Bored and Brilliant: How Time Spent Doing Nothing Changes Everything

by Manoush Zomorodi

tracking included their social multitasking—such as what kinds of social media the kids used and how many other ways they were interacting while they were doing things like their homework. Two years later, she and her team did a series of tasks with the group. The kids were asked to imagine solutions to world problems, react to real-life stories, and predict where they would be in their lives a year from now and ten years from now. Although her findings are preliminary, Immordino-Yang reported a “very intriguing correlation that kids who were more engaged and multitasking with social media were actually less empathic in their reactions to other people. They also are less imaginative two years later about their own possible future and about solutions to world problems, like violence in their neighborhood for example.”