Bored? Get Smart!

"Boredom is sort of an emotional dashboard light that goes off saying like: 'Hey, you're not on track'."

"[Boredom is a warning sign that says, it's] really necessary."

"I think boredom gets a bad rap that's not deserved. [Boredom] is linked to a lot of what most of us want out of life, like living a rich, fulfilling, interesting, meaningful life."

"Boredom is just one sort of helpful signal -- maybe unwanted signal -- that helps us get there."

Erin Westgate, social psychologist, University of Florida

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Dr. Westgate and colleagues found in a 2021 study that participants were led by boredom toward sadistic behaviour. One experiment with bored participants viewing a mundane 20-minute video showed them to be more likely to do something that it was presumed none had ever considered doing before. They took to shredding maggots with names the researchers gave them to 'humanize' the maggots in the minds of the study participants: Toto, Tifi and Kiki.

 

A psychological play to appeal to their consciences that failed to produce desired results, under the influence of boredom for some of the participants. Of 67 study participants who had watched the boring video, a dozen, representing 18 percent of the total, dropped a maggot into a coffee grinder. Just one out of 62 study participants in another group viewing an interesting documentary turned to shredding a maggot. Although the study participants had no knowledge of this, the maggots didn't mind that the grinding machine was faked.

 

A link was proven between boredom and various types of bad behaviour ranging from online trolling, to bullying in the classroom, to verbal and physical abuse by members of the military toward one another in other experiments. Boredom, it was confirmed, does not always make people surrender to our meaner instincts; it merely calls upon us to take action whether it is deigned to be good or bad. When good alternatives are present boredom also can convince people to perform good deeds.

 

In conclusion it seemed that research pointed in the direction that boredom appears to motivate people to search for novelty situations to staunch the boredom and raise interest levels. Having distractions to entice one away from boredom can often mean resorting to favoured topics having the effect of moving distant from feeling bored. Ten adults were placed in an fMRI brain scanner to measure brain activity as they watched either a clip from the nature documentary Planet Earth, a video of two men hanging laundry, or a static image.

This experiment initiated by James Danckert, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo and his colleagues, featured  the boring laundry video, the documentary or the men hanging laundry, spurred the brain's default mode network to activation; a constellation of brain regions active during internal thought, similar to someone's mind wandering. The anterior insular cortex, a region of the brain believed to signal something important happening in the outside world, shut down as a result of the boring video.

When personal agency is temporarily withdrawn people are most likely to be bored, and that often occurs at work or in school where situations arise where less autonomy presents and fewer options to remedy the emotion are present. Boredom is the mind's way of informing us that something is not quite right, but what to do about it, is not a feature of boredom. It is up to the individual to find useful measures to defeat boredom.

James Danckert, speaks pf people automatically trying to dispel boredom by turning to an iPhone for interest; yet he points out that decision is not particularly meaningful and could lead to a return to boredom. In the search of alternatives more meaningful, he recommends scrutinizing goals, large and small. Boredom, and the search for relief from it, is an essential part of our human experience points out Dr.Danckert.