Why Boredom?
Some years ago I participated in a documentary called “Why Horror?”. The filmmakers wanted to explore why we like horror movies so much given that their chief goal is to scare the living sh*t out of us. I agreed to do an fMRI scan on the central character in part because I love horror movies and in part because I liked the question [i].
But a little more reflection tells me the question is not so simple. So I ask it now about boredom. Why boredom? Why does boredom exist? Why do some people suffer from it so much — and suffering is the right word? Why do I study it?
The first is perhaps the easiest question to answer. If we want to look for functional accounts of behavior one thing to do is to search for the evolutionary forces that might have led to this particular behavior being selected for. Do animals get bored? Anyone who has owned a pet — particularly active breeds of dog — will believe the answer is yes. But we need evidence right, and you can’t just ask Fido, “Are you bored?” A study in 2012 from Rebecca Meagher and Georgia Mason, both at the University of Guelph at the time [ii], is one of my all-time favorites. They examined mink who spent time in enriched or non-enriched cages to explicitly address this question. After spending some time in the different environments the animals were then exposed to positive (a toothbrush or the smell of female feces for males!) or negative (urine of a predator), or neutral things (a water bottle). The animals who spent time in the non-enriched cages went quickly to investigate all types of stimuli, as if they were desperate for anything new, anything different than their mundane cages to interact with. And they ate more treats than the animals in the enriched cages — something humans do too, overeating when bored.
So, yes, animals get bored. Its function then is to push us (animals and humans alike) into action — do something to explore your world and escape monotony. It’s clearly more complicated than that — but a driving factor in my own thinking about boredom is that it signals our need to be effective agents in our world (this “push to act” idea should be credited to my friend Andreas Elpidorou, a philosopher at Louisville University who has a lot of interesting things to say about boredom).
The second question is a little harder — why do some people seem to suffer from boredom more than others. There are people who claim that they are never bored. Fundamentally, I don’t believe anyone who makes that claim. I could be wrong of course, but what I think they’re really saying is that when they feel boredom coming on they respond to it very quickly. And that’s the key. People who suffer from boredom are failing to respond to the state signal well.
There’s been a lot of talk lately in the press about boredom and creativity (I’ll likely rant about that in a different blog post). In an awesome book about the electrification of the guitar called Play it Loud, the authors tell a tale of Jimi Hendrix. After another musician sees this guy play a right-handed guitar left-handed (although still strung for a right-hander — watch videos of Hendrix playing — you can’t make out his chords because they’re all upside down) he asks Hendrix, “Man, where have you been hiding?” Hendrix says, “I been playin’ the chitlin circuit and I was bored sh*tless.” Now, if you hope that boredom will turn you into a guitar virtuoso I think you’ll be sorely disappointed. In a more extreme example, three teens shot and killed an Australian chasing his dream of playing major league baseball in America. When asked why they did it, one said “We were bored, so we decided to kill someone.” Just as boredom won’t turn you into a musical genius, it’s also not the thing that turns you into a killer.
How we respond to boredom is up to us. But what factors play into good or bad responses remains something in need of research. We’re chasing down a few factors — self-control and self-esteem chief among them. If we believe we are effective agents in the world — that what we choose to do makes a difference on some scale — then we’re unlikely to feel bored. Hendrix took actions to alleviate his boredom and feel as though he was in control. So did the teens who murdered Christopher Lane, the Australian baseball player. Boredom says nothing about the ethics of what we choose to do — it just tells us we need to do something to reestablish ourselves as effective agents. Ultimately, we want to know something about the causal relations here — but we are still some way from getting there. It does seem clear though that those who experience boredom a lot also have lower levels of self-control.
The final question is more personal. “Medicus cura te ipsum” is the Latin for “Physician heal thyself” [iii]. I suffer from boredom — which means I have to admit that when I experience the state signal I don’t always respond to it well (I do pick up the guitar often, but I’m a good distance off Hendrix’s talent). I don’t think it is too problematic for me — I have enough to do to keep boredom at bay most of the time (research is a curiosity-based endeavor that I’m fortunate enough to be able to do — and it’s a great boredom killer). But when I do experience it, I loathe it. So perhaps if I can understand it better I can deal more effectively with it when it does come.
And then there is my brother Paul. My best mate for many years, he suffered a brain injury one consequence of which was a long struggle with depression. And he said he was often bored. Boredom and depression are common bedfellows and we need to know more about why that is. Paul lost his battle with depression in 2017 (perhaps something for another blog). I think boredom played a huge part. If we fail to respond well to boredom it can become a huge burden. It essentially stops us from engaging well with the world. Paul’s struggles were complex and I wouldn’t lay the blame solely at boredom’s feet. But it does show to me that boredom is non-trivial. It is not simply a part of the furniture of life. It matters. And so I study it in the hopes not of reining it in, but just to get a better handle on what it is and how best to live with it.
[i] In all honesty it seemed like the whole thing would be fun to do. And it was — the filmmakers were great people and going to the premier in Toronto was cool. But the risk in such a thing is that what I did was step way outside my area of expertise and what I did for them was not science! We had an n equal to 1, a block design which did not control for anything like what it needed to (no control for jump scares, no control for disgust — i.e., body horror — versus fear, no control for anticipation of fear, and so on and so on), and discussion of findings that really amount to rampant speculation. So if you see the movie, please don’t judge me too harshly! I also did it because I saw myself as a horror fan — but even that thought was blown up when I met Tal and had his friend Gore-met make the clips we used for the scans. There is a way deeper rabbit hole for horror movies and genres than I was ever aware of.
[ii] Rebecca is now at Dalhousie.
[iii] OK, I fess up, I don’t speak Latin. So I understand that it’s pretentious in the extreme to include it here. As a kid my father used to drop Latin phrases on us every once in a while. He had spent time in the seminary to become a priest, where Latin and Gregorian chanting was still a thing! His most prominent Latin aphorism was “Nil illegitimi carborundum” — don’t let the bastards wear you down!