Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
Action and
danger is exciting but this
is a fake gun and the process
of enlarging a hole, like the barrel of a gun, is called
boring. Boring. Boring a hole
is a slow process requiring repetitive movements from a tool that goes in
circles,
which may be why things that are slow and repetitive and don't appear to be going
anywhere
came to be described with the same word. They're boring. But why do we get
bored and why does it matter? Evidence of being
temporarily uninterested in anything happening - boredom -
has been found as far back as ancient Pompeii.
Boredom is a feeling we don't like. It's
uncomfortable but it's trivial, right? I mean, boredom happens to all of us but
now
we have Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and texting and Candy Crush
to keep ourselves occupied. So, really,
who cares? Well, here's the thing.
Physical pain, heartbreak and nausea are also
uncomfortable but they're caused by dangerous
serious toxic things, whereas boredom
occurs when you are merely disinterested in the outside world
and the inner world of your thoughts, when you are
alone with just yourself. So,
does the existence of boredom mean that when it really comes down to it life
itself existing isn't really enough?
Arthur Schopenhauer said that "if life possessed
in itself a positive value in real content,
there would be no such thing as boredom. Mere existence would fulfil
and satisfied us." But apparently it doesn't
because boredom exists. Is something wrong
with being, or is something
awesome about us? Nearly 200 hundred years ago Giacomo Leopardi wrote in a
letter to his father
"boredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because
it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense,
is greater than the entire universe. Boredom
is an expression of a profound despair and not finding anything that can
satisfy the souls'
boundless needs." So, while superficially boredom might seem trivial or
childish, embarrassing, almost rude to admit to feeling,
one thing's for sure - boredom isn't
boring. When bored, your brain activity
only drops about 5% and magnetic resonance images of people's brains
while they were bored actually showed greater activity in regions responsible
for
recalling autobiographical memory, conceiving
the thoughts and feelings of others and conjuring hypothetical events -
imagining. Jennifer Schuessler wrote about this
in her appropriately titled essay "Our boredom,
Ourselves." She points out that in line with neurological
evidence, boredom historically has been "an important source
of creativity, well-being and our very sense self."
It's an imposed state that leaves us
to think about ourselves, notice things we may have overlooked and get "ancy" enough
to take productive
actions we might have otherwise put off, like
cleaning, writing or challenging the mind with puzzles
and games.
As a pressure to move, boredom
may have driven us to accomplish much of what we have achieved.
But how do you measure
boredom? The boredom proneness scale,
'BPS', assess an individual's propensity for getting
bored, in a sense their ease of being attentive. Average
scores range between 81 and 117.
We can take scores on the BPS and correlate
them with other things. For instance, people who know themselves well
can easily label their feelings, have high levels of self-awareness,
tend to have a lower propensity score feeling bored.
But when it comes to feeling boredom frequently,
the culprit may be one's own physiology.
Individuals with fewer dopamine receptors in the brain
tend to need more excitement to stay stimulated,
meaning chronic boredom may be a symptom
of the way your body is. A symptom that if
left unchecked can become something worse
Anna Gosline lists depression,
anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, hostility,
poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance.
In fact, the National Center on drug abuse and addiction has reported that the
top three
risk factors for teenage substance abuse
are too much stress, too much spending money
and too much boredom. The Beth Israel Medical Center in New York
reports that addicts reported levels of boredom
are the only reliable indicator of whether or not they will stay clean.
Our brains need stimulation
in order to be healthy, not so much that they're overwhelmed but a perfect
balance
unique to each individual, under which they can perform
optimally, with energized focus, what psychologists call
flow. Too little stimulation and our brains will act out,
hoping to find some somewhere to prevent something worse
from happening. Our brains have thaasophobia,
the fear of boredom. Peter Toohey's "Boredom: A Lively History"
quotes Norman Doidge's findings that "nothing
speeds brain atrophy more being
immobilized in the same environment: the monotony
undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial for maintaining
brain plasticity." Variety
and stimulation encourage neurogenesis, new brain cells
and can extend the lives of cells that already exist in certain regions
of the brain. In order to avoid a lack of stimulation,
our brains will even try to make up their own stimulations -
hallucinations. Hallucinations can be induced
in almost anyone's brain, if there isn't enough stimulation
around. For instance, the ganzfeld effect.
When exposed to random noise and unchanging monochromatic field,
the brain freaks out and starts generating hallucinations.
The effect can also be induced with ping pong balls hemispheres
over the eyes and a radio tuned to static.
Extended sensory deprivation in a special chamber
that eliminates site, sound, smell, taste and tactile sensations
by floating the body in a special fluid to reduce the sensation of weight
can also cause hallucinations as well
as anxiety. When denied proper stimulation,
the brain goes through phases that begin with boredom
and if left unchecked can become worse.
It's a phenomenon well-documented in animals confined to cages
for long periods of time, and, in a horrific case,
a human child named Genie. Born
in 1957 in Arcadia, California,
Genie became one of the most famous cases of abnormal
child psychology. Her father was abusive to her and her family
and delusional. He hated the outside world and sought to isolate his family
from it
as best he could. He confined Genie
to a room with only two blacked-out windows for the first
thirteen years of her life. He often tied her to a toilet chair
and never fed her solid food. When authorities finally found her,
in 1970, she had not acquired a language
and had the mental age of an 18-month-old child.
Genie was extensively studied and became a staple
of psychology courses, a rare example of an impossible
experiment. What if a human child was
isolated from human contact, social behaviors
and human language. A feral child, not raised by the proverbial
wolves, but instead
right in the middle of suburbia. Genie
is still alive today, her identity anonymous,
as a ward of the state of California. Extended
under stimulation isn't just a punishment inflicted by delusional
caretakers,
it's also a punishment inflicted on criminals,
especially in the form a solitary confinement.
In the Bureau of Prisons, the record for most
time spent denied social contact is held
and still being set by Thomas Silverstein.
Considered extremely dangerous, Silverstein has been kept in solitude
since 1983. He has barely seen a single
other human for the last 29 years.
Stories like those are intense
and are far beyond everyday occasional boredom,
simple boredom. What you feel when waiting
at an airport or listening to an unengaging lecture
is not a disorder, it's not a moodm
it's an emotion. Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions is a great way to
visualize this.
The wheel is based on 8 basic emotions extended
in order of intensity. Boredom is positioned as a
light version of disgust. Emotions
are not superfluous. Normal amounts of them have a purpose.
Creatures who feel emotions are often compelled to do
and not do more complicated things than merely
eating, drinking, sleeping and procreating, like
building friendships, apologizing, loving unconditionally and
planning and building for the future. Disgust
is an emotion we don't like. It keeps us from doing things. Its purpose
is most likely a warning, an alarm triggered by things that appear rancid,
spoiled or toxic, that could poison us or make us sick.
Like a good friend, disgust pushes us away from such things. It guides us
in a healthy direction. Likewise, boredom
protects us. Monotonous speakers,
mind-numbing tasks and overloaded sameness,
those things aren't dirty or poisonous, they're just not
stimulating enough. Boredom compels us to new things,
fresh stimulation and when it can't be overcome
a propensity to boredom is a sign of a healthy mind.
It's advantageous. Creatures who felt it wound up
doing more, flourished more, which led to more creatures like themselves,
boredness feelers. So the next time you're
a little bored, be proud.
Thank your ancestors, you are participating in a life
improving drive, like hunger or thirst
that pushes us toward new and better things.
Give yourself time away from the usual distractions
to get bored. It will be
boring, but boring is literally how
holes get made and perfected. Not all holes are useful but some
become people's to some pretty cool stuff.
And as always,
thanks for watching.