Boredom, it seems, might be so universally despised because it’s indicative of an unhealthy mental state. But unlike, say, touching a hot stove, there may be reason to linger in this kind of discomfort on occasion. Boredom allows our thoughts to wander. This is bad if you’re presenting the quarterly earnings report to your boss, operating a chainsaw, or disarming a bomb. But it turns out that a little mind-wandering is often good for creativity. Our brains are arranged in networks, and insight often occurs when seemingly disparate circuits are connected in a way we hadn’t previously realized, like realizing that Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and U2’s “With or Without You” use the same progression of the same four chords. The thing is, it’s hard to make connections across networks when our field of focus is dialed in tightly on one particular subject. Boredom, and the mind-wandering it permits, allows us to zoom out and evaluate new information in a broader view. “Boredom pulls things out of their usual contexts,” says Svendsen. “It can open ways up for a new configuration of things, and therefore also for a new meaning, by virtue of the fact that it has already deprived things of meaning.”
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 11:53:49 +0000
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