When our minds are preoccupied with something “productive,” the areas of the brain that specialize in our capacities to process autobiographical memory, craft a coherent sense of self, and imagine how others are feeling are all muted. So, the great irony is that the more we demand our brains to attend to being productive, the less our brains are able to grow us as persons in key areas of identity construction and empathy. This doesn’t even address the more widely known contention that sometimes it is only when “nothing is happening” that something actually can happen. Sometimes it is only in
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