On boredom

A rather interesting article in the Washington Post, with the headline explaining what it's all about:

Boredom’s link to mental illnesses, brain injuries and dysfunctional behaviors

Amongst other things I learnt from it, I hadn't realised that an increase in proneness to boredom is a common feature of head injuries:

A harrowing personal experience triggered Danckert’s fascination with boredom as a teenager in Australia.

His older brother, Paul, crashed his car into a tree, suffering a fairly severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Even as his other injuries began to heal, something in Paul had shifted. Frustratingly, he no longer got any enjoyment out of drumming and other activities that he used to love — to him, they were downright boring.

When Danckert trained as a clinical neuropsychologist years later, he treated a number of young men who had head trauma similar to his brother’s. Out of curiosity, he asked them whether they experienced more boredom now than before the accident. Every single one of the men said yes.

“To me, that added up to something sort of organic that has changed in the brain, something that is making it more difficult for these individuals to engage effectively with the world,” he said. “I was fascinated by that and wanted to try to understand it more.”

In a 2013 study, Danckert discovered that the connection between brain injury and boredom went beyond mere anecdotal evidence. He surveyed 52 patients who had suffered either mild, moderate or severe TBI, finding that the presence and severity of head trauma predicted levels of boredom proneness.

The exact mechanism remains unclear, but Danckert suspects it might have something to do with damage to an area of the brain that helps represent value and reward. The orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the frontal lobe that sits just above your eye sockets, is commonly affected in TBI and known to be dysfunctional in patients with depression.

“It may be the case that, having damaged this area, things just don’t seem to have the same kind of value to patients,” Danckert said. “When things lose value or meaning, there’s a good chance that you will be bored by them.

I guess it's a case of the development of anhedonia - the inability to feel pleasure - that is behind it?

There are other points made in the article that were interesting:

The poet and philosopher Lucretius described the plight of the Roman rich in his most famous work, “On the Nature of Things,” as he flees from city house to country home to escape a lingering sense of dissatisfaction. In the fourth century, theologian Evagrius Ponticus warned his fellow monks about the “noonday demon,” a passing feeling of exhaustion and listlessness brought on by the monotony of life.

Of course, in the case of monks, I wouldn't be surprised if they had been awake since 4.30 am and really were exhausted by midday!

One (very modern) irony is whether the internet, by making the vicarious experience of everything from sex to travel so readily available, is making people more prone to boredom by reducing their engagement with the actual experiences.  Maybe the vicarious experience isn't exactly boring, but ultimately becomes unsatisfying.

I think I have been lucky to have low boredom proneness:

More recent research has explored boredom as an inherent trait — known as boredom proneness — which has a whole host of negative associations. People who experience boredom more frequently and with greater intensity are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, gamble compulsively, binge-eat, drop out of school, drive recklessly and suffer from anxiety or depression. Studies conducted during the coronavirus pandemic also found that individuals high in boredom proneness had a greater tendency to break the rules of social distancing.

“There’s a distinction between in-the-moment feelings of boredom — what psychologists refer to as ‘state boredom’ — which isn’t good or bad,” said psychologist James Danckert at the University of Waterloo. “If you’re high in boredom proneness, however, there really aren’t any positives to be associated with that. It’s not good for your mental health to have this sort of chronic sense of being disengaged or disconnected with the world.”

The article does not talk about something I think relevant to the topic - the extent to which religious belief may affect proneness to boredom.   I mean, put a highly religious person who believes they can engage at any time with a meaningful communication with (or at least, towards) their deity in solitary confinement, and they may presumably cope much better than a person who thinks they are alone in their mind in the universe.   Worked well for George Pell recently...

Anyway, the whole article is good and worth reading.