Bored and Brilliant Quotes

“Boredom is the gateway to mind-wandering, which helps our brains create those new connections that can solve anything from planning dinner to a breakthrough in combating global warming.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“to think original thoughts, we must put a stop to constant stimulation.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“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.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“Many of us who have observed our own behavior don't need science to prove that technology is altering us, but let's bring some in anyway. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter that records certain experiences in our brain (typically described as pleasurable) and prompts us to repeat them, plays a part not only in sex and drugs, but also the swiping and tapping we do on our smartphones.

Scott Barry Kaufman--- scientific director of the Imagination Institute...gave me the straight dope on dopamine. "It's a misconception that dopamine has to do with our feelings of happiness and pleasure," he said. "It's a molecule that helps influence our expectations." Higher levels of dopamine are linked to being more open to new things and novelty seeking. Something novel could be an amazing idea for dinner or a new book. . . or just getting likes on a Facebook post or the ping of a text coming in. Our digital devices activate and hijack this dopamine system extremely well, when we let them.
...Kaufman calls dopamine "the mother of invention" and explains that because we have a limited amount of it, we must be judicious about choosing to spend it on "increasing our wonder and excitement for creating meaning and new things like art--- or on Twitter.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“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.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“Research shows that great artists, scientists, and other types of creators have an abundance of dopamine in their system that allows them to deal with novelty,” Kaufman explained. In other words, they are extra-motivated to seek out the new and can then channel that novelty seeking into being creative. Kaufman calls dopamine “the mother of invention” and explains that because we have a limited amount of it, we must be judicious about choosing to spend it on “increasing our wonder and excitement for creating meaning and new things like art—or on Twitter.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“Why is it that you think that technologies are any more distracting than your own mind or anything else in the world?”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“In a Wired piece by Steven Levy, the cofounder of Apple—nostalgic for the long, boring summers of his youth that stoked his curiosity because “out of curiosity comes everything”—expressed concern about the erosion of boredom from the kind of devices he helped create.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“every time we respond to a ping or bubble, it takes twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds, on average, to get back to what we were originally working on, according to Gloria Mark’s research! No wonder it often feels like a miracle when we complete any project or report at all.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“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.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“The result of my obsession with boredom is this book:”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Time Spent Doing Nothing Changes Everything

“My goal is to be in the moment more often than photographing it.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Time Spent Doing Nothing Changes Everything

“But what exactly happens when you get bored that ignites your imagination? “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.” Totally awesome.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“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.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“Smartphones allow us to do all kinds of amazing things like contact people from great distances, but we can get trapped in devoting our entire life to them,” he said. “That’s not the smartphone’s fault.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“Amazon Mechanical Turk”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“If Steve Jobs had invented the phone call, it would have been on the front page of the Times the next day, and there’d have been giant back-page ads everywhere you looked talking about ‘Finally, real voices! Real communication! Liberate yourself from the pressure of the keyboard,’” Gopnik wrote.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“Boredom makes people keen to engage in activities that they find more meaningful than those at hand.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self