The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

by Adam Gazzaley

Boredom, as a field of psychological study, has not received much attention, perhaps because it is difficult to define accurately what it means to be bored. For example, John Eastwood and his colleagues at York University suggest in their work that boredom is “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.”5 Eastwood and his colleagues go further in clarifying boredom as an aversive state that occurs when we • are not able to successfully engage attention with internal (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external (e.g., environmental stimuli) information required for participating in satisfying activity, • are focused on the fact that we are not able to engage attention and participate in satisfying activity, and • attribute the cause of our aversive state to the environment. Eastwood further clarifies that a bored person is not just one who has nothing to do; rather, he or she wants to be stimulated and is unable to be. He calls it having an “unengaged mind.”6 Others have viewed boredom similarly but often from a different psychological perspective. One researcher defined it as “a state of relatively low arousal and dissatisfaction which is attributed to an inadequately satisfying environment,”7 while another suggested that it is “a restless, irritable feeling that the subject’s current activity or situation holds no appeal, and that there is a need to get on with something more interesting.”8 Finally, a third definition, gleaned from ...