When Manoush Zomorodi [http://manoushz.com/] was eight years old,
she walked around her house gathering up all the houseplants. She
arranged them in rows, gave them all name tags, and then performed a
concert for their benefit. Why? Because she was bored. But Zomorodi
— host of WNYC’s podcast New Tech City
[http://www.wnyc.org/shows/newtechcity/] — says her kids will never
do anything so charmingly pointless, because old-fashioned boredom is
a thing of the past, for fidgety kids as well as their parents.
“When I’m on the subway, I look at my phone,” she tells Kurt
Andersen. “When I walk down the street, I look at my phone. Is that
bad? Is there a consequence to not having that time when you are
literally getting bored?”
A growing body of research suggests that there is. Neuroscientists
have seen fMRI evidence
[http://themindwanders.com/articles/cognitive-neuroscience/] of
organized, spontaneous thinking when the brain is supposedly idle.
“When you’re given nothing to do, it certainly seems like your
thoughts don’t stop,” says Jonny Smallwood, professor of
neuroscience at the University of York. “[You] continue to generate
thought even when there’s nothing for you to do with the thought.”
[http://www.wnyc.org/story/participate-bored-and-brilliant/]
PARTICIPATE IN THE EXPERIMENT
[http://www.wnyc.org/story/participate-bored-and-brilliant/]
Work by Sandi Mann of the University of Lancashire suggests that time
for aimless thought could be important for creativity. In a study
called “Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?
[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2014.901073#.VMATHUfF8lI]”
she gave research subjects tasks of varying degrees of boringness, and
then used a standard measure of divergent thinking involving plastic
cups. Those given the most boring task — reading the phone book —
came up with more interesting uses for the cups. "You come up with
really great stuff when you don’t have that easy, lazy, junk food
diet of the phone to scroll all the time," she tells Zomorodi.
While there’s no conclusive proof that phones are inhibiting our
creativity, the podcast New Tech City is trying to use technology to
bring back the quiet, reflective time our gadgets have disrupted. In a
project called Bored and Brilliant
[http://www.wnyc.org/story/participate-bored-and-brilliant/], they
invite participants to track how much time they spend on the phone.
Then on February 2, they’ll launch a week of creative challenges
aimed at regaining control of phone use and making time for
constructive mind-wandering.
Still, Zomorodi cautions that we shouldn’t be too quick to blame our
tools. She relates a story told to her by Alex Pang, author of The
Distraction Addiction
[http://www.amazon.com/The-Distraction-Addiction-Information-Communication/dp/0316208264].
In his research, Pang talked with a group of Buddhist monks who were
heavily connected — active web and social media users. “Why is it
that you think tech is any more distracting than your own mind, or
anything else in the world?” the monks asked him. “Distraction
comes from within.”
You can find out more about Bored and Brilliant here
[http://www.wnyc.org/story/participate-bored-and-brilliant/], or
subscribe to New Tech City here
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/new-tech-city/id561470997?mt=2].