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

by Manoush Zomorodi

When our minds wander, we activate something called the “default mode,” the mental place where we solve problems and generate our best ideas, and engage in what’s known as “autobiographical planning,” which is how we make sense of our world and our lives and set future goals. The default mode is also involved in how we try to understand and empathize with other people, and make moral judgments.

When we lose focus on the outside world and drift inward, we’re not shutting down. We’re tapping into a vast trove of memories, imagining future possibilities, dissecting our interactions with other people, and reflecting on who we are.

Andreas Elpidorou, a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Louisville and self-described defender of boredom, explains, “Boredom motivates the pursuit of a new goal when the current goal ceases to be satisfactory, attractive, or meaningful [to you].”

Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that motivates us to switch goals and projects.”

Golden Krishna, an expert in user experience who currently works on design strategy at Google, astutely pointed out during one of our conversations that the only people who refer to their customers as “users” are drug dealers—and technologists.

“It’s up to us to figure out how and where we want to share our attention,” he said. “Through research on neuroplasticity, we know that the brain is responsive in that it changes based on the behaviors we adopt, and knowing that is power.”

“Introverts can do quite well. If you’re clever, you can learn to get the benefits of being an introvert, which might be, say, being willing to go off for a few days and think about a tough problem, read everything you can, push yourself very hard to think out on the edge of that area.”