Boredom

00:00:10 I'm addressing the director of the center just wanna tell you about the next round table in May on May 12 the subject is the completeness of physics and the participants are from the physics side priyamvada from Yale B from the philosophy side Tim maudlin from NYU and Carol Robin from Columbia from the humanities side

00:00:42 Jonathan Kramnik from Yale and from the mathematics Joseph Cohen from Princeton we are planning another roundtable which will be the last before the summer on June 16 on the science and art subject called turbulence and it's still being planned so I don't have all the names of the people who will be involved in that influx it's in flux it's in progress and

00:01:22 a member of our Executive Board is the person who proposed this idea and has mental in putting it together and she will introduce the other participants so I've always been interested in but don't I don't know anything about it but I hope you all find out just to introduce Gordon him a little bit sharpen our describe board him as a tame longing without any particular object

00:01:56 SAS he said it was a beast chill and indefinable affliction and the poet Joseph Brodsky said it was times invasion of your world system unsurprisingly not many can describe boredom even though most have felt it and it is one of the central preoccupation of the age the most current definition comes from John Eastwood who was with us raise your hand from Toronto drawing from research

00:02:27 across many areas of psychological science and neuroscience Eastwood and colleagues defined boredom as an aversive state of wanting but being unable to engage in satisfying activity which arises from failures in one of the brains attention networks but interestingly people who investigate boredom find it thus boredom is a blast to a curious and creative scholar nothing is ever too trivial and Peter - he finds a perverse

00:02:57 kind of Glee in his subject that the daily telegraph wrote that curiously the subject seems to invigorate those who study it we hope that this roundtable will in bringing together scholars from literature psychiatry neurology cultural history and the law who have thought deeply about the subject encourage the exploration of the meaning and characteristics of boredom and in so doing give the audience a chance to enlarge their own ideas I'm going to as

00:03:29 quickly as I can because they have long biographies introduce the participants that would you raise your hand when I introduce you so that so that we know who you are well we know John Eastwood is a registered clinical psychologist called an academic appointment at York University in Toronto Canada as an associate professor of clinical psychology where he trains future psychologists and conducts research on the intersection between cognition and emotion he has examined how attention is

00:03:59 allocated to effective and socially relevant information the influence of mood and motivation on attention as well as the affective consequences of attention failures in particularly is examining the feeling of boredom associated with the unengaged mind recently he obtained a research grant to explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying boredom he's been awarded the Ontario Psychological Association Harvey Brooker Award for Excellence in clinical

00:04:30 training the Pietra Canada young of end your award and the Premier's research excellence award Jacqueline Gottlieb is professor of neuroscience and the callee Institute for brain science and the morning of the exec of an Institute for mind brain and behavior at Columbia she completed her education at MIT Yale and the National Institute of Health and she joined the Columbia faculty in 2001 dr. Gottlieb is

00:05:01 an internationally renowned expert on the neural mechanisms of attention and decision making and the recipient of numerous awards her work pioneer is the study of active information sampling and curiosity which she investigates using behavioral computational and neuro physiological methods the central goal of her research is to understand cognition as an adaptive process whereby the brain dynamically allocates its resources to best serve the demands of a decision situation

00:05:34 Gerald Hurwitz assistant professor of clinical psychology and on faculty for the past 30 years at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons he has a full-time clinical practice in psychopharmacology and neuropsychiatry in New York City dr. Hurwitz is a founder and chief medical officer at m3 information and information technology company that focuses on mental health integration into primary care he has authored and co-authored many texts in

00:06:06 the fields of psychopharmacology and neuropsychiatry dr. Hurwitz received a master's degree in philosophy from NYU an MD from Jefferson Medical College and a Bachelor of Arts physics and philosophy from Yale your bag if it is too long has translated more than 50 books from the

00:06:36 French including works by Flo BAM Mariano do us what don't and layman who sell a Chevalier of the all the desire Ida let her and the recipient of a 2016 American Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature he's the author of eleven books including revolution of the mind the life of olive wood doll louise buñuel's la Salva Dada's Bob Dylan highway 61 revisited and sympathy for

00:07:08 the trader a translation manifesto his essays and reviews have appeared in endlessly the New Republic The Wall Street Journal artists the nation Parnassus partisan review book form and elsewhere and he directs the publication's program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Josefa Rose Velasco is associate in the Department of Romance languages and literature at Harvard University and

00:07:39 great I don't know about pronouncing this but and my real collect collegue come Lou tensing my al-khalil gonna put them soon thank you postdoctoral fellow she is conducting multiple multidisciplinary research on the evolutionary role of boredom from a philosophical anthropological point of view to argue against the whites for an understanding of boredom as a pathological personality trait whereby medicalization of such a common daily

00:08:11 annoyance is legitimized as part of this approach she's examining how the comprehension of boredom in terms of a mental disease has gradually formed historically as a result of the act of taking at face value the metaphor of boredom is an illness especially represented in 19th century Western literature and philosophy she's editor and author of the book feminism past present and future perspectives contemporary approaches in philosophical and humanistic thought enhance bloomin burg latorah Aesthetica

00:08:44 in nihilism oh and of academic papers such as Hans Bloomberg's philosophical anthropology of boredom boredom humanizing or dehumanizing treatment boredom a comprehensive study of the state of affairs she's currently working on her next book history of boredom the way towards the pathologies ation of boredom and its alternatives in the future she would like to read a research project on boredom in old age and the improvement of seniors quality

00:09:15 of life in old people's homes by paying attention to the phenomenon of boredom to begin I'd like mark kawasaki say a few introductory words on them on our subject hello everyone thank you indeed for being here by apologies for those who are looking at my back I would rather you hate me than be indifferent to me Schopenhauer wrote that the two enemies of human happiness our pain and boredom and of the to the more fearsome

00:09:47 is clearly boredom we rot our brain cells with drugs or Twitter to avoid it we willingly endanger life and limb to get away from it here today I would much rather you throw tomatoes at me than yawn so if you must walk out please do it from anger or disgust not from lack of interest what is it about boredom that so frightens and discomforts us Tolstoy defined it as the desire for desires which speaks of a yearning but one that can never be satisfied because

00:10:18 it's a failure of yearning itself the fact is boredom is hard to concentrate on we get restless we are literally driven to distraction the desperation we feel when we're forced to endure it for long periods can be positively claustrophobic and yet somewhat paradoxically boredom maintains a real hold on our imaginations you find it unexpected references to it everywhere Robert Musial in his novel three women writes of a group of prospectors what

00:10:49 caused them more suffering than food poisoning was melancholy and boredom which seems to buttress my conviction that we'd much rather suffer physical pain than suffer tedium others have taken a more prescriptive approach to boredom offering recipes on how to be a bore that presumably really means to tell us how not to be a bore well Tara's formulation was the secret of being a bore is to tell everything a sentiment echoed by the American humorist Burt Liston Taylor in a well-known quip a

00:11:20 bore is a man who when you ask him how he is tells you today we would simply say TMI he'll others have tried to combat boredom for that proactively if not always considerately the surrealist leader and Roberto having cruelly humiliated one of his closest friends in public explained afterward to his nonplussed companions it's only natural when I'm bored to provoke an argument even a nasty one to avoid losing stamina now you have before you

00:11:52 five people who are going to spend the next two hours trying to engage your interest in the negation of interest which might seem like the very definition of a fool's errand but fear not because for every sage who is despaired of boredom others have zeroed in on its redeeming qualities the American educator Jon kabat-zinn reflecting his work on mindfulness points out that when you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting similarly John Ashbery wrote in his poem the short answer why make things more

00:12:23 difficult than they already are because if it's boring in a different way that'll be interesting too indeed the potential of boredom to spur creativity is well known to any artist the life of the creative man said Susan Sontag is lead directed and controlled by boredom avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes and Robert and Pirsig author of sin in the art of motorcycle maintenance put it even more bluntly when he said that boredom always

00:12:55 precedes a period of great creativity are they protesting too much putting a happy mask over their agonized faces perhaps but many are those who have written not only out of boredom in both senses of out of but have even made boredom their pet subject Alberto Moravia is most celebrated novel is titled boredom though it's actually about a young man's but aboard young man's dangerous infatuation the decadent writer Shores Carl Weiss months who we

00:13:25 might call literature's chairman of the board made a career you knew I was going to do that sir made a career of displaying in book after book his uninterested society and all its works if you search under boredom in the book listings on Amazon it will return more than a hundred pages of results suggesting that the literature of boredom is practically an industry unto itself mention of literature quickly steered us the steers us toward Boredoms highfalutin French cousin on wheat as well as to his German

00:13:55 relative felled Schmitz even though the terms are nearly synonymous each carries a particular residence and each stands apart from plain vanila boredom in its connotations of romantic world weariness of being not only board but extravagantly even exotically board from Kierkegaard to starch ennui has got something that mere boredom hasn't got cachet so much so in fact that a company making protective sports gear chose it as their brand name here's the pitch on their website urban

00:14:28 sports are extremely fun don't ruin the experience with the wrong gear choose on we know while ennui and belch merits give off a paradoxical whiff of excitement and intensity plain old boredom is just well boring it's on we stripped of its glamour it's what we all know when we're at home it's the tedium of the familiar still I would posit that's that very familiarity of the same old same old can also be a

00:14:59 comfort and I'll end my remarks with one last quote this was said not by a famous pundit but by the woman in a couple I know who for years have been maintaining a bicoastal relationship once when the three of us were dining together they were lamenting the difficulties of never quite seeing each other for long enough and after thinking it over she came out with one of the most romantic sentences I've ever heard it's not that I want you here all the time she told her partner I just want the luxury of being bored with you thank you

00:15:29 Oh feel free to jump in or or if you have something you'd like to say I don't mind jumping in first of all I'm sitting over here just in case the tomatoes start flying okay I thought I'd be as far away from mark as I could I know I'm really struck as a psychiatrist with sort of the very mundane nature everyday

00:16:02 nature of boredom and how something that's in front of us and it's in front of everybody a little bit like sleep every night that's still mysterious I think that's really a wonderful feature of it it was a and adds to the sort of interest of boredom I I make this observation for what it's worth a recent review of two books on Jewish humor by Kathleen shine in the New York Review of Books quotes the poet Billy Collins to say humor is the dog that leaves the room when you call its name it's sort of

00:16:34 well known and it's an old saw that if you have a clinical or critical discussion of humor it's not funny humor and mirth or sort of positive effects or feelings emotional states and the more you talk about them analytically the less humorous it becomes boredom maybe the Murph's evil twin sibling is has a negative valence and but it seems the more we speak of it the less boring it is I thought that was an interesting way that place to start and also I won't go on at this point now

00:17:04 but I wonder about Murph as being a you know in a more literally a kind of a the other side of boredom [Music] on that point I mean one of the things that I would like to say is that you know I think if you give as you said you know if you give boredom at least sort of a second thought it's sort of beguiling really and enticing and on the one hand I think that's both a blessing and a curse for scholars aboard them

00:17:36 because it is so open to understanding definition interpretation study in so many different ways it's almost like you know this Rorschach that can capture all of our thoughts and it indeed does seem to provide an organizing framework for a lot of preoccupation and concern that people have today so on the one hand that's just plain fun as a scholar right because you can just roll around in this unconstrained limitless landscape but if

00:18:08 we want to you know really collaborate with one another if we want to be able to make some progress dare I say if that's an okay thing to say in our understanding of boredom that I think we need to find sort of some lingua franca that we can all work from and we need to find some way to work together to develop some precision around terms and around the uses of our words because the

00:18:39 term boredom is so elastic that as a scientist it's really difficult to wrestle with it right when one person uses the term I might mean something very different than another so well I really think multidisciplinary approaches multi-method approaches are absolutely the way to go I think it would be wise for us to find ways to corral and constrain our thinking and to find ways that we can communicate across

00:19:10 disciplines and work with each other you know I totally agree because today concerning boredom we have to admit that we have more questions than than responses than solutions so but we all recognize that we have to do that to speak of boredom at least we have to admit that boredom to talk of boredom is not boring because we are all smiling all the time so my first reaction to to

00:19:43 your presentation your fascinating presentation you told in a one time that boredom conduct to disaster at the very beginning so I think boredom conduct to disasters in because we are worried about boredom especially because of the consequences of being bored in particular of the consequences of not to

00:20:14 be able to get rid of boredom so I think boredom leads to disaster in two different situations when when individuals are unable to to give a response I replied to to boredom also this is the topic use Italian trees and psychologists are working on when individuals have problems we regard to attention and so on and also on the on the other situation

00:20:46 when the context so it's so closed that we don't doesn't offer the responses you are expecting in this case when the individual is not able because of the his own problems mental problems on and so on because of the context in these two situation is when boredom leads to the

00:21:17 disaster I mean to to behavior that anybody could say are illogical Davian behaviors completely agree and I'm wondering to your point tell me the maybe one of the things to try to distinguish between is boredom and the feeling of discomfort that we feel we think that we call boredom which are maybe not quite the

00:21:49 exact same thing because I feel very lucky in the sense that if I'm on my own I actually never feel bored I mean I can feel you know tired I can feel that I don't have any particular activity I can feel a lack of energy but I don't feel bored and that sense of being almost kind of desperately anxious to get out of whatever that state is where I do get bored sometimes is when I'm in a place where I can't leave so you know held as other people and so is boredom and and

00:22:20 the plastic example for me is in my day job you know if I'm stuck in a meeting and I just have to be there and sometimes that can be great but sometimes they can get really painful and it does cause that sense of claustrophobia that I thought I referenced where you know my astral self is sort of getting up from the table and walking out of the room and going running down the hall but my physical self because I'm sort of stuck because of you know the expectations of the job I'm still sitting there just waiting for

00:22:51 this thing to end because whatever they're talking about is just of no interest whatsoever and there's a memoir I remember reading once by the former director of the Louvre was talking about his one of his predecessors would go to meetings of which they had zillions and the French were even worse than than we are in the museum world and they would go to meetings at a certain point he would just stand up and say okay I'm going to the movies now and all the other curators to be sitting around the table completely nonplussed because this man actually dared to do what they probably wanted to do themselves but he

00:23:21 actually stood up and did it and walked away and it eventually cost him his job but it kind of didn't matter because he doesn't want to be bored anymore HIDA got or talk about situation in which you are Fortin you are not forced to be to be there but you should constrain you should and you you you decide to go to go there voluntarily nobody is forcing you but you know in advance you are going to be to be bored

00:23:53 no sorry I'm not sorry fear this is the first of the the second kind of Bordeaux hey they get to talk about I would actually take slight issue with that because the fact is that there are pressures and constraints under you are kind of force I mean you're not forced physically at gunpoint it's not like being in jail but the fact is that the dictates of my job in the position I have at the Museum and the expectations are such that I'm expected to be in that room I'm expected to pretend that I'm paying attention I'm expected to pretend that I actually care what these people

00:24:23 are talking about and I mean that probably most of the time I do but once in a while it's you know it's where I earn my salary and and this is this is part of the job so you're kind of there are pressures to do it I can't just walk it walk out much as I would love to I have a question about the other kind of boredom that happens when you're alone by yourself and some people who don't get bored in that situation and I promise I said I think we're very lucky

00:24:53 but other people who do get bored in that situation and what do you think is the difference I know you you've studied this a lot and maybe related to this what is the role of boredom in mental illness and psychopathology or what let's say yeah there's a big topic you know but what's the difference be people who get bored when they're by themselves and people who write well I

00:25:23 have a few thoughts that address a number of those issues and please jump in if I mean there's there's lots of different factors cultural social environmental psychological factors that can cause boredom right there's a wide variety of things but I do think we need a clear definition of what the state of boredom is and so I define the state of boredom as the uncomfortable feeling of being mentally unengaged yep and well not perfect I think it does a pretty

00:25:55 good job of succinctly capturing definition and I think the underlying cognitive mechanism is this state of underutilized cognitive resources right we have mental capacity that sort of pent up and not being utilized or not being used and I think that's an inherently uncomfortable feeling and I think we are just designed evolutionarily to experience that state is aversive I think that's a good thing right it's a good thing I mean we

00:26:25 wouldn't be here today having this conversation if we were content to be mentally unengaged right we wouldn't be here in this culture of the society and not unless this conversation itself so I say boredom is the uncomfortable feeling of being mentally unengaged and I think you can compare it to physical pain I think that the the discomfort of boredom is analogous to the discomfort of physical pain they both keep us safe or

00:26:58 they go both keep us well so it's a good thing that we have the capacity for boredom that doesn't mean that we should cultivate boredom right so just because pain is a good thing we don't go around cultivating it's right we don't say yes we should cultivate it nor do I think we should become preoccupied with trying to avoid pain at any cost that would be diss about be advantageous nor would it be advantageous to try to avoid boredom at any cost right similarly like

00:27:31 pain or dumb can become chronic and problematic right similarly like pain I think boredom is the signal and how we respond to it is what's really critical right pain is just a message it's just a signal that tells us we're in a non optimal state where we're cognitively unengaged and it gives us that impetus to do something about it now what we do you know one g jump go

00:28:02 and get drunk read a novel whatever we can all respond in very different ways and that's where boredom can become problematic right it's about our response to it I not a fan of the idea of pathologizing boredom I don't think we should consider it an illness I don't think we should consider it a problem it in its chronic form it does co-occur with what I would call mental disorders but I don't think of boredom itself as a pathological state but one that we need

00:28:33 to handle carefully in lots of different contexts I'd like to expand on that a little bit and also maybe make it a little bit more intuitive for people who are listening about your that's an excellent analogy to pain when you say that people we don't we need pain it does serve a function I think most of us think of things like you know you stubbed your toe or it's considerable pain but you know they're all these folks out there who don't have pain fibers and don't have any sense of pain you know they're their number one problem is see I'm here I'm a little

00:29:04 constrained I can't keep changing my posture but we all if we stay in the same posture exactly for any period of time pain is what makes us want to move or so our joints don't get stiff etc and you know people in hospital who are forced to be in the same position can start develop pain and it becomes worse and worse so it can really be a very tiny negative feeling pain can be and where we don't even recognize it's occurring and we shift our posture because it's starting to build but it's

00:29:35 there that is a little tiny bit of pain and so I think using as an analogy to wouldn't boredom is was really useful because boredom can happen any sort of micro doses and have an effect in spurring us to do whatever hopefully we'll do next I'll just say one of the things is to be a little bit a little bit argumentative it's your wish to define boredom just simply that you know there's there's an idea that goes back to the beginnings of modernism of I'm sorry of the sort of the

00:30:07 Enlightenment that if only we could have a language a scientific language that was precise and all of our problems would be solved right so whereas I'm really I think the protean nature of boredom is actually a very interesting issue because it has many sides and aspects to it and it fits in so many places and I'm certainly in favor and I like your definition of it as well but I think we also can bear in mind that it is a sort of slightly ambiguous term and it does serve in

00:30:39 different context slightly differently or it has a role in different context slightly differently and I think that's actually interesting we don't want to cut off an idea about boredom by reducing it too much fair enough I mean I agree with that I remember actually once attending a conference where this poet was talking of was talking about TS Eliot's and he was talking about how any definition of h2o needed to include a little duckweed right so so I'm quite

00:31:09 comfortable with that idea but I think right now if you can talk about a field of boredom study the problem is we got too much duckweed and not enough precision but I but I certainly think we need to to stay open and I do think that there are useful precise ideas that cut across contexts and finding those common patterns is I think very exciting and very useful because

00:31:43 what Mark was describing I also been lucky enough to be in that position sometimes and I never described that as boredom to myself I described it that I was Restless irritated impatient couldn't tolerate all the nonsense being talked about but I felt more annoyance whereas when I am bored is more that I

00:32:15 kind of passed passively not knowing what to do or how to engage or so there is a there's a difference there and one question then is that you people who think about boredom and or or knowledgeable about it how do you define it what is it exactly actually if I could just jump it with one thing because there's analogically and this might or might not have a bearing but the French direct translation of boredom

00:32:45 is of course ennui yeah ennui comes from old French which means annoyance and that comes from Latin which means hated so there is the the annoyance hatred in dispute Oh fordham make you know vector is very tight I had a fellow in my lab once who was from France and he would always say these things this is boring this is also the cultural quality of boredom and whether or not one chooses

00:33:16 to use that term because I think when you heard that some people would label what you were experience is boredom I don't think you said well I didn't have boredom that was something else you said mmm I didn't think to call that boredom in a way and I have a different thing I refer to when I think of boredom but I think there may yet be something in common between those two states which is I don't know what yet what I want to do with myself and gee I wish I did which is the wishing to have a wish that Mark referred to and then there's the under utilization of my act my the sort

00:33:48 of cognitive capacity right where I could do more or I'd like to act and somehow I'm constrained to not act and that can create a sense of boredom the words that Edie used are all active words mean I'm I'm annoyed I'm irritated I'm they're all active words where fornum as you pointed out is passive well I think it's a passive state maybe not so what else could be in boredom that's not why well

00:34:20 as opposed to annoyed irritated you know all those things they're there they're active words and I think that's it I think that got whatever the dichotomy captures it because the person's both idle in some sense are not acting as much as they might and yet they have an impulse to do so so there's the active impulse and then there's the feeling I don't know what only has a passive quality to it whereas if you say someone

00:34:52 we that annoys me know when you say someone we means that annoys me but when you say I have only I'm just passively feeling something uncomfortable yeah so this gets back to a concept that comes up in in many many contexts and that is the optimal level of stimulation right and it comes up I mean and I don't really know it's a very mysterious concept in neuroscience when it's presumably it maps on some Network State

00:35:24 right if your brain is a state and a big dynamical systems of neurons interacting and there's presumably some optimal rate of interaction that it's just good and it feels good for whatever reason and so this is how I imagine born even though I have I couldn't tell you what that state was what the principles are but imagine boredom is being in some other state that is under stimulated relative to that optimal one and and of course we

00:35:55 can imagine being over stimulated and that feels bad and if but so it's not really determined by any single external circumstance if some people the same boring meeting maybe experienced as irritating by somebody and infested is boring and fascinating maybe maybe or maybe even pay yourself in a different day no it's funny to read

00:36:25 somebody sections of yeah some of the papers on board and where they're trying to you know you've been among them where they what could we use as a stimulus for boredom which is almost again an oxymoron it's funny during like oh we got this movie that's so boring we'll show that and yeah but it's never properly only of the external environment is what that external environment does to you what kind of memories it evokes what kind of mental life it stimulates right so if if all of

00:36:56 a sudden that boring meeting something came that triggered your memory of something then at least you could distract yourself with some memory anyone be bored anymore so it's not right it's not a function just a familiarity or just of novelty there's some happy medium if things are too simple or too complicated they can both be boring so there's some happy medium there right whatever that is and boring boredom I think is the state where you

00:37:27 might be under stimulated and don't like it and want to get out of it as I think you very well say well they're participants of a sir we're doing a practical demonstration over stimulated and understandably that's what about when the flow is broken well yes I guess what I would say is that you know where we choose to put the

00:37:57 definitional boundaries is up for grabs right I mean there's no a priori a right answer you know we have to decide what's useful and and you know well I think boredom has a long sort of history I'm sure that culture and situation and time have shifted where that boundary has been put slightly you know in my mind I would think about it as an emotional state and I think the two neighboring states that we need to distinguish it from our frustration on the one hand and a hoppity on the other and I think

00:38:28 boredom fits somewhere in between those two and I think it's important not to conflate boredom with apathy which often people do and I think that boredom involves that desire for desires we already heard the Tolstoy quote right and that idea goes back to Schopenhauer's formulation of boredom that there's this Restless longing and desire but an inability to articulate what is longed for right so it's not at all a passive state it's a very there's a sense of urgency and the desire for action the psychoanalytic psychoanalytic

00:39:01 writers talked about the you know desire being too threatening and so it needed to be repressed but that desire for action remained without any target for discharging that energy right so there's that it's not apathetic and on the other hand frustration in frustration you have a goal out on the horizon and something is thwarting your progress towards it something is standing between you and a desired state and that's frustration but in boredom you don't have that future desired state articulated right so you

00:39:31 can't be frustrated you know I heard another psychotic writer that talked about a board person was like putting on a suit you know it doesn't quite fit right no is it we're trying to remember a name right like what is that guy's name was it Joe was it George no no what was it like you're you've got the sense this Wraith there there's something there that you want which you can't name it right and in terms of the over or under stimulation I would again go back to the idea that it situations

00:40:03 that are too challenging right if we attend a lecture on some topic that we know nothing about it's like we can't get a foothold in right we can't get a foothold in and so we are not cognitively able to engage with what's happening if if the lecture is on something we know too well and it's sort of very you know uninteresting to us below our capacity and it doesn't engage us either and so I think in both you know those over under stimulating or over challenging or understanding under challenging situations they have that final common pathway of being

00:40:33 cognitively unengaged and when I say that that's the underlying sub personal cognitive mechanism I don't wish to say that that's all there is to it there's a phenomenological there's a subjective part on top of that underlying mechanism it's very important and that's where all the effective kinds of components come in a little bit we are talking talking about kind of boredom as you know there are we should talk of Borden's perhaps

00:41:06 because we are talking of this situational contextual boredom but what about society which is bored completely bored this do you know this separation this differentiation between the situation of boredom or yeah yeah and the situation in which you are born but if you can you do something boredom perhaps and you may get rid of boredom

00:41:37 but then you have the the profound board on the deep board and later chance it also fail talk about this this differentiation was established by Paul valéry the French support for Bolivia and essentially yes last century and then also if I'm not yeah I think it was crack our secret

00:42:07 Krakauer then also repeated this definition of Borden in certain situation and the burden that a society suffer a society this kind of burden do you suffer when you are situated with your cultural social economic structures yeah so perhaps apart from trying to attempt in to to define to find a definition for for

00:42:40 boredom we we have to start talking of Borden's different borders yeah I agree not to make it too focused in one direction but when you talk about societies societal boredom is that is that really boredom in a sense you know in the sense even in the in the larger sense that we're understanding it or is that more metaphorical because you know societal boredom sounds to me like it shades more toward what you were talking about in frustration that that when we talk of a society being bored it really is that the people in that society are

00:43:11 feeling that there's something that's not working whether it's an economic structure whether it's a political situation whether it's their ability to affect yeah but that's not really bored of that that's really frustration I mean we're not bored with you know the current administration we're just frustrated with it enculturation in a particular society may not give us the goals or may not cultivate the goals and people I don't know how to exactly say this but if those goals are not

00:43:42 cultivated by people you know it sort of like you some young people as they're coming up through school they'll say now I don't know what I want to do with myself and say well go see a career counselor which is perfectly reasonable but the idea is maybe that person will find some interest the person wasn't aware they had or give them some focus in direction so frustration implies there are things barring people from expressing themselves and I think that's a more sort of a description of philosophical and sociological description of let's say anger among the

00:44:12 young under class or femme them and such and some people would say well yes of course women are of course African Americans are angry because look they're being mistreated so why are you treating it like a psychological problem it's a societal problem in this case I think with boredom you could say actually also people don't know what to do with themselves yeah and they may also be frustrated it's not just one or the other yeah yeah I mean I do think when we judge something to be boring we're doing social work right we're dismissing we're denigrating so to

00:44:47 describe something as boring as kind of a social act I think and so I would definitely agree in that regard and you can think about it you know like a child in a classroom who let's say they're struggling with math wow this is boring right but what's happening right there right well maybe this child lacks the capacity to be successful in this context but it's a way to save face it's sort of an aloof kind of stepping back and we use boredom to judge people as well right I

00:45:17 had I had one graduate student that was doing a project cross-culturally looking at boredom in in rural communities in Guatemala and it's interesting that when people people say well I'm never bored I'm never bored because I got too much work to do it's just those rich guys over there they get bored right it's a way of rejecting the other so I do think Social Work is happening around boredom in a way that's interesting and a little different than then other kinds of emotions perhaps and I so I think your

00:45:49 point is well-taken in that regard I also think that there are many different potential factors that can cause boredom when you know you've touched on that as well but I think if you're thinking about it as an emotional state I would think of it as singular with lots of different causes and then lots of different responses I might make to it so there's certainly variety that needs to be explored and understood remember many many years ago we were talking one

00:46:24 of the early meetings like that and called pre broom was there and coal free brooms said many of these words be used and we were talking about creativity imagination zone he said these are just words we use that it's because we don't really know what they are about and we give them a name do you think boredom falls into that category that it's I think Oh like you know for example when when we say fear as an emotion it seems to be a lot more

00:46:54 specific and now you can talk about fear circuits and so on but boredom seems to be as I listen it seems like different people feel it or or or describe it or like your student with the mad who says I'm bored it does he actually have an emotion that is specific and kumbhak can be called boredom where I started right I mean my thought would be that boredom can be like fear if we can work together

00:47:27 and come up with a definition but I think the person in the street will and should continue to use the term very broadly and very loosely just the way people use the term fear in a way that you know neuroscientist would say well that's not actually not quite fear right I mean they make distinctions between fear and anxiety and all kinds of nuances that others wouldn't make so I think we should start by listening to the person in the street to develop kind of grounded definitions of our concepts

00:47:57 and and and and make sure they're culturally relevant and we should look at theories but then I think we need to do a little pruning and kind of come up with that definition so that we can work with it like we can work with fear yeah yeah I agree so I think it's so coming from neuroscience where we're not really studying for boredom yet but we're not studying a lot of interesting higher-level concepts like curiosity right it's right and it but it's not that they cannot be studied it's just we didn't get to them yet so this is why I

00:48:29 mean fear seemed impossible to study at the biological level not long ago and all these decision making everything we care about that's interesting it's very hard to fine that's in a sense that's why we're not going to give up trying to you know operation studying boredom cause it's so difficult to define that yeah think of what we are going to say about boredom

00:48:59 cause it's an infection it's an emotion a state of mind is I mean so it's the same sort of the dark side of mental life right so even when we study feeding behavior in neuroscience we don't say we study hunger right hunger is a motivation for feeding so the same thing boredom is the motivation for engaging in mental life but so I was going to ask you speaking of these disconnect I mean in a sense you're a lot farther ahead than we are in neuroscience and this is

00:49:30 what attracted me to read some of your studies because I started thinking about what motivates us to engage attention what motivates us to be curious and then I looked in my field in neuroscience and I'm amazed to find that in neuroscience we think of mental activity as a cost so right it is it's really nice to be able to put everything that has resource limitation in an economic framework right so attention mental capacity is limited so we have to decide how to engage it either I'm attending to one

00:50:02 thing that means I'm not attending to the other and and we engage our mental life in order to obtain some benefit whatever that is utility right but optimally or rationally we want to obtain that benefit with the minimum of effort so in that framework mental life is a cost that if we everything being equal with I rather not pay right so if you give me a choice between doing something that's a bit more difficult

00:50:32 and a bit more easy if you don't pay me extra just don't for the easy stuff that's our theories that's the state of our theories that people go by and of course that opens the question well what then wire curious why are people reading books for no apparent benefit when you just go to sleep to conserve energy it looks like that right so so so clearly that little definition that we're working on is very incomplete and anyway so I was wondering what do you think about that well I

00:51:03 think that's a great question and and so you know you could summarize that maybe is this cognitive misers miserly model right this idea that we M we want to reduce our expenditure resources and we want to now so sometimes people when they hear me say that the state of being mentally unengaged is inherently aversive they say well wait a second how does that jive with this a cognitive miser the idea right but I don't see a conflict there because I'm not you know

00:51:34 the cognitive miserly model is about the exertion of effort right and there are ways to be cognitively engaged that don't necessarily require a lot of cognitive effort you know so you think about reverie daydream mind-wandering these are all ways of being engaged mentally that don't involve cognitive effort however you brought up some other examples like curiosity which i think is an interesting example and you might argue while curiosity sometimes does

00:52:05 require the exertion of effort and therefore it might be victory yeah with this miserly model and you know I I have I don't have a kind of a solution to that paradox when it comes to curiosity but I feel confident that we can say that being mentally unheralded without it being in conflict with this miserly model and I think the miserly model as you're pointing out is too simplistic right that certainly there

00:52:36 are times in which affections motivation like we're motivated to demonstrate our competence to be effective in the world make changes and that sometimes requires effort and so I think the miserly models is which has its base in this very narrow cognitive science kind of paradigm in is yeah doesn't apply more broadly when we look at human life we'd be I don't know of

00:53:08 this how this affects or where those car takes the miserly model but you know maybe one pathway into it is to broaden the definition of what payback is that's right because you know you talk about okay I want to do something for the least possible effort if you're only going to pay me XYZ and I'm thinking you know just a very practical basic term translations I've done that have taken me enormous amounts of time and enormous amounts of effort and for which I've gotten you know one ends the amount that I would usually charge for it for one of these because I just wanted to do it it

00:53:39 was a you know the labor of love right and so the payback there is my satisfaction in taking the time and putting in the effort to do what I consider a good job and being able to then read it and say well that's actually pretty good that's my payback I mean the monetary part is fine but if it were only because of that I just wouldn't have done it at that rate and if you talk about why people engage in altruistic events or whether you know why they do things that don't seem to have any particular return the return is you know but potentially

00:54:09 the return is in fact that feeling of having engaged in some sort of altruistic effort this reminds me a little bit of what we were talking about earlier about the the very small valence attached to pain or boredom and I think the same thing applies to reward we have this new model newish model about how dopamine functioning in the brain and the midbrain effects our anticipation of reward and you know bear in mind actually that could easily become through simplistic a model where we think oh will reward equals dopamine and that's clearly wrong but it's because

00:54:40 actually I was careful to say the anticipation of reward is different from reward right and so what we each of us imagines will be the reward if I do X Y or Z may have a greater bearing on what we end up doing in the world and I do mean again just like with the issue about the slight bit of pain in one's joints if I'm sitting somewhere and I'm just idle and I suddenly see a bottle of water let's say I just want to move in because it's not where I want it to be or where let's say I'm thirsty

00:55:11 very small valence of interest then motivates me to get up and move and and to do it and I suppose that does involve something to do with the dopamine that's going through my brain I was also interested in the whole idea of this sort of default mode network which hasn't been mentioned so far and which is sort of a sort of a background activity in the brain it's interesting to note in keeping with our talk about boredom not being a not being a passive state and and again I

00:55:42 want to be careful not to equate boredom to the default mode Network but the default mode Network which is sort of how our brain seems to be functioning the network connections between parts of our brain when we're idle is not it's also not a very passive thing and that's part of the thing that's interesting about it's actually an active state that needs to be sustained in some fashion and so I know that then switching from that idle state to a more you know a salient state where things become interesting and I might want to choose

00:56:12 to do X Y or Z that's an important area right and I think we have to carefully imagine where might boredom fit in there in that paradigm there's actually some research on that there's and there's not very much but you know I think one of the areas that's really exciting is looking for the neural and the physiological signatures aboard them so you've already mentioned the default mode Network which is active when you're sort of at rest or when you're engaged in internal thought and internal reverie and the Central Executive Network when

00:56:42 you're engaged with kind of tasks in the world right I'm trying to figure out you know something in front of me and certainly when you are bored the default mode network is more active than when you are engaged in some activity but importantly you know there was a study done by a colleague of mine James danker at the University of Waterloo where they compared someone in a bored state versus a resting state and there is a difference right so they're the insular cortex is another part of the brain it

00:57:14 has thought amongst other things to be involved in helping you toggle back and forth between the default mode Network and the central executive network and is also responsible for tagging salience e in our environment mm-hmm and so I'm going well beyond the data in my interpretation here and this is only one study but one way of interpreting this is that a person is having a hard time shifting out of the default mode Network into the Central Executive so there's this kind of you're stuck where you can't

00:57:46 disengage from the one and engage in the other the other neural network so indeed you know just to summarize the default mode Network is quite centrally involved in boredom but it's not equivalent with boredom there's some very important distinctions in fact external movements on are so very different when you are bored sometimes you jump here's a thought actually yawning and I read something about yawning being involved

00:58:17 in this toggling act you did did I make that up or you know whether I don't know I think I saw some reference where they mention that yawning actually helps someone sort of switch out of the default mode Network Tristan's just perfectly in keeping with what you're saying so when I think about curiosity again with very little data but the way I imagine this so if the default mode Network is engaged in resting state and it's involved in mind wandering all kinds of mind wandering so people when they when they don't do anything people

00:58:49 do stuff usually there studies that probe the thoughts and usually you're planning stuff and most of the time and sometimes it's it's other things like singing songs or reciting stuff okay so that's associated with a default mode Network but that's a resting state which is not boring so if you can so the way I imagine this working is that if you can engage your default mode Network together with your memories and somehow engage the reward system then you're happy you're in a good mental state but

00:59:20 there must be some other state where you're resting and you can't engage that whole network and then you're not happy well put it sort of what I was trying to get at is you're in between the two yeah you can you can't you can't get into one mo you can't act we can't activate one neural network fully or the other yeah and so you know I I do see mind wandering to be a consequence of boredom in situations where you're constrained and you can't leave yeah you know you might mind wander as a way to engage your cognitive resources and therefore to not be bored

00:59:50 right and when you're able to do that then you just see default mode Network but when you're being told you have to pay attention to this and you don't really want to and your taient you're trying to do dream at the same time where you become interested in what your mind wandering sure and that becomes salient and of itself sure and what is that exactly and how does the brain adapt or respond in those circumstances because I think people who are creative well most certainly are you know sort of riffing off these sort of

01:00:22 mind wandering you know events and and then paying attention to it and developing and it's interesting and I think on you know just maybe this is shifting the topic a little bit but I'd be very interested to hear what you think about this in terms of curiosity you know because there's a psychologist that talked to use this term constructive internal reflection and she was referring to that mind wandering state when you are kind of riffing and

01:00:53 that creativity is happening and I think what happens with boredom is we often go to the external world for salvation right we pour a relief and I think that short-circuits the capacity to develop that constructive internal reflection as a as a skill or as an ability and a resource yeah yeah and you know what I think culturally we're in a culture right now where our attention is being yanked around by the caller from all these exogenous demands right look here

01:01:24 do this I mean standing in Times Square you know from the big town Toronto and and Times Square is overwhelming right and your attention is just drawn everywhere and what happens is that capacity for constructive internal reflection or for endogenous control of attention can sort of atrophy and I think boredom can maybe push us to seek out that external stimulation has a short-term solution to our problems but in the long term it may actually end up

01:01:55 really making the situation worse mm-hmm you know and so I think that some what you were saying about creativity and about that internal reflection being adaptive kind of this pulls it together right yeah maybe because part of it is to you know if you can focus on one thing that's calling for your attention or if you're bored and you you focus on one response to it in a creative way that doesn't gate that does imply some kind of engagement and depth that you have to then go into whereas if it's a

01:02:25 Time Square model you can't you know you start moving in one direction business other thing calling with you there and you never really go anywhere yeah no there's no attention really paid it's just constantly I mean the questions do you get bored in Times Square shall I open it to questions - no you can't be

01:02:58 thinking but it was something I was irritated about okay but but then you changed it a little a little bit and I think that it was argot it was the word you used first looking for the right word and he would said the word unengaged and the grammatical word is disengaged huh right and disengage for

01:03:28 me carries and ethical aspect to it if a patient would say to me then they were bored you want to do that would be engaged engage you something you know save the world help your family you know something something like that in other words it's keyed to taking some kind of action and and

01:04:00 actions have ethical aspects but I'm very glad that you and not only that everybody started using that term being engaged which is a very different than something which is neurological yeah essentially neurological so could you comment on that I'm glad you brought that up and I think there's a really important idea here that's fairly

01:04:31 complicated right and there's a number of elements to you to your comment to your question engaged is a description of my relationship with something else right so I'm engaged with this or I'm not engaged with it and it's it's action-oriented like you said in it as you said it contains ethical implications you know what I choose to engage with or whether I commit myself to something or not unengaged is a description of sort of my cognitive resources and they are not being

01:05:02 utilized a way to utilize them would be to become engaged but I think it's important for me to define boredom in a context-free way because if you try to define it in a way that is linked to disengagement then you need the context to define the state but if you define the state as this unengaged state then it is a definition that sort of

01:05:33 transcends the context having said that I think I would agree with all of your points about the ethical connotations of this topic and the importance of seeing the solution through engagement the various analytical society and I'm pologize from my English so I have one comment and one question for mr. Polly

01:06:05 so T III I'd like to emphasize the importance of time when we speak of boredom Allah brought his invasion of time and this preoccupation about time goes and about how avoid to avoid boredom goes far beyond the Enlightenment I don't know if you know about palettes Oh sniffing oh yeah in

01:06:36 Ferrara it's it's it's a beautiful story because Duke of Ferrara in Italy the family nest one of the Dukes in the 14th century built new palace and he called it Palacios - oh yeah - oh yeah in Italian is Esquiva real and no yeah which is to avoid the boredom and he

01:07:11 commissioned to paint in terms of the Renaissance to paint frescoes on the walls of a room which is called insula to Damacy the the room of the month because these two papers of francesco de la cosa and Kozma Torah which were very important painters of Renaissance they painted the month of the year so it's

01:07:41 about time they painted so that is the problem led them to creation artistical creation of representing the time that's my my first command and the time is it's also important because it maybe could link a stimulant yeah and and melancholia - you spoke of

01:08:13 them to engage mentally through things but for example our patients very often they are not able to engage because they're not not able to they no capacity for cat taxes and that's also about boredom just pay attention to the war in German land by Lee and the opposite yes

01:08:46 by the subjective impression that the time is variance in Wimborne when we are bored it's because we feel bad of being spending or china in doing anything or time passes and the question for you it's as if translate of christopher obey could you say some words on madam she's

01:09:37 a good case study and it's self-destructive behavior the one can indulge in if one is bored in america it's it's a very particular kind of satisfaction in the sense that there's something you know sort of a grass is always greener kind of a sense there's this ideal out there that can be

01:10:08 attained and that in fact doesn't really exist you also brought up something that told me to hold you up but you brought up one thing that actually actually we might not have time to touch on here but I'd be curious at some points to know what the scientists and the philosopher think of the relationship between boredom and depression because it seems to me that those you alluded to this that that those two will also have a connection and that boredom and depression you know might be maybe to size it for the same coin I don't know

01:10:38 sure yeah I mean reference to that I was about to say I don't mean it whatsoever to reduce what you said so well to discussions of neurotransmitters and such there is a nice correspondence here which is related to the way time is perceived in people based on their sort of how much dopamine that we have sort of coursing there are veins and you know the most famous case of someone having a very long a low low amount of dopamine or people with Parkinson's disease who

01:11:10 are almost like moving in slow motion right there their time is much slowed and their time sentences is changed as well and that's very interesting depression of course has all sorts of effects and all different neurotransmitters in the brain when one is depressed but one of the changes of again is an effect on dopamine levels some people especially elderly patients when they become depressed they gotta actually appear somewhat parkinsonian we say because their dopamine levels have dropped sufficiently for that to be manifest and so there is the same issue

01:11:44 if dopamine is the sort of stimulus let's say that make makes us move here or there or elsewhere and when that is at low ebb we don't have that sort of guide us forward and that doesn't mean our desires or wishes are gone and that's important and then I think because they're not gone that may be a recipe for feeling bored right question that so you mentioned that the distinction between boredom and apathy so it seems to me that it could be depressed and I don't know if this is

01:12:14 true you could be depressed and not I mean be so apathetic that you're actually not bored because you don't want can't even imagine don't even want to get out of the stage because you don't right and whereas boredom could actually be an improvement there's a desire to your you know executing something else you hit it perfectly that's right they they very much do overlap it's a very common bit of confusion for family members and caregivers to people with Parkinson's for example that they think of them that

01:12:45 they're both that they're depressed right just because they are so apathetic and so there are there are pure forms of apathy withers and there's no boredom involved they have no wishes and then there's sort of it could shade from one of the other and you're again correct if you move towards feeling a restless sort of boredom that's it that's a movement in the right direction yeah it seems that we use the word boredom in all different ways yeah there's so much more that could be said about boredom and

01:13:16 depression so I won't get into that but they are very much linked developmentally across time for the time is a really important point which we didn't talk about today but you know it is part of the definition that phenomenological feeling of the slow passage of time and we've already heard about the relationship between dopamine and the perception of time passing we also know that cognitively when you are not engaged there's a sense of time passing slowly as well and so we know that boredom prone people don't judge

01:13:47 the passage of time well and in our in our studies when we try to manipulate and make people bored we rigged the passage of time as one of our variables to try to change that and then there's time but then there's things happening in that time too right and so you can think about boredom as sort of everything is happening at that moment and nothing is about to happen right and so you think about you know the difference between art versus sort of you know pornography or or propaganda

01:14:19 right and in propaganda pornography it's all there what you see is what you get there's nothing more whereas art kind of draws you in there's that sense of walking through the garden and as you turn a corner a new Vista presents itself a new possibility and in boredom that stops right that possibility of more stops so there's time but then there's also what is happening within that time important to think about it anomaly was not depressed was first a conversation

01:14:54 has been two quick questions in that quick comment wondering about mindfulness and meditation and the effect on board being bored boredom the second question is are curious people less bored and can curiosity be in fact an antidote to boredom and the third is just a pedestrian definition of perhaps boredom is just the nanosecond before we reach our phones no boredom boredom like that

01:15:31 I can say a few things about those questions on the issue about mindfulness there's a little bit of research on mindfulness and boredom and as you would expect people that are high in trade mindfulness or people who regularly practice mindfulness meditation when put in a vigilance task or a sustained attention task which is very very boring trust me we just have to watch a computer screen for a rare kind of event that may happen and then press a button people that are high in in trade mindfulness experience less boredom and

01:16:04 less discomfort and less agitation during those kinds of potentially boring situations so indeed mindfulness prevents or protects one from boredom and there's some open questions about precisely why one idea is that mindfulness actually results in the strengthening of attentional capacity so that you then can attend more effectively but there's also the idea that mindfulness may make you less emotionally reactive to the state of

01:16:38 being under aroused and we just have one study that we haven't published yet where we're looking at this and so far the data seems to be more consistent with the idea that mindfulness has its beneficial effects via that emotional reactivity pathway not through an increasing attention capacity so they're definitely related and curiosity yeah did you want to speak to a tissue yeah so bye so I think it all goes back to this so yes I I would definitely

01:17:08 think that more curious people are less bored and I think it all goes back to this idea of being able to generate questions so so the key about curiosity is the way we think it works is that you encounter a situation that triggers a bunch of hypotheses in your mind what could be happening here could be X Y Z and then it's the willingness to engage and answer the question right that's how

01:17:38 it works oh so so in a sense it goes back to the same thing as being able to generate mental activity which is then very satisfying so answering those questions is very rewarding is that it was internal rewards that it's I think fuels human civilization I mean without if we didn't have curiosity we'd still be back in the cave I think but anyway so so yes so it's it's exactly the antithesis and I think of boredom I guess as the if the failure in some way

01:18:09 to trigger that mental activity I would I know I'm hoping that your John's last interpretation of what how mindfulness might work I'm actually I don't know if it's true but I like that I agree with it that is that if you feel more comfortable managing this state of being idle minded let's say and not get tense and stressed about it and actually think I can master it that might be a way also to master being able to focus your attention when you want to be able to

01:18:40 focus it not getting anxious about it I think to the other topic we didn't talk on very much it relates to your question your your comment or your question about curiosity is that I think this is something all educators would really say yes a big thumbs-up we want to be able to cultivate curiosity in people and how do we go about that what are the different mechanisms by which we do and I think art and and science and literature are our most common ways that we try to do that with people and I think there's proof that it

01:19:10 works yeah so emotional reactivity is very important and there are some studies on that it actually effects memory they're direct studies on memory so the way that you remember an item or an event depends on the circumstances so in the laboratory we can motivate memory by for example by rewards or by avoiding punishments we can put somebody in a task and it's been shown that the encoding of information differs in those

01:19:42 two contexts so if you're motivated by rewards you encode more incidental information there's more of richer context that's being stored whereas motivation by punishment which presumably induces anxiety narrows the focus it's interesting because all of these seem to pause without being tested somatic about it a kind of a you know sort of a dividing line in which you on the one hand you have boredom and anxiety and it goes back to yeah you know yeah that goes back to the example of the the kid who can't get the math so

01:20:14 he gets bored with with the study of math because he's afraid he's anxious about it versus curiosity and ease curiosity and comfort which is that when you are more comfortable with the state of not doing anything and having to focus your attention and in a in a way that many people might find boring you're actually a less bored by it there's kind of a again a sort of a reward of self-fulfillment comes from those those seconds yes thank you all very much for this I'm a

01:20:47 person who qualifies as essentially very bored my name is Nancy Garnier I'm a musician and performing and teaching my memory as a child was of incredible boredom except when I was playing the piano mostly fooling around and when I was about 12 I hit on something in a book by a composer I knew nothing about anything my family was not into

01:21:17 classical music at all it turned it was within a sonata by Mozart it wasn't the piece it was specific sounds within that piece that just blew my mind I thought oh there's been a person in the world who hears as I hear I then subsequently found that the field of music was not at all interested in that quality of hearing that rather it was assumed that people heard a certain

01:21:49 way I don't believe that's true I still don't believe that that's true I believe that this power of shared intensity is is is epitomized in the action of hearing it's become my life's work in fact the thing that has meant most to me in putting together my incredible capacity for boredom and the intensity of my reaction to specific

01:22:19 sounds was measured by a James Hudspeth at Rockefeller University who found out that there are 16,000 moving hair cells over here in your cochlea and 16,000 over there and that they impart information to the brain 200 times faster than any other sense perception when I tell this to a child student who's eight years old Wow there is no

01:22:53 possible way they can get bored no it's gone there's so much happening it just totally transformed my ability to take in all kinds of information from disabled students to I don't know all kinds of people anyway I gone I've joined the Society for music cognition and music perception and cognition and to my astonishment they have bought into this kind of man

01:23:24 and approach to listening so the examples they study are all recorded they've all been listened to a million times they're all it's like canned green beans it's such an amazing massive disappointment to me I just throw out to you you're studying boredom to consider the dynamic of hearing and how it can inform division it usually it's the

01:23:55 reverse that vision is used to kind of quiet the hearing down so it won't be so intense that is that a question I don't know I hope it's certainly inspiring story no I'll say this about what you said I don't know if this is so I'd ask you more questions to find out but no I think you brought up something very interesting about how having an experience of a shared experience played such an important role in unlocking your feeling of curiosity you know because you said Oh someone heard this and intended it the way I hear

01:24:27 things and that idea of sort of empathy obviously played a role and I think that's why the best teachers are often the ones who impart a feeling of empathy and their students so I think it also brings up you know this without any scientific basis to say so that to me instinctively it makes perfect sense that people hear things different ways and that it does bring up what I think we were touching on before about you know part of curiosity or boredom has to do also with personal response you know the same reason that someone could be very moved by Mozart and someone else

01:24:57 could be very moved by Ozzy Osbourne and you know who's to say that it's who's to say that there's a you know wrong or a right answer there it just depends on okay yeah so let me get I want to give a little perspective because you you mentioned the studies of the year of the cochlea and so on so in neuroscience again I think this is this I come back to this topic of how early we are in neuroscience because I mean there's a magic to all the senses I mean vision is

01:25:28 incredibly rich olfaction is incredibly rich of hearing as well but but in but in neuroscience we study them separately just like you said in the field of music cognition so we study the receptors as just engineering systems input and how things are represented and then when we study other things like emotions and decision-making that's a different topic like a different world different people and clearly there's an enormous interface there because the way much of

01:25:59 our pleasure comes from interacting with the world and there's enormous very very variability there and how people sense and hear things and emote the emotion anyway all of that is totally unexplored so just gonna say one other thing about the other thing I heard in your in your story there was the importance I would call that of sort of doing ecologically valid research right and so you know the joke about you know you come into the parking lot and and there's the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost you know and you say what are you doing

01:26:30 I'm looking for my keys where'd you lose them over there why you looking here because the lights better right then and so you know I think a lot of science can be characterized in that manner right there yeah so so you know I hold that but I still hold my earlier comments about our need for more precision right and so it's a balance it's a it's a balancing act but thank you for your story I have one more real quick comment about what you said I don't know the author these what is a recent study that of infants that showed that they

01:27:01 observed the effort being made by their parents doing some tasks some tasks that may be frustrating and the infants knew they saw the difference between the parents making a effort or not I don't know how they measured the outcome but there was some sort of outcome this is in nature was not a obscure journal or anything like that but it was interesting that how you know that idea of empathy and they oh that's important to someone else important to me so that must be important and as a way of engendering curiosity you can see that be rather potent to all of you for

01:27:38 such an interesting conversation I in which there are a lot of children of working parents a number of whom have wherewithal and increasingly children go to school after school will have a lot of activities that are assigned gymnastics art whatever in sort of like little channels and in between I've observed they will say I'm bored when

01:28:10 one activity is over a bored they say whoever's around that's the responsibility you have to find how it should be resolved and I wondered you is mentioned internal reflection but what happens to that in that kind of a situation when you're not allowed to be bored or it quickly has to be resolved

01:28:41 whereas another time to left supposedly to their own you know finding their own answers to these things there's one metaphor that might speak to that from Georg Simmel a sociologist many years ago he talked about the relationship between technology and boredom and how they collude with one another lots about collusion while so the idea that that boredom and Technology collude and on this particular issue the idea is that using technology is like falling into a

01:29:11 fast-moving river where you can forget how to swim the river carries you along and you don't even need to know how to swim anymore you just push before you know it you're downstream and so I would use that metaphor to communicate the idea that if your time is structured exogenously if your attention is directed exogenously the cup paucity to endogenously direct your attention may atrophy now I can't say this based on any kind of research finding at this point but this is

01:29:43 certainly something that we're trying to see if we can bring under the light the lamppost of science to see if we can kind of actually quantify that sort of effect what loss is there it happens then it's it you mean to put it very metaphorically it's like a skill that atrophies when we're born we have a hard time directing our attention right our attention is very much stimulus bound there's a you know a rattle over here you know and then it takes some development for us to be able to

01:30:14 disengage from that and to engage in internal reflection and so this is a skill that needs to be taught and needs to be developed and I think the excessive use of technology may short-circuit opportunities to develop that skill and it's not only technology I mean I completely agree and I think you know I mean I hear what you're saying about those children and I see it a lot myself you know we are not in a society that actually fosters that sense of self-reliance and and the beneficial effects of being bored ie using your own

01:30:44 devices to mentally come out of that state and to actually use it to some kind of positive you know that creative capacity that we were talking about earlier on you know standing in the subway I try to read when I'm in the subway but there are announcements all the time that have nothing to do with anything there people talk there's you know there's just you're constantly stimulated when I was in when I was in when I lived in Boston there was this one moment that thank goodness only lasted about a week it was an experiment and I think they must have gotten a lot of complaints where they suddenly started blasting music on the platform

01:31:14 so that God forbid you should be bored for two seconds or actually you know alone with your thoughts while waiting for the train to come and I was thinking you know I'm I want my thoughts I want a little bit of quiet I want to actually think find out what's going on in there that's like going into a doctor's office where they're playing some kind three years on