Anyone who’s ever been on a road trip with kids will have heard the phrase, “I’m bored.” But what exactly is boredom — and what causes it? And, is being bored always a problem?
James Danckert, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, says boredom is neither good nor bad, it’s just a signal in your body. We may not really understand what boredom is as much as we think we do.
Danckert researches boredom, among other things, and joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: James, how do you define boredom?
JAMES DANCKERT: Yeah. So I define boredom as a motivational state. It’s wanting but failing to engage well with the world. So when you’re bored, you really want to be doing something that’s meaningful, that’s purposeful to you, but you just don’t like any of the available options.
And the quote I like most comes from Leo Tolstoy from “Anna Karenina,” where he describes boredom as “the desire for desires.” And it really captures the conundrum of boredom that you want to be doing something, and you want to be doing something that matters to you, but you just don’t like any of the available options.
BRODIE: That’s an interesting way to think about it. And I wonder because — especially for kids who say, “I’m bored, like there’s nothing to do” — I wonder how much the the desire to do something, that desire for desires matters, as opposed to maybe just not even not liking any of the options, but just not having anything to do and not being able to come up with something that will keep you engaged or entertained.
DANCKERT: It’s common for kids to say things like when they’re bored, there’s just nothing to do. And the knee-jerk reaction that most parents take is to trot out all the options that we know exist: Go play with your Legos, go outside, play basketball, do something with your siblings, whatever it is.
And at every turn, the child dismisses those options just as “Nah, I don’t want to do that.” But what they are saying is they’ve looked at the options, they see them. They’re not silly. They know that there are things out there that they could do, and those things might have worked in the very recent past for them to be engaged and engaged well, but right now they just don’t want it.
And that kind of highlights another aspect of boredom that I think is really important, and that is the need to be able to be in control of your goals and in control of your life in that moment. So when we’re bored, it’s pretty obvious to us that we’re not being very effective.
And it’s the same for the kids. When they’re telling you that they’re bored, they’re not going to accept your solutions because they come from you. What they need, what boredom pushes you to try and do is to come up with a desire of your own. And when you can’t do that, that’s when boredom is most painful.
BRODIE: What is going on in our brains to make us bored, or to at least make us say that we’re bored?
DANCKERT: So there’s not as much data on what’s going on in the brain as I would like, but there’s at least a little bit. And what we show, we put people in a magnet, an MRI machine, and we made them bored. We did that by making them watch an eight minute video of two guys hanging laundry, which — believe me — is a very effective way of making people bored out of their skull.
BRODIE: Sounds scintillating.
DANCKERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we did that. And what we found is that a range of brain areas that form a network known as the default mode network were activated.
Now, what this network is all about is sort of self-referential thought, which is very true of boredom. You know, it’s “I am the one who is bored” in that moment. But also, you see this network of brain areas activated when there’s nothing external for you to do to engage with.
The important thing in our study is that there was something for us to do. There was a movie to watch. It just turned out it was so mind-numbingly dull that you instead turned inward to that default network that normally is only active when there’s nothing to do.
There’s a lot more work to be done, though. One of the other things that we found is that another really interesting part of the brain known as the insular cortex was downregulated. So it sort of showed less activity when we made people bored.
And this part of the brain is really critical for representing things that are relevant to you and for sort of exploring your world for, for something engaging to do. And so clearly, when people were bored and they had nothing that they thought was engaging, this part of the brain sort of turned off in some sense.
BRODIE: That’s interesting. I’m wondering if you think or see the nature of boredom changing, perhaps. And I ask because you mentioned that it’s nothing that you can think of to do seems engaging or is in the world of things you want to do.
But most if not all of us carry these giant entertainment systems in our pockets now. And it seems like if you are bored, like you’re standing in line — I can’t tell you. The last time I saw someone standing in line somewhere who wasn’t with their nose in their phone, just kind of looking around. And I wonder if that does something, if that changes somehow, what boredom is or maybe how we respond to it.
DANCKERT: The first thing I would say about that is I don’t think it changes the nature of boredom itself. Boredom is this signal telling you that you need to do something else, you need to engage in something more meaningful than whatever’s right in front of you. Certainly.
I often have people say to me, “How could you possibly be bored, given that you have the world at your fingertips on your phone?” And the thing about that is that that kind of way of engaging your brain and just turning to your phone, scrolling through your social media feed is quite passive.
And that’s not a good solution to boredom. It might occupy your mind for a moment, but as soon as you put your phone down, whatever major board beforehand is still going to be there.
BRODIE: Do you think that boredom gets a bad rap?
DANCKERT: So I don’t really think that boredom is bad or good. I think it’s just a signal. And so maybe it gets a bad rap, but I think sometimes it also gets an artificially good rap. So I’ll tell you what I mean.
It can get that bad rap, and that we blame it for everything that we find distasteful. I don’t think that boredom can be blamed for those things. It’s doesn’t make the choice of what to do. It just tells you you need to do something.
And the flip side is where people sort of think boredom will somehow magically make you creative. But creativity is complex, and creativity is difficult and takes practice. And it takes a lot of exposure to new techniques and new ideas and this sort of thing.
And it’s really a complex human behavior, creativity. And you can’t hope that somehow embracing boredom for an hour a day is going to magically make you creative. It won’t do that.
BRODIE: Well, so what you said about the creativity is interesting to me. Especially because yes, I think you’re right that a lot of people will say, “I just stare off into space and these great ideas come to me, and that never would have happened if I’d just been staring at my phone or watching TV or doing whatever.”
But I wonder, based on what you said, if that’s maybe a misinterpretation or a misunderstanding of what boredom actually is, because it seems to me even if you’re staring off into space, you’re actively engaging your mind to come up with the creative ideas.
DANCKERT: I think you’re 100% correct. So when people say, “My mind was drifting and I wasn’t doing anything, and so I let boredom in and I became creative” So you didn’t let boredom in. You disconnected from the world in an intentional way, let your mind wander and it was open to different ideas and that led to whatever it led to.
But that’s not the same as boredom. It comes back to the definition that we have, that boredom is this agitated, restless state of wanting but failing to engage. Well, you can’t be restless and feeling bored and at the same time happily letting your mind wander to discover new things in your ideas. Those two things are antithetical to one another.
BRODIE: Yeah. So do you hear often from people who say they’re bored when in fact they’re not?
DANCKERT: I don’t hear a lot of that. There’s other, other occasions I’ve had, you know, one or two people say something like, “I like being bored.” And then you probe a little bit and you ask a few questions. And what they like is they like being disconnected. They like some downtime. And I think we all like a little bit of downtime.
And then the other thing that happens a little bit more commonly than that is I hear from people who say, “I never get bored.” And again, if you just probe a little bit, you find out that, yeah, actually they do get bored, but it tends to be a really fleeting state for those people.
