she said. That means never saying things such as “Stop wasting your time and do something real.” Trivializing a kid’s favorite video game will not get him or her to stop playing. It will only serve to “develop that escapist mind-set” by reinforcing the idea that their interests don’t matter and that games don’t have a connection with the real world. Instead, engage with children by asking questions about the game. How you play it. What’s hard. What’s cool. How they’ve gotten better at the game. You know, the basics.

With all games, she recommends helping children make the connection between what they do on-screen and real life by—sigh—quizzing them. Yes, add this to your modern parenting repertoire. She counsels parents to ask their kids what they have gotten better at since they began playing a game. However, the important aspect to this question is to get at the abstract skills. So if your daughter answers, “I got better at slinging this bird,” or your son says, “I’m really good at using this kind of power-up,” you have to dig deeper. Push them to move past the concrete tasks and get into the larger skills behind them—such as “I found trying different strategies helps with this level.” I tried this with my son after his first slumber party. He was thrilled that I wanted to talk video games and responded with enthusiasm when I asked him what it took to be good at the game he and his buddies played. “You really had to think hard and focus!”

And every time we respond to a ping or bubble, it takes twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds, on average, to get back to what we were originally working on, according to Gloria Mark’s research!

Yikes! Remember this!!

TAN’S TEN-SECOND MEDITATION PRACTICE Here’s a brief exercise Tan crafted to prove that meditation can be as quick and useful as a Google search. This one is geared to upping your kindness quotient (which Tan says makes you happier). 1. Bring a person into your mind, preferably someone you care about. 2. Think I wish for this person to be happy. 3. Maintain the thought for three breaths, in and out. 4. Do this every day to turn your wish for other people’s happiness into a habit … that will bring you happiness, too.