Why are we so bored?

We live in a world of constant entertainment – but is too much stimulation boring?

Although we seem to live in a varied and exciting world with a wealth of entertainment at our fingertips, this is actually the problem. Many of these amusements are obtained in remarkably similar ways – via our fingers. We spend much of our work life now tapping away at our keyboard. We then look for stimulation (watching movies, reading books, catching the news, interacting with friends) via the internet or our phone, which means more tapping. On average we spend six to seven hours in front of our phone, tablet, computer and TV screens every day.

All this is simply becoming boring. Instead of performing varied activities that engage different neural systems (sport, knitting, painting, cooking, etc) to relieve our tedium, we fall back on the same screen-tapping schema for much of our day. The irony is that while our mobile devices should allow us to fill every moment, our means of obtaining that entertainment has become so repetitive and routine that it’s a source of boredom in itself.

The Surprising Habits Of Original Thinkers

How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies "originals": thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this TED talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including embracing failure. "The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most," Grant says. "You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones."

Being An Expert Literally Changes How You See Things

The Washington Post:

People who are experts in things can see differences in them that most laypeople can’t. Two little black dresses that look different to fashion lovers may look nearly identical to everyone else. The same goes for birds and birdwatchers, vintage cars and car aficionados, art critics and abstract expressionist painters, and even the faces of our friends and loved ones — when we know something well, it's easier to distinguish its differences.

A fascinating study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University shows that the same principle also governs how we read and interpret language. The study finds evidence that the way we process information visually is influenced by our knowledge and experience.

Robots and Babies Both Use Curiosity to Learn

"Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know," Zach St. George for Nautilus:

Scientists who study the mechanics of curiosity are finding that it is, at its core, a kind of probability algorithm—our brain’s continuous calculation of which path or action is likely to gain us the most knowledge in the least amount of time. Like the links on a Wikipedia page, curiosity builds upon itself, every question leading to the next. And as with a journey down the Wikipedia wormhole, where you start dictates where you might end up. That’s the funny thing about curiosity: It’s less about what you don’t know than about what you already do.

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Brain studies suggest that this “novelty bonus”—the additional weight we give to new options—stems at least in part from the euphoric feeling it gives us. For instance, a 2007 study found that, like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the ring of a bell, the part of our brain that processes rewards like love and sweets activates when we expect to find something new, even if that expectation doesn’t play out. These findings, the researchers conclude, “raise the possibility that novelty itself is processed akin to a reward.”

Attention Residue Is Ruining Your Concentration

Tanya Basu, for The Science of Us:

Which means ... what, exactly? Newport explains it using a 2009 paper titled “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?” from Sophie Leroy, a business-school professor at the University of Minnesota. She studied a modern, daily workplace conundrum: switching between tasks and getting things done. In two experiments, Leroy finds that people are less productive when they are constantly moving from one task to another instead of focusing on one thing at a time.

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Leroy calls this carryover from one task to another “attention residue,” where you’re still thinking of a previous task as you start another one. Even if you finish your task completely, you still have some attention residue swirling around your head as you embark on your next task, meaning that bullet point on your to-do list doesn’t start off on the right foot. In other words, as much as multitasking gets nods for being an asset in today’s time-crunched world, it’s not really a good thing when it comes to your productivity, and it's actually a time-waster.