The gateway to mind-wandering
November 7, 2017 11:25 PM   Subscribe

Spacing out is so important to us as a species that “it could be at the crux of what makes humans different from less complicated animals."
Manoush Zomorodi discusses boredom.
posted by Rumple (15 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
too long; read anyway
posted by otherchaz at 1:04 AM on November 8, 2017 [9 favorites]


My strategy at work -- which is often boring -- is to keep a text editor open and ready to catch daydreams. I work work work work work until I can't stand it, or until I am thrown by a chance word or image, and then I flip to the empty page in the editor and see what emerges. Maybe just a word or two, a title or a theme. Maybe a good chunk of a new song or poem. By the end of the day, I almost always have something worth considering later.
posted by pracowity at 1:11 AM on November 8, 2017 [19 favorites]


It’s more difficult to space out when engaged in an active task such as writing than when doing something as passive as reading.

This is why I find my job -teaching- so difficult and tiring. I routinely have five hours of classes in a row, which means five hours of active listening, and not a minute to spare for my brain to slide out of focus.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 1:37 AM on November 8, 2017 [14 favorites]


I'm having some difficulty with the article, first by it starting off with "Every emotion has a purpose— an evolutionary benefit" of which there is no proof and is undermined in concept by the discussion following on "positive" and "negative" mind wandering/boredom.

The second is in equating mind wandering and boredom so closely. I'm rarely bored in part because I rather enjoy my mind wandering as a thing in itself, where many people I know get bored and irritated by inaction rather easily and find the condition almost intolerable. Their minds, I assume, also wander, but they aren't taking the same pleasure in it. That to me suggests that at least common usage has boredom as something other than simply mind wandering as it is generally framed as a disagreeable state in itself, so there would be a contradiction in enjoyable boredom for many people.

A mind uninterested with whatever activity or lack thereof a person finds themselves involved in at the moment is not necessarily a bored mind and therefore not necessarily a bored person. Boredom, from this perspective, comes from feeling that disinterest as unsatisfactory and defining of one's state in the moment, which then one seeks to change.

Ruminating on ideas, possibilities, or flights of fancy is not an absence of mental involvement or interest, its only a separation between focusing on one's physical environment or actions and focus placed elsewhere. The mind may be wandering but that alone doesn't constitute boredom in how the term is typically used in my experience.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:08 AM on November 8, 2017 [20 favorites]


Modern life has accustomed us to unnaturally high levels of continuous mental stimulation much as it has accustomed us to unnaturally high levels of sugar, salt and fat all the time.
posted by Segundus at 3:49 AM on November 8, 2017 [8 favorites]


“Imagine a world where we didn’t get bored. We’d be perpetually excited by everything—raindrops falling, the cornflakes at breakfast time.

This also seems dubious; it is a false dichotomy. We don't oscillate between only two states, boredom and ecstatic rapture.
posted by thelonius at 3:53 AM on November 8, 2017 [9 favorites]


"To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it.

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. "

David Foster Wallace
posted by lalochezia at 4:16 AM on November 8, 2017 [20 favorites]


As somebody who can’t help but frequently get lost in daydreaming and ruminating on thoughts and feelings due to inattentive ADHD, I endorse looking for what might potentially be valuable in those kinds of activities... We should have more freedom to let our minds wander and for reflection and meditation. To me, it seems less like our society’s collapsing due to rampant secularism like some of our more fanatical faithful believe but because we’ve shrunk down and minimized the importance and reality of our interior lives in service to impersonal industrial and market pressures.
posted by saulgoodman at 4:30 AM on November 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


Evolutionary teleology in the first paragraph! ugh. Not everything we do has to be adaptive; it just has to be not-so-disastrously-maladaptive-we-cannot-survive. We might get bored because it's adaptive for the reasons the article discribes; we also might get bored for no reason at all and it's just that people who get bored don't have noticeably fewer kids than people who don't.
posted by Fraxas at 5:29 AM on November 8, 2017 [14 favorites]


Maybe just a word or two, a title or a theme. Maybe a good chunk of a new song or poem. By the end of the day, I almost always have something worth considering later.

IINM this is how Goddess Joni does it, to. It's also how I do it, but not nearly as well.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:35 AM on November 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


The thing that sort of drives me nuts about the singing the praises of boredom is something that gusottertrout hit on.

It's based on a very neurotypical view of how the mind works.

Because, folks, some of us can't do boredom because our brain will eat itself. People with various mental illnesses and disorders need that stimulation to keep some of those things at bay. I'm diagnosed with ADHD, and medicated, but I still need something to keep my brain occupied. The benefit of medication for me is that it lets me focus on one thing, and shift gears easier when I have to switch to something else. I know there's people with depression who use mental stimulation to keep those demons at bay.

Yes, they're coping strategies, and they may not be the best, or healthiest coping strategies. There's almost certainly something to the boredom thing that can be good for my poorly wired brain, but I have to do it in a very different way, or at least to a lesser degree.
posted by SansPoint at 7:10 AM on November 8, 2017 [7 favorites]


Spacing out is so important to us as a species that “it could be at the crux of what makes humans different from less complicated animals."

Or not.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:14 AM on November 8, 2017 [12 favorites]


Fairly closely related, I was just listening to a podcast, I think it was On The Media, where someone came on and talked about how boredom was so amazing and how we needed to give up our phones to a large degree and let ourselves experience boredom. ( Checking and it was in fact Manoush Zomorodi speaking with Brooke Gladstone). I was a bit stunned that this was mainly tied into smart phones. There used to be a reason I carried a book with me pretty much everywhere I went. Before I got an electronic reading device, whenever something wasn't going on I had my nose buried in a book. This wasn't some modern tech totally changing my habits, but just a continuation of a theme that's been part of my life at least since I've been able to make my own decisions. Now granted this article is more about boredom qua boredom, and less boredom qua noe-luddism, as the interview on OTM was, but it's an approach I'm never sure how to handle given my own experiences pre/post cellphone ubiquity.
posted by Carillon at 8:53 AM on November 8, 2017 [10 favorites]


Metafilter: People who are bored think more creatively than those who aren’t.
posted by emmet at 10:29 AM on November 8, 2017


I used to listen to her podcast, Note to Self, for a long time until the episode where she uncritically interviewed Dave Asprey of Bulletproof fame. Looks like according to the comments on the episode page, I wasn't the only one that was disappointed in her complete lack of investigation into his biohacking claims. That said, I DO think there's something behind how boredom is actually a driver for creativity.
posted by ikahime at 1:35 PM on November 8, 2017


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