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

by Manoush Zomorodi

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.”