Why boredom is anything but boring

http://www.nature.com/news/why-boredom-is-anything-but-boring-1.19140

110 31 11 years ago

dschiptsov2• 11 years ago

Because that feeling of boredom has been evolved to avoid getting stuck into reatricted, repetitive behavior patterns - behavioral infinite loops (increased feeling of boredom should act as a breaking threshold).

Mield forms of autism, by the way, is when you have too many of such behavioral loops.

epalmer• 11 years ago

Mield forms of autism, by the way, is when you have too many of such behavioral loops.

Attribution please.

noir_lord• 11 years ago

Not sure why you got downvoted, I'd also be interested for the sources on that as it's a bold statement just thrown out there.

dschiptsov2• 11 years ago

Even the wikipedia page tells us that repetitiveness is one of hallmarks of Asperger.

The question why, still unanswered, is much more tricky. It seems that, like it is with a language and many other traits, there is a genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning (training). It seems that autistic people has some genetically transmitted factors, which, if behavior patterns in early childhood is not corrected, would result in behavioral deviations, such as extreme shyness, inability to maintain an eye contact, sociophobia etc.

The famous "mind blindness", it seems, is an effect, a symptom, not the cause. Those children just didn't train themselves enough to recognize facial expression patterns properly because, perhaps, some inherited changes in the "social areas" of the brain which, for example, perform facial expression recognition.

Why are such areas supposedly exist? Because even newborns could distinguish calm and friendly face from angry, etc. Facial expressions is the most efficient way to read other people's emotions, along with other non-verbal bodily ques, such as posture and jerky movements. No one taught them to do it, so it is somehow hard-wired. Animal, of course, also read body-language, much better than we are.

Inability to read (or rather interpret) other people result in excessive anxiety, almost physical discomfort, and repetitiveness, as an effect, is probably an acquired habituation to deal with that anxiety.

tdkl• 11 years ago

reatricted, repetitive behavior patterns

Those command our lives anyway, the only thing is if we train ourselves good or bad ones (and know the difference).

alva• 11 years ago

Boredom is extremely important to me, although potentially there is something else at play.

Some of the biggest life decisions I make come at the end of a spell of boredom. Either as a result of too long doing monotonous work, or purposely self-induced, perhaps in order to let my subconscious do all the work and let a solution float to the surface.

dhimes2• 11 years ago

I can't stand those kinds of questionnaires where you have to choose between two extreme answers to an ill-posed question. (The thought of watching someone else's vacation pictures bores you-- agree/disagree: It depends on the person! duh!)

For what it's worth, I got a 4/28.

cfcef• 11 years ago

Forced-choice is deliberate because it maximizes the information of the question. If you put in intermediate options, that can mask real differences by letting peoples' differing preferences for certainty influence whether their responses are informative or not. (People have information or preferences they don't even realize they have, like in some perceptual tasks, and you can't detect this without something like a forced-choice because if you give subjects any other options, they'll just say they don't know.)

dhimes2• 11 years ago

Interesting. Forced-choice is ok if the question is completely clear. In many cases you have to assume information that makes the difference in which choice you pick, I find. Unless that in itself is what is being tested (do you implicitly supply optimistic or pessimistic information? for example). The problem with these questionnaires is that they get a lot of information from people who don't take it seriously so they don't learn anything either. In other words, it's my preference for clarity that is making my responses uninformative for the survey-giver.

stepvhen4• 11 years ago

I haven't had a work task at my job for 6 months, sans a week of QA testing, and a few days in SQL. I come to work, and have to be left to my own devices, and I never connected my personal laptop to the internet there. I tried to study text books and work on projects, and that worked most of the time, but not all the time. Its absolutely exhausting finding something to do that looks like work, for at least 4 hours every day, for 6 months, with very limited options.

That tendency for boredom has leaked into other parts of my life and I am actively trying to fight it, and that is difficult. I hope this research continues and turns up decent conclusions.

For the record, I gave my two-weeks this past week. 6 months is long enough.

delluminatus• 11 years ago

I just want to say, well done on giving your notice.

To someone who's never experienced it, it might seem like having no work would be great, but it's actually terrible for our sense of self-worth in my experience. A surprising number of people are too afraid to leave a position even if they feel it's soul-sucking. It takes serious guts to leave a steady job even if it sucks.

Good luck finding a more exciting position!

jhallenworld• 11 years ago

Did you have a new job lined up or leap into the unknown? If you had a new job, was the pay higher, lower or same? I guess I'm asking if people are willing to take less pay for less boredom.

stepvhen4• 11 years ago

Due to the family illness I mentioned in another comment, I have come into some money. I am actually going back to school, and don't have much desire to work. Maybe at a coffee shop, just so weekends don't lose their meaning.

dhd415• 11 years ago

I was once in a similar position at a startup in the early 00's that was trying to "pivot" to a service model that was more profitable. Like you, it was hard for me to keep my boredom and lack of work productivity from spilling over into other areas of my life. I was starting to worry that it was going to damage my work ethic and ability to focus. I eventually got laid off and found another job that was more fast-paced and challenging and was relieved to find that I was able to jump right back into it. I hope the same is true for you!

merpnderp2• 11 years ago

If they didn't give you any work to do you could always use your own initiative to create tools/apps that they might need, or work on improving processes. If that doesn't seem like fun, you could contract out or just look for another job. All that free time sounds like fun to me.

cgriswald• 11 years ago

I wrote a few tools when I found myself in a similar position, and was rewarded with being told that writing code (while not technically a developer) was a "security risk"[0]; and I was then given a bunch of useless Sisyphus-type jobs that management never quite agreed were finished (they were gold). To this day I think they were surprised, but not sad, to see me go. Only managers I've ever had who didn't absolutely love me and my work ethic. Easily the worst job I've ever had. Took me awhile at my next job to shake off the "bad vibes".

[0]I'm still kinda baffled by this one. I had root access to everything already and could easily have written any malicious code I wanted to introduce at home.

Edit: Formatting

grecy• 11 years ago

My last job was a little similar, and only towards the end did I realize how other people dealt with this. Here is what they did (I never did it):

Get to work kind of early, put your stuff on your desk, fill coffee mug, etc. Make it look like you're there. Re direct your office phone to your cell.

Take your laptop or books you want to study to the nearby coffee shop, and do whatever you want there - side projects, learning, teaching yourself programming languages, etc. etc. Be sure to answer your cell and respond to work emails.

Come back into the office around lunch time and sit in the lunch room to eat, then head out again for the afternoon. It's easy to cover your tracks by saying you were in a meeting, or working with so-and-so, or whatever.

It took me a long time to understand it was better to do the above, than it was to sit at your desk and be seen to not be working hard (i.e. reading a programming book, or reading HN)

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

That's a pretty sloppily run place if nobody notices structural behavior like that. And even if nobody notices, that's pretty bad behavior. I've worked in a place once long ago where people did everything they could to avoid actually working and I left simply because of that. Being told to 'slow down because you're making us look bad' is extremely de-motivating.

stepvhen4• 11 years ago

For the record, I tried getting my phone to work back when I was hired, and it just wouldn't. I never contacted somebody to fix it, why bother. I virtually never got emails either. People would just show up at my desk unannounced if they needed me, which was quite rare.

hiq• 11 years ago

I always wonder when I read stories like these: what if you had connected your personal laptop to the Internet, and worked on your own projects? You wrote that you had no "work task", so I guess you asked for some and you got none. Why do you have to do something that "looks like work" then, if you're not the one to blame?

moron4hire• 11 years ago

I was in a knot of people like this. We spontaneously organized a software engineering quality team out of ourselves. We bribed one of the IT people for the admin password to a desktop PC they failed to deprovision after firing a guy (a case of an admin's favorite beer is worth at least 10x the retail price in terms of bribing power). We setup a rogue server on it for source control and ticket tracking. By the time anyone figured out why we were generating high quality documentation and fulfilling our few assignments in record time, we had a full-blown lifecycle management process of our own. By the time anyone figured out what they should do about it, we had our own ERP system that integrated with and automated most of the excruciatingly repetitive tasks their Salesforce-based system made us do. We were so hyperproductive over everyone else on the company's own business tasks that they couldn't ignore it anymore and they adopted our systems and practices.

And then they fucked it up by adding a bunch of top-down, manufacturing oriented process, but by that point I was able to find another position and Gee the Eff Oh. At least my skills didn't stagnate, and I didn't have a sword hanging over my head on one of my personal projects.

keithpeter• 11 years ago

"I haven't had a work task at my job for 6 months"

Is there a specific reason, or has your manager just forgotten about you? I'm confused.

I work as a teacher and I can recommend teaching to anyone who wants to avoid boredom. Never a dull moment, honestly. Always something to sort out. Not unicorns and butterflies, but never boring.

stepvhen4• 11 years ago

I was hired at a large software consulting company, that sends people all over the place. I established with them that I was a backend/lower level developer. But due to some family illness I requested to stay in the city I lived in. The only account they have in my city is one that does support, not development. That's one reason, at least. Why I was never reassigned I don't know. I assume that's where I got ignored/forgotten.

wfo• 11 years ago

I think any treatment of boredom, scientific or not, is woefully incomplete without reference to the man who understood it better than anyone, Soren Kierkegaard. He uses it as a vehicle for discussion and engages in it at a level I haven't seen since. This particularly funny and biting essay should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding it from a philosophical or psychological context:

http://www.sorenkierkegaard.nl/artikelen/Engels/145.%20THE%2...

Why boredom is anything but boring

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