In high school drama class, my friend Gint performed a piece of "performance art" where he hung a piece of paper on the wall that read "LIFE!" He sat down, looked at the paper, and pretended to fall asleep.
"Brilliant!" we thought.
Gint had attention deficit disorder, that condition which would essentially mark my generation. His was clinical and chronic, though, and he found it intensely difficult to focus on the task at hand. Boredom, it seemed, was the driving force. It wasn't that he didn't care, but that his brain refused to be stimulated by the material.
Now, a Canadian neuropsychologist named James Danckert is taking that problem seriously. No longer is boredom relegated to the list of problems that kids just need to grow out of. Boredom, it seems, is a clinical state — a thing that happens in our brains. For some people, it happens a lot more than it does with the rest of us.
Speaking to Nature, Danckert recalled when boredom became important to him. When he was 18, his older brother sustained serious head trauma after crashing his car into a tree. As his healing carried on, he complained of insurmountable boredom. Even the things which he once found fascinating and exciting were now dull.
"There was no hint of apathy about it at all," Danckert told Nature. "It was deeply frustrating and unsatisfying for him to be deeply bored by things he used to love."
Danckert, now a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, went on to study boredom, especially in people who have experienced head injuries. As it turns out, they suffer from extreme boredom, complaining almost universally that things they once enjoyed no longer hold any worth for them.
Understanding internal causes of boredom (as opposed to, say, Bonanza being on TV) is important because people who experience chronic boredom are more likely to binge eat, drive unsafely, smoke, drink, and use illicit drugs. Unlike their sad or anxious peers, bored users may use substances as a reprieve from the monotony of life, rather than to turn away from its troubles.
Bored people are also more likely to have job or school problems. They achieve lower grades than their peers not because they don't like the material, but because they can't find stimulation therein.
According to Scientific American, bored people participate in more risky behaviors across the board, from gambling to sky diving. Even people who have been in terrifying accidents, like the one Danckert's brother experienced, may seek more dangerous activities later on. Theoretically, the brain damage they suffered may have caused them to receive such massive doeses of pain relievers in the hospital (or natural pain relievers produced by the body) that they have adapted to need more and more stimulation to produce the same responses in the body's pleasure-reward systems. Like a heroin addict, the patient finds himself unable to get the same high from normal activities.
Researchers are also working on new ways to measure boredom more accurately, rather than relying on a solid but incomplete test developed in 1986: the Boredom Proneness Scale (you can self-administer the test, here).
Scientists say that while the BPS is useful, it is entirely self-reported and measures chronic boredom but not situational boredom. If a person is bored in her current position, for example, that is worth noting even if she is not a bored person in general.
Danckert wants to look at the brain maps of various people who scored high and low on the BPS, and compare the structure of their noggins. Maybe, then, he can spot boredom in the brain and help correct it.
As for the BPS, it may not be perfect, but it seems to be reasonably accurate. Mine reads:
"You are 15/28 on the Boredom Proneness Scale. Hmmm. You are something of a will-o'-the-wisp, and don't like to focus on any one topic for long. Consider a career as a science journalist."
Photo: Julie Edgley | Flickr
