Hidden Brain - Episode 23: Boredom

Episode Date: March 15, 2016

We've all been there: bored in class, bored at work, bored in standstill traffic. But why do we find boredom so unbearable? And, if we hate being bored so much, why do we still take boring jobs? This week on Hidden Brain, we try to answer these questions and more — hopefully, without boring you.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanthan. The topic for today's show is one of the most difficult we've ever handled. Why? It's boredom. And it's really hard to make boredom interesting. Social scientists have been studying boredom for many years. Why people get stuck in boring jobs? But now imagine standing there. All day long.

I cannot imagine a more boring job. How to combat boredom? The reason for a more hot sauce is that lack of sensory stimulation from your environment that you're compensating for it by putting hot sauce on. And the pernicious effects that boredom has on our lives. Boredom some scientists say creates a feeling of meaninglessness. So keep listening, I promise you won't be bored. Really.

In Greek mythology, King Sisyphus is accused by the gods of being vain, avaricious and egotistical. Upon his death, he is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, watch it roll down the other side, and then repeat the process for all eternity. Now, we've all been there, stuck in repetitious boring jobs, doing boring chores, getting bored in class. Some time ago I spoke with Peter Ubo from Duke University. Along with a colleague David Kymmaferd, Peter studied why people get stuck doing boring work. He asked me to think about applying to be a security guard at a museum.

At the time, it might sound like a wonderful job. I just stand there and do nothing, and they pay me for it. Wow, that sounds great. But now imagine standing there all day long. While people are walking by the museum and enjoying themselves, you're not even allowed to really talk to them much. I cannot imagine a more boring job. Peter says that when you're anticipating the kind of work involved in a job,

you may think about it differently than when you're actually doing the job. Peter says that when you're anticipating the kind of work involved in a job, you may think about it differently than when you're actually doing the job. One rule of thumb we follow in applying for jobs, we often pick work that doesn't involve a lot of effort. The researchers ran an experiment with business students and told the students they had a choice between two jobs. The first job would be to sit in the back row and do nothing. They couldn't look at laptops or cell phones. They had to just look straight ahead. We'd pay them $2.50 for that five minutes. So, money for doing nothing.

Or, or they might end up solving word puzzles for that five minutes. Where they'd sit in the front row. And we asked them how much would we have to pay you where you choose the word puzzle over sitting and doing nothing. And we found that the large majority of the students said we'd have to pay them more than $2.50 to solve the word puzzles. Now at one level this makes sense. If someone asks you to work harder, they should pay you more.

And yet when we asked them independently, which do you think would be more fun? They said the word puzzles. When we actually finished the five minutes and asked them how much they enjoyed those five minutes, the people solving the word puzzles, enjoyed the five minutes significantly more. And yet very few of them said, yeah, pay me two dollars and I'd be happy to do word puzzles because at least I'll be having fun. Peter calls this tendency of the students to avoid hard work, effort, aversion.

Anything that this is one reason, many people get stuck in boring jobs. A simple rule of thumb, the fancy term is heuristic, led the mystery. More effort should mean more pay is not always true. It isn't just guards who tell people not to touch the paintings who get bored at work. Even jobs that most people would consider to be widely exciting can be boring much of the time. Think about firefighters or soldiers. Also, astronauts.

Max Nestrack from the Hidden Brain team has the story. When NASA sends astronauts into outer space, something strange happens. They use more and more hot sauce. Scientists at NASA got curious about this. One explanation? The absence of gravity causes physical changes in the body, and that weakens your sense of taste. Another idea? Small and close places like spaceships are really stinky.

Tabasco hides the smell. Then there's boredom. Now, it may be hard to imagine astronauts getting bored, but think about spending weeks looking at the same loose hanging wires, the same floating co-workers, the same blue planet, the same small window. That's where the Tabasco sauce comes in. So one hypothesis for the reason for a more hot sauce is that that lack of sensory stimulation from your environment that you're compensating for it by putting hot sauce on. So yes, there's not a lot of colors in your environment, but you can have colors in your mouth. This is Kim Binstead.

She's a professor at the University of Hawaii. And she studies the psychological effects of long-term spaceflight. And this is a subject that's really important to NASA, because they want to send astronauts to Mars in the next 20 years. Binstead's job is to figure out how to keep the astronauts healthy. And she's found that boredom isn't just a psychological problem. They don't eat enough and they don't eat enough for a couple of reasons and boredom is one of them. The food isn't appealing. And that's okay for a short stay on the ISS, but it's really not

okay for the two and a half years or so of a Mars mission. That malnutrition could seriously affect astronaut performance. So a few years ago NASA launched a new project. Scientists built this 1200 square foot geodesic dome. It looks like a bubble on the side of a volcano in Hawaii. The idea is to simulate a Martian environment. NASA started setting groups of six volunteers to stay inside the dome for months at a time. Here water is limited. When the volunteers want to see a website, they have to a time. Here water is limited. When the volunteers

want to see a website, they have to submit a request to retrieve the page. And when they want to go outside, they have to put on a space suit. What we looked at out the window was red rock. It was Mars. It looked like Mars. It felt like Mars. It sounded like Mars. We explored lava tubes which are caves created by lava which are also on Mars, and it was a Martian-like environment. Kate Green is a science journalist who spent four months living in this tiny dome with five others. She wrote about her experience in Eon magazine. She says that before she went in, she considered herself a person who never got bored. She says that before she went in, she considered herself a person who never got bored. I go into this mission and I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be bored.

Well, things wear on you over the course of four months, and by things I mean a static environment. We were talking to the same five people every single day. Our home was a white dome with puffy walls that didn't really change day to day. But here's the thing, astronauts don't like to admit they get bored. There's a stigma to it because the government is spending literally millions of dollars

to send you into outer space. Even Kim Binsed, the researcher, was reluctant to call it boredom. She says it's a mental lethargy from lack of stimulation, which is like boredom. In addition to all the other scientific research NASA is doing, scientists like Binset have been studying ways to combat boredom. You can't give astronauts hobbies, but you can build variety into their existing routines. One possibility is cooking. Right now, astronauts eat all pre-prepared meals, dehydrated vegetable protein, tortillas,

peanut butter, that sort of thing. Now, if you're an astronaut, a NASA gives you a frozen lasagna for your mission to Mars. It's a lasagna now. It's always going to be a lasagna. Two and a half years from now, it's still alozania. But if I give you pasta and tomato paste powder and some herbs and seasonings and some cheese and maybe some freeze dried meat,

you can combine those in a bunch of different ways to produce maybe even hundreds of different meals. So that variety means that you get some sensory stimulation from that variety in your food. There's also the creative side, figuring out what best way to combine those ingredients to make them tasty. To be clear, astronauts are not going to be cooking on their way to Mars. You are not going to be cooking in a spaceship. Let me just take that right off the table. The cooking that we're talking about would be on the planetary surface. So Mars has less

gravity than Earth, but it does have gravity. So that is, you can keep the ingredients in the bowl. Whereas on the space station, your ingredients are gonna float all over the place, and it's just not really possible to cook on the ISS. NASA isn't going to get rid of pre-prepared food altogether. Inside the bubble in Hawaii, Kate Green and the other pseudomarsians

had both pre-prepared food and raw ingredients. On their cooking days they got pretty creative. They actually had a contest where people outside the bubble could recommend recipes. They made a kind of sushi using spam, patties out of flour and canned salmon, and a crater crunch bar with quinoa flakes and macadamia nuts. And cooking didn't just increase the variety of their diets. So many interesting things happen when you're preparing a meal, especially with other people. Cooking is truly a social experience. I remember I had a number of great cooking experiences with everyone on the crew. Actually, everyone had such different styles. And so it was a time when

even if I wasn't working with people in a scientific way or with any of our projects, I worked with everyone in the kitchen. And that was, you really got to know a person's personality and attitude and I really enjoyed that part of it. Now there are other benefits to sending astronauts to Mars with ingredients rather than pre-prepared meals. Cooking with ingredients can be healthier. It weighs less to send the food this way, but there are costs, more equipment, more energy, and more astronaut time.

There are more important things to do on Mars than make a homemade lasagna. But, instead of finding the psychological benefits are worth the trade-off. If you look at the same things every day, if you eat the same things every day, if you hear the same things every day, it can produce some negative psychological effects. The creativity of making food and the way you can use the same set of ingredients in different ways to reduce different meals, that those things were very psychologically important to the crew. NASA is running its fourth and final pseudomars mission in Hawaii now.

Volunteers will be there an entire year. That's Max Nestrak. You can learn more about the pseudomars missions by going to highc's.org that's h i dash s e a s dot org. Coming up, Daniel Pink is here to play Stop What Science With Me. We're going to talk about the pernicious effects of boredom in our lives. Stay with us. Back now for another round of stopwatch science, I'm Shankar Vedanthan. I'm joined as always by Daniel Pink.

He's been variously called the love guru and the divorce doctor But on this show his primary title is senior stopwatch science correspondent. Welcome dad. I thank you, Shankar on Stopwatch science dad and I give one another 60 seconds to summarize interesting social science research as we approach the 60 second mark Our producers will bring up the music to drown us out just like they do at the Oscars and they have itchy fingers so they are dying to do this. Our topic today is boredom. Now, I often feel like my life is one long struggle to avoid being bored. I hate being bored. Are you the same Dan? Only when I'm with you strangely.

Yeah, I don't understand it. Is that because you're talking to me or because you're listening to yourself? I'm not sure. So today we're going to talk about the effects of boredom and the lengths we're willing to go to avoid being bored. Dan, if you're ready, your 4.60 seconds starts now. Okay, this research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin takes us to Ireland where a bitter history has left some Irish with a negative view of the English.

Researchers gathered Irish university students and cafe goers and divided them into two groups. One group, they bored the heck out of by making them count tiny boxes on computer screens or draw lines on paper for a very long time. The other group did the same tasks, but only briefly. Then they had participants play judge. Researchers presented a hypothetical case about an Englishman beating up an Irishman and asked participants what prison sentence they'd impose. Those who were deeply bored imposed far longer sentences than those who weren't bored. Then researchers reversed the scenario, and Irishman beats up an Englishman.

This time the bored people gave their fellow Irishman a shorter sentence than people who weren't bored. Board of some scientists say creates a feeling of meaninglessness. When we feel things are meaningless, we seek meaning, and one way we do that is by aligning more closely with our own tribe and discriminating against those we perceive as outsiders. So that's really interesting. What you're saying is that the more bored the Irish volunteer's got, the more willing they were

to give English defendants a longer sentence and Irish defendants a shorter sentence. Precisely. And the people who weren't bored, though, they gave the English and the Irish similar sentences. But there's something about being bored that makes us feel a lack of meaning. And one way way unfortunately,

the human being seek meaning is by affiliating with the in-group and discriminating against an out-group. So do you think this has applications in the criminal justice system? Perhaps. I mean, I think that if you've ever been on a jury, jury service is often quite boring. And what this paper made me wonder is,

is being so bored serving on a jury, introducing bias, even more bias into the criminal justice system. But interesting question, let's go to you, Shankar, for our next one, your 60 seconds starts right now. All right. I think that last study done was by Wynon Van Tilburg. Yes.

Van Tilburg seems to be very interested in boring stuff because I came by another study he did about boredom in 2013. Along with Eric Igou, Van Tilburg asked people to copy boring passages from Wikipedia on how you mix cement. Good Lord. I can just imagine Van Tilburg sitting in his office and dreaming up new ways to make people bored.

Anyway, the more bored volunteers get when you ask them to think about a memory, Van Tilburg and Iggo find board volunteers end up into nostalgic thinking, nostalgic memories. Now, I have to say I don't find this particularly counterintuitive. Many of us have seen this happen, but I do wonder if this explains why many artists and creative thinkers say that being bored is a useful thing.

Bordom can put us in a state of mind that's open to daydreaming, imagination, and creativity. Very interesting. Do you think this has to do with meaning too? That we're feeling meaningless and so we go back in our lives and say, oh, that great home run I hid in Little League or the day I got married. Not to equate those two. You get the idea. I just want to know, Dan, this segment is not being edited and your wife is going to be hearing this.

Yeah, well, fortunately I've never hit a home run in Little League, so that's a complete fantasy, not nostalgia. But I think you're right. I think it does have something to do with meaninglessness, and sort of the drive to find meaning, and how we drift to what that kind of thinking when we're bored. All right, Dan, if you're ready, your next 60 seconds starts right now. Okay, so how much do we hate being bored? That's the question a team of researchers led by Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia answered in the prestigious journal Science. In 11 experiments they confirmed that we really don't like being left alone in an empty

room even for just 15 minutes with nothing but our own thoughts. But one of these experiments was rather shocking. Researchers put participants in one of their unadorned rooms, asked them to do nothing except think, but get this, offered them the option of giving themselves painful electric shocks. One quarter of the women and two-thirds of the men chose to shock themselves at least once.

One guy in fact, shocked himself, 190 times, which is just kind of weird. In other words, simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was so horrifying, so terrifyingly boring that many prefer to harm themselves. Self-administering electric shocks was less painful than just being bored. Well, that is an amazing study, Dan.

And do you know what the voltage was on these shocks? I have no idea, but I know that it was painful because they also tested, and they found out that these participants said they would pay to avoid these shocks, and yet when they were bored, they brought them on. In other words, they would actually be willing to pay even more to avoid being bored.

That's what it sounds like, which just seems crazy. So Shankar, you're next. Here's your 60 seconds. Starts right now. All right. This is one of my favorite stories about how much we hate to be bored. Richard Larsen at MIT tells a story about how business passengers arriving on early morning flights into Houston were complaining about being bored as they waited for the conveyor

belt to bring their bags. The airline company brought in consultants, they hired baggage handlers, they reduced the waiting time to eight minutes max. Nothing worked, the complaints kept coming in. So the airline thought harder, executives realized that business passengers was spending only a couple of minutes disembarking from the plane and six or seven minutes waiting in baggage claim. The solution, they move the arrival gate further from baggage claim. Passengers now spend six or seven minutes walking to baggage claim and one or two minutes waiting for their bags. Poof, the complaints disappeared. Extraordinary. I mean, this goes to, there's a concept called

Occupied Time, where if our time is occupied, we don't feel a sense of distress. So we'll take more occupied time instead of a shorter amount of time that is an occupied. I love that. It is fastening. But you should never check your bags. All right. So there you have it. Boredom can make you prejudiced.

It can make you nostalgic. Completely pointless activities can reduce your feelings of boredom. But here's the most important takeaway. If you find yourself bored and asking yourself whether you should stick your finger in that electrical socket nearby, please don't. Instead, go listen to all the additions of stop-what science and Dan and I promise to keep you entertained. Dan, thank you for joining me today.

Thank you, Shankar. Thank you, Shankar Vedantam and this is NPR.