James Danckert
Subject: Beating Boredom
Bio: Cognitive neuroscientist and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo
Reading: Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Beating Boredom.
Our speaker is James Danckert who is a cognitive neuroscientist and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. James is the co-author of the book Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom. I want to learn from James about the relationship between boredom and personal agency. And I want to discuss how using new technologies like the smartphone to alleviate boredom might be problematic.
James, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
James Danckert:
Boredom's an uncomfortable experience because it is an alarm signal. It is letting us know that what we are doing right now is unsatisfactory. We do not want any of the options available to us.
Most parents have that knee jerk reaction of providing suggestions for what to do when their child complains that they are bored. “Go play with your sister. Build a Lego set, go outside.” But at every suggestion, the child says, “nah, I don't want to do that.” They see all the options that the parents suggested. They know what is available to them, but the child does not want those options and worse does not know what they want.
We are no different as adults. This is what my colleague John Eastwood calls the desire bind, wanting something, but not anything that is easily available. Boredom painfully highlights to us is that we are not being effective human beings.
One of the challenges people who are prone to boredom is to restore agency. Boredom prone people have higher rates of alcohol and drug use as well as gambling.
Young people who are bored turn to their phones and social media. This is not unlike the slot machine. It occupies the mind but not in a purposeful way. This junk food for the mind is fulfilling in the moment but not nutritious.
So, what do we do about our boredom? First, stay calm. When boredom descends on us, it is a restless, agitating experience. So, take a breath. It is just boredom. It will not kill you.
Next, reflect on why you are bored. What is it about this circumstance that you find boring? If you can figure that out, you might be able to reframe the situation.
The classic example of this comes from assembly line workers. Many of them push themselves to best their last hour's performance. So, what looks monotonous and repetitive to outsiders is a personal challenge to them. And so, it is no longer meaningless or boring. And finally, use the signal of boredom as a chance to reflect on what matters to you. What are your goals in life, big and small, and are you pursuing them effectively? You might not be able to do something about it in that moment, but at least it allows you time to think about what matters to you. That is what boredom is urging us to do.
Larry Bernstein:
Your theory of what causes boredom is a lack of agency. Why do we want to be an agent of change?
James Danckert:
We want to be agentic because that shows us to be effective. You can see this as a motivation that starts in infancy. You put the kid in the highchair, and he drops it on the ground. There used to be developmental theories that the infant was trying to learn the physics of the environment.
You can see as they are trying to grasp things and are not effective at it. They persist because they want to succeed in the world.
There is a famous paper by Timothy Wilson called Just Think that was published in 2014. They put people in a room for 15 minutes without cell phones or anything to do. Some people reported that that the 15 minutes was pleasant. Some were ambivalent and others hated it because they were bored.
They said that they did not like sitting around with just our thoughts. What made this study famous was that their final experiment gave people a choice. You can sit in the room for 15 minutes with nothing to do or you can self-administer an electric shock. One guy administered 196 electric shocks to himself in 15 minutes, which is crazy.
A more recent paper did a similar thing with mice. They had two groups of mice. One group of mice were in a room with toys to play with and the other group had nothing to do. Both rooms had a hole in a wall. Mice are curious little creatures, and they will poke their nose through the hole to sniff around and figure out what is going on. If they poke their nose through the hole, they will get a puff of air that does not feel good. What they found is that the mice in the room with nothing else to do, poked their nose through the hole more than the mice in the room with stuff to do. This is like the people giving themselves shocks in the Wilson Experiment. And what it says to me is that animals need to be doing things in the world just like us.
People talk about mindfulness and meditation as a solution to ills, but it is hard to do mindfulness meditation. It is unnatural. We normally pursue goals and when we finish, we pursue new ones. Boredom signals that you are in a stagnant state and that you are not pursuing goals effectively.
Larry Bernstein:
Why is it that babies seem not to be bored even though they lack agency?
James Danckert:
I will answer that with a story about the octopus. Their body is very gelatinous with malleable eight legs. It can change the color and texture on its skin. It has a unique central nervous system with a central brain, and in each of its tentacles, it has a decentralized brain unit that can independently control that tentacle.
In a human skeletal system, you can only move your fingers in certain ways, whereas the octopus can move its tentacles in all kinds of ways. Each individual octopus needs to develop control of that body plan.
From infancy to adulthood, once you have got full control of that body plan, now what you have is leftover neural resources. Because in the early stages of development for the infant, they are using all the neural resources to do simple things. Children do not reach adult capacity for grasping until they are 12 years of age.
12 years (not 12 months) before you are fully accurate in grasping at an adult level. And so that long period of time trying to develop control of your body plan uses up your brain resources. But then at some point in your development where you have got control of grasping, you have freed up resources.
I think that explains that infants probably cannot be bored because they are still in that early stage of using all the horsepower to do the simplest of things. But then eventually probably around about four years of age, they are starting to free up some of those resources. That is the key difference between infancy and childhood, where boredom starts to rear its head.
Larry Bernstein:
Technology may create boredom. In the old days before GPS, I may have to use a map and then I'd have to think through what's the best way to go. Technology allows us to not have to think. I do not need that mental mindset of geography. I can coast, and I can get bored.
James Danckert:
We have always worried about the advent of new technologies, making things both better and worse. Socrates bemoaned the invention of writing because that was going to ruin our capacity for memory. Because if you write it down, then you do not have to remember it. The irony is the only reason we know is Plato wrote it down. Then we worried about the advent of the newspaper in late 1800s, people were thinking, there are too many newspapers and too much information. And now our phones, we have an onslaught of information. My colleague and coauthor John Eastwood called this trying to drink water from a fire hose.
I do not want to be the person that shouts at the rooftops that the internet's or your smartphone's ruining your brain, because that denigrates the magnificent things that they do right now. We are talking to each other on a program that did not exist five years ago, and it makes this viable for us to have this interview and for then you to share it with all your listeners. That is a fantastic use of the internet and technology. Having these things at our fingertips highlights to us that we need to be intentional. We need to be agentic.
I do not think that there is anything wrong with deciding to binge watch Netflix because you just want to veg out. You are tired and you do not want to think. It might be scrolling through your social media. It might be knitting. I do not really care what it is. The key thing about letting the world come to you is that you chose it.
At the start of the pandemic, there was a sourdough baking craze. My wife took it up and I am the beneficiary of fantastic homemade bread. The craze required people to post YouTube videos on how to bake. The people who posted the videos were like you creating this podcast. It also required people to watch the baking video or listen to this podcast. I do not think that the nature of the medium itself is the problem. It is the nature of how we interact with it.
Larry Bernstein:
Learning how to bake is different from playing mindless games on the phone. Human beings are spending billions of hours on silly games. I did an event at Penn and a Wharton professor spoke about gamification.
People like to play games and therefore we need to reorganize work as a series of games, and they will enjoy their work more. When you were talking about the assembly line worker in your introductory remarks who wants to be more productive in their final hour of work, that would be an example of gamifying to achieve a personal best in their assembly line work. And the Wharton professor was saying how can we gamify everything at work, score it and give awards.
If someone is playing solitaire on the train for 40 minutes each way every day that is not productive.
I am hoping that we bake more and play solitaire less. So, there is a place for binge watching, solitaire and baking. But I have a rank order preference for how people should use their time because there's fake and real enjoyment. How do you deal with that?
James Danckert:
The notion of trying to gamify everything at work and that will lead to more productivity has a lot of things wrong about it. That is potentially infantilizing your workforce. From a societal or a personal point of view, why does every moment have to be productive?
Back to the octopus. There isa tropical octopus that picks up coconut halves and uses them to hide as cover to get their prey. There's also evidence that an octopus will get two halves of a coconut shell, pull it around themselves to make a ball, and roll down a hill on the ocean floor, pick them both up, go back up to the top of the hill and do it again.
It is play. Play in lion cubs does not translate to better mate selection later or being a better hunter. But play behavior would be a good thing to use up your unused neural resources. If you are in a moment where you do not have anything else to do and you have got these brain resources, well maybe make up a game and just roll down the hill.
Larry Bernstein:
I am hugely positive on play. When the child said, I am bored, the first thing that we say to the child is “why don't you go out and play.” You used the slot machine as negative play.
James Danckert:
It is a negative for those people who get addicted to it. What you are worried about with solitaire is not that they are doing it, but how often they are doing it.
Larry Bernstein:
In physics there is this concept of friction. The kid is stuck, and we give him a push and beat the inertia. If we can get the kid away from his phone and push him outside, then he is going to have fun. And the kid knows that too at some level.
James Danckert:
So that can happen. And I am not suggesting that it would not, and maybe parents want to try that, but ultimately, it's going to work better if the kid makes the choice himself and have a sense of autonomy.
I do not think there is a magic answer about how you prevent your kid from getting bored, or how you can prevent your kid from spending too much time on social media, gameplay or whatever else. Because the objective should be to teach them to pursue their own goals.
Larry Bernstein:
We want them to be self-soothing and to figure out how to be happy.
James Danckert:
It is not a happiness trap. It is an effectiveness goal. Happiness is byproduct of being effective in the way you pursue goals. If you pursue happiness as an end, you will be setting yourself up for failure because life has its challenges.
Larry Bernstein:
How should you be a productive member of our society?
James Danckert:
What productive things should a person do when they go to the DMV?
Larry Bernstein:
Going to the DMV is in the top 10 worst things to do.
James Danckert:
That is why I chose it.
Larry Bernstein:
Delays at the airport are also a nightmare. Why is it the DMV or a delay at the airport, what makes them so horrible?
James Danckert:
Because no one likes to wait. Back to that Wilson experiment of people or the mice in the room with nothing to do, doing self-harming rather than doing nothing. The default setting for people and mice are to be active.
I have not planned for a plane delay. I never go anywhere without a book. So, if I get delayed in an airport, I hope that I am not near the end of my book.
We find those waiting situations so horrible because we did not choose them. The constraint is imposed on us. And it is hard to plan sometimes to have something to do. So, the notion that people would turn to their phones to play solitaire, does anyone still play solitaire?
Larry Bernstein:
They play on their phone. I am using solitaire as an example of ridiculous games available on a phone.
James Danckert:
Problematic smartphones use is between 4% and 8% of people. So, it is a large population but it's not an epidemic. It is not like everybody who picks up their phone and plays solitaire or looks at TikTok on the phone that we were not doing wasteful things 20 years ago. We are falling into that trap that every generation does that looks back and says, back in my day, where we were better because we walked to school uphill both ways.
Larry Bernstein:
My son went to sleepaway camp in a forest in Wisconsin, and the camp banned phones.
They were bored. And then someone said, let’s go for a walk, play basketball, go by the lake. I got a letter from my son that he was learning how to play cards and having a blast betting on it.
How do you think about it?
James Danckert:
If you want to say boredom brought them to this good place, then you also must accept that boredom could bring them to a bad place. When they did not have phones, teenagers got bored and stole cars and vandalized buildings. We have data that shows that teenagers did these criminal acts often reported that boredom was one of the driving factors. You cannot blame phones for doing good things or bad things. You must teach the child to frame and pursue goals in effective ways. And that might involve effective use of their phone.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about as it relates to boredom?
James Danckert:
I am optimistic that we will know a lot more about boredom soon because there are good research labs doing important work. We are going to figure out how to help people better engage with the world and keep boredom at bay, or at least, respond well to boredom when it comes.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to James for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, the topic was Cocaine, Race Riots, and the Cuban Boat Lift in Miami in 1980. Our speaker was Nicholas Griffin who is the author of a book entitled Year of Dangerous Days. 45 years ago, Miami was a dangerous place. Columbians used the city as their US entry point for distributing cocaine. Miami was also known as the race riot capital of the country. In 1980. Fidel Castro released 125,000 Cubans who resettled in Miami that further added to the chaos.
I would now like to make a plug for our next podcast with H.W. Brands who will discuss his biography of Andrew Jackson.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Cocaine, Race Riots, and the Cuban Boat Lift in Miami in 1980, here.
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