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So, what do you do?
I devise experiments to test ideas my students and I have about human behaviour. We use a range of different tools, from questionnaires to in-lab experiments and neuroimaging, to better understand behaviour – in our case, boredom.
Scientifically speaking, what is boredom?
Boredom’s role in our lives is to signal that what we are doing now is unsatisfying in some way and we need to do something else. So while it is unpleasant, boredom is most definitely useful. A life without boredom would be a life of inactivity. If we were never bored, how would we choose to change what we do from one moment to the next?
Are people getting more bored more easily?
A recent paper did suggest things might be getting worse. They tested high school kids and found that boredom was increasing across grades, peaking at around grade 10 (age 15 to 16). But I think what you really want to know is whether boredom is worse now than it was 20, 30 or 50 years ago. And we just don’t have the data to answer that.
Knowing what you do about boredom, are there ways we can become more engaged in the world?
This question is a little like asking, “What makes people happy?” The answer will be idiosyncratic for each person. David Morgan was considered so boring he was in the Dull Men of Great Britain calendar – he collects traffic cones! You and I might think that is boring, but David finds the nuance and history in each cone fascinating. So there is no specific answer to what you in particular should do to engage more effectively with the world. What boredom is prompting you to do is to think carefully about what matters to you. Maybe it is traffic cones, maybe it is 18th-century board games.
What are you working on right now?
One thing my students and I are trying to do is determine what factors cause proneness to boredom. So far, we have found that different levels of self-esteem and self-control at one point in time predict changes in such proneness at a later date.
“My family has started making our apoca-list: things we need to learn to do before the zombie apocalypse descends!”
How has your field of study changed in the time you have been working in it?
The biggest change has been a significant rise in interest in understanding boredom. We are starting to see people deploy the tools of neuroimaging to understand the brain states associated with boredom too. This is in its infancy, but exciting things are coming out all the time.
What is the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you?
My dad has always been quick with an aphorism, so much so it is hard to pick one! But in my mid-20s, I told him to stop doing things for me and that I needed to stand on my own two feet. He looked at me and said: “Jim, I’m nearly 60 and I’ve never stood on my own two feet.” What he meant was that we always rely on others to get through this life.
What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen in the past 12 months?
A computational modelling paper by Yen Yu and his colleagues. They created two computational agents – one driven by curiosity and the other by boredom – and set them a virtual maze-type task to see which learned best. The boredom agent won! This great paper shows that boredom functions well as a drive to explore the world.
How useful will your skills be after the apocalypse?
My family has started making our “apoca-list”: things we need to learn to do before the zombie apocalypse descends! It is a long list, but the internet will be down so we must get cracking! Science is all about creative problem-solving, so I would like to think I would be OK in the end.
OK, one last thing: tell us something that will blow our minds…
Animals get bored. Perhaps you have seen it in your pet, but Rebecca Meagher and Georgia Mason actually showed it to be true experimentally in mink! House the mink in non-enriched cages and they will desperately approach anything novel you show them – even things they would normally avoid, like the shadow of a predator. I am always amazed by the clever experimental designs of people and this paper blew my mind.
James Danckert is a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He is the co-author of Out of My Skull: The psychology of boredom, out later this year
