What boredom does to your brain

If you have noticed that you have fewer original ideas than you used to, and you have not been able to say why, this piece is for you. We have, as a culture, quietly removed one of the most important cognitive states the human brain depends on. It has a name, a measurable underlying neuroscience, and a small, well-replicated research literature behind it. The state is boredom.

What follows is a short, cited summary of what we now know about boredom, what it does inside the brain, and what is at stake when it disappears.

The default mode network

In 2001 the neuroscientist Marcus Raichle and his colleagues at Washington University published a paper in PNAS on something they had been quietly puzzling over for years.^[1] When a subject lay in an fMRI scanner with nothing to do, waiting for an experiment to begin, certain regions of the brain were more active than when the experiment was actually running. This was the opposite of what the whole field had assumed. The brain was supposed to go quiet at rest. Instead, at rest, it was doing something.

Raichle called the network of brain regions involved the default mode network — the default, as in: this is what the brain does when nothing else is asking it to.

In the two and a half decades since, the default mode network has become one of the most-studied things in cognitive neuroscience. It includes the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, parts of the inferior parietal lobule, and the angular gyrus. Names you do not need to remember. What you do need to know is what it does.

The default mode network is the brain system most active during what researchers call internally directed cognition: mind-wandering, autobiographical memory retrieval, future planning, thinking about other people's mental states, and the generation of spontaneous thoughts that have nothing to do with the task you happen to be doing.^[2] When you are processing external input — reading, watching, listening, conversing — the network goes relatively quiet. When the external input stops, it turns on.

This is the part of the brain that does, in measurable terms, much of your actual thinking.

What boredom is, technically

Boredom, in this framework, is not the absence of activity. It is the cognitive state in which the default mode network is given the conditions to operate.

The conditions are not exotic. They are: a wakeful mind, no compelling external input, and no immediate task. A queue at the post office in 1995 was the conditions. A train journey before smartphones was the conditions. A long walk in silence is the conditions. Lying on a carpet looking at the ceiling at ten years old is the conditions.

Almost all of these have been quietly converted into screen time over the last fifteen years. We will get to what that has cost in a moment.

The Mann and Cadman study

The most-cited experimental study on boredom and creativity is a 2014 paper by Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire.^[3] They took two groups of participants. One group was made to copy numbers out of a telephone directory for fifteen minutes. The other group was not. Both groups were then given a creativity test: name as many uses as you can for two polystyrene cups.

The bored group produced significantly more, and significantly more unusual, uses than the control group. A follow-up made the boredom stronger by having participants read the directory aloud instead of copying it (more boring, presumably). The reading group out-produced the copying group, who out-produced the controls. More boredom, more creativity.

The effect is real, it is replicable, and it tells us something quite specific about the function of the discomfort we associate with being bored. The discomfort is the brain's prompt to its own internal idea-generation system.

The Baird mind-wandering study

A complementary study from Benjamin Baird and colleagues at UC Santa Barbara in 2012 looked at a slightly different question.^[4] They gave participants a creativity task, then split them into groups for a twelve-minute break. One group did a demanding mental task during the break. Another did a low-demand task that allowed mind-wandering. A third did nothing at all. Then everyone did the creativity test again.

The mind-wandering group improved by approximately 40 per cent. The other two groups did not improve meaningfully.

The conclusion that follows is uncomfortable for a culture that fills every break with input: the conditions under which most of our most useful problem-solving happens are precisely the conditions we have engineered out of modern life.

What Belton found

Dr Teresa Belton, working at the University of East Anglia, has spent years interviewing creative adults about their childhoods.^[5] She kept hearing the same thing from novelists, scientists, and artists: they had been allowed to be bored as children. Belton has argued, in the Cambridge Journal of Education and elsewhere, that boredom is necessary for the development of what she calls “internal stimulus” — the capacity for ideas to arise from inside, rather than be supplied from outside.

This is not metaphor. It is a thread that runs through the developmental literature on play, creativity, and the maturation of the default mode network in children, which continues into adolescence.

What is at stake

If you spend most of the small unstructured moments of your day on a phone, you have not just reduced your “phone-free time.” You have removed the cognitive conditions under which the default mode network does its work.

The work, when not done, accumulates. The half-formed thought never finishes forming. The memory does not consolidate. The slow assembly of an idea you had been chewing on does not resolve. The small autobiographical sense of who you are, what you want, and what you actually think about the people in your life — which the network handles in its quiet background way — does not develop as fully.

This is not a moral statement. It is a description of what happens when a measurable cognitive faculty does not have the conditions it requires.

How to give yourself the conditions back

The practice is small. It is also, for most people who have not done it in a while, mildly uncomfortable. Three minimal interventions worth trying:

• The four-minute experiment. Put the phone in another room. Sit in a chair. Four minutes of nothing. Watch what your hand wants to do, and what your mind does once the discomfort passes.
• One unaccompanied walk a day. Even ten minutes. No podcast, no audiobook, no phone call. This is the highest-leverage single intervention in the literature, because walks combine low-level physical activity with no demand on attention — almost the ideal condition for default-mode work.
• The phone outside the bedroom overnight. This reclaims the first thirty minutes of the day, which research consistently identifies as one of the most productive cognitive windows.

If you would like the long version of the argument and a complete set of practices, the small book the studio publishes — How to Be Bored Again — was written for exactly this. Twelve short chapters. About a long evening's read.

The point of being bored is not, in the end, to be more productive. The point of being bored is to have an interior life, the kind that the default mode network was quietly building all those years it had the time. It can be rebuilt. The brain wants it back. You just have to stop interrupting it.