Bored and Brilliant: How Time Spent Doing Nothing Changes Everything

by Manoush Zomorodi

“In a very deep way, there’s a close link between originality and creativity and the spontaneous thoughts we generate when our minds are idle.” In other words, you have to let yourself be bored to be brilliant.

if we changed our relationship to our gadgets, could we generate bigger and better ideas?

people told us they felt they had been fundamentally changed by the experience. Seventy percent of them reported that after the experimental week, they felt as though they had enough time to think. “It’s like I’m awakening from an extended mental hibernation,” one person said.

Whenever society acquires a new technological skill or ability, there’s an unsettling period during which we’re besotted with the technology, using it indiscriminately without really understanding its effects. While swearing off our devices isn’t necessarily the solution, for many of us the honeymoon phase with our gadgets is decidedly over.

“What we need is to support people in thinking about how they can integrate these technologies most usefully and most advantageously into our daily lives,”

We crave reflective time; we seek balance; we want a life full of joy and curiosity.

We use the word “boring” so often these days, it’s hard to believe it appeared for the first time relatively recently, in 1853, in the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House.

Latin taedia turned into the Christian acedia, the “noonday demon” of listlessness and restlessness, which became the full-blown sin melancholia during the Renaissance only to mellow out later into the French idea of ennui.

“situational boredom” from “existential boredom,”

situational or simple boredom describes the mild sensation produced by temporarily unavoidable and predictable circumstances such as a long road trip or dull dinner party talk. It’s manageable, because you know it’ll eventually come to an end. The other kind of boredom is the existential and spiritual kind—a powerful and unrelieved sense of emptiness, isolation, and alienation. Like depression but different.

“Boredom makes people keen to engage in activities that they find more meaningful than those at hand.”

People who are bored think more creatively than those who aren’t.

“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. That is what can stimulate creativity, because once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to wander, you start thinking beyond the conscious and into the subconscious. This process allows different connections to take place. It’s really awesome.”

When we’re consciously doing things—even writing down numbers in a phone book—we’re using the “executive attention network,” the parts of the brain that control and inhibit our attention.

when our minds wander, we activate a part of our brain called the “default mode network,” which was discovered by Raichle. The default mode, a term also coined by Raichle, is used to describe the brain “at rest”; that is, when we’re not focused on an external, goal-oriented task. So, contrary to the popular view, when we space out, our minds aren’t switched off.

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).

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.

three different styles of daydreaming: • poor attention control • guilty-dysphoric • positive-constructive

“Daydreaming has aspects that will allow us to think originally about our lives,” Smallwood told me. “But in certain circumstances, continuing to think about something might not be the right thing to do. Many states of chronic unhappiness are probably linked to daydreaming simply because there are unsolvable problems.”

“Daydreaming is different from many other forms of distraction in that when your thoughts wander to topics, they’re telling you something about where your life is and how you feel about where it is. The problem with that is sometimes when people’s lives aren’t going so well, daydreaming might feel more difficult than it would be at times when their lives are going great. Either way, the point is that it does provide insight into who we are.”

By design, daydreaming is helpful to us when we’re stuck on a problem, personal, professional, or otherwise. And boredom is one of the best catalysts to kick-start the process.

“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.”

We’ve trained our brains to always have one thumb on Snapchat. But if we want to, we can also untrain them. “We have to mindfully step back and say, wait a minute, I don’t need any more information to make sense out of whatever I’m doing,” Immordino-Yang said. “Let me stop and reflect.”

“It was found that conversations in the absence of mobile communication technologies were rated as significantly superior compared with those in the presence of a mobile device, above and beyond the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, and mood,” the study noted. “People who had conversations in the absence of mobile devices reported higher levels of empathetic concern. Participants conversing in the presence of a mobile device who also had a close relationship with each other reported lower levels of empathy compared with pairs who were less friendly with each other.”

This study echoes in my mind every time I grab coffee with a friend. I used to make sure I put my phone facedown. Now I’m sure to get it off the table entirely. Call me snooty, but I’d like to be able to rate the majority of my conversations as “superior.” The

Turkle sees virtual therapy and texting over talking as part of society’s larger trend toward devaluing conversation and the “human sensibility.” “We’ve forgotten that conversation is supposed to be with another person who can remember the previous conversation,” she said. “Conversation happens because there is history and empathy.” So much for eyes being the window to the soul.

The problem is when you’re dividing your attention between other people and your phone. Sometimes we have to give ourselves a chance to unfold to each other.” Unfolding takes time, stutters and starts, embarrassing moments, and awkward pauses . . . conversational nuance the space bar can’t help us with.

Armed with the firm belief that “distraction is a choice,” Pang set about researching and developing more mindful digital practices that could transform our phones from unruly brats to well-behaved tots; ways we can set up and use our devices that “puts them in their place.” Our devices aren’t going anywhere; they are a permanent part of the modern world. Still, that doesn’t mean distraction has to be.

Here are Pang’s prescriptions for putting that iPhone in its place (or at least making our lives with it a little more balanced): 1. Turn off nonvital notifications

2. Make sure you do get the notifications that matter to you

3. Fight phantom gadget syndrome

4. Remember to breathe The message “Remember to breathe” is Pang’s screen saver. Tech writer Linda Stone coined the term “e-mail apnea,” which she defined as the “temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing e-mail.” You know the feeling: when checking e-mail or waiting for a page to load, often we hold our breath (not to mention keep our shoulders hitched up to our ears).

The idea is that when you are on the bus or walking down the street, you’re not doing nothing. Actually, I should say, your mind is not doing nothing. We think of those moments as unproductive, inefficient, or lost if we’re not checking our mail or doing other tasks. But these are ideal times for letting our minds wander.

your second challenge in the Bored and Brilliant Project is to keep your phone out of view (and not listen to headphones, either) anytime you are in transit. Whether driving, taking the bus, or just walking down the street, make it a completely tech-free time.

Challenge Upgrade During your usual commute to work or a route you take every day, take the time rescued from not looking at your phone and note five things you’ve never noticed before. It could be ornamental cornices and gargoyles (like the ones in my neighborhood that I never saw before I began strolling my colicky son around) or the way the light hits the clouds in the sky. It could also be details that are a lot less poetic, like a gorgeous pair of shoes in a store window that would go perfectly with a dress you just bought or simply another human being smiling at you.

It can be hard to parse the line between capturing and holding dear a fleeting impression of precious life and immediately jumping mentally ahead to what people are going to think when they see your amazing photo.

“Over and over again, I heard the same thing from kids, the generation that theoretically loves technology,” she said. “ ‘Dad, please stop Googling. Mom, stop checking your phone. I just want to talk to you.’ That was repeated in different forms, by so many different people.”

The results were that the more likes a photo had, the more activity it generated in the nucleus accumbens—part of the brain’s reward center. Even when researchers played around with the likes—giving the same picture fifty likes for one subject and five for another—it didn’t matter. The number of likes was the determining factor in stimulating the part of the brain that makes you feel good.

every time we snap a quick pic of something, it could in fact be harming our memory of it.

The results were clear—people remembered fewer of the overall objects they had photographed. They also couldn’t recall as many specific visual details of the photographed art as compared to the art they had merely observed.

“photo-taking-impairment effect.”

Instead of outsourcing so we can focus our attention on more important tasks, “we have this constant stream of what’s next, what’s next, what’s next and never fully embrace any of the experiences we’re having.”

HOW TO TAKE A PHOTO TO ENHANCE YOUR MEMORY

“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.”

The digital economy has been in large part built by app designers who are very good at making things we want to keep using, over and over and over. Even if—especially if—we pay with something even more precious than money—our time and attention.

Having worked for innovation labs at Samsung and Zappos, Krishna witnessed firsthand this shift in priorities from the historic definition of design as “solving people’s core problems in an elegant way” to adding other features that “intentionally get you hooked.”

Facebook, Google, and all the big players use data dashboards that count things like how many times an app is opened or how much time the average user spends there as a way to assess their projects. Because they use those metrics to define success, companies naturally direct their resources to bolstering usage “rather than happiness or the real value to the end consumer.”

He compares what’s happening in the technological ecosphere to the growth of the food industry, which has made billions off our preference for salt, sugar, and fat. “Those are three ingredients that we really need and we’re built to appreciate because they used to be really rare,” he said. “Now there’s a mismatch between our instincts, which tell us that those things are really good, and an environment that has abused them.”

This isn’t just a productivity or focus issue. Mark’s lab has found that the more people switch their attention, the higher their stress level. That is especially concerning, she says, because the modern workplace feeds on interruptions. Dubbing the group of workers most affected “information workers,” she said this population “might have every intention of doing monochronic (concentrated) work, but if their boss sends them an e-mail or they feel social pressure to keep up with their e-mails, they have to keep responding to their e-mails and being interrupted.”