Dullness Is Essential. Here's Why.

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0:56You will have less meaning and you will be more depressed if you never are bored. I mean, it couldn't be clearer. Let me give you the good side of boredom in general. Boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied otherwise cognitively, which switches over our thinking system to use a part of our brain that's called the default mode network. The default mode network is a bunch of structures in your brain that switch on when you don't have anything else to think about. We don't like it. My colleague in the psychology department here at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, he did experiments where people had to sit in a room for 15 minutes with instructions to do absolutely nothing.

1:36And there was nothing in the room to do, except there was a button in front of them that they could push. And if they did, they gave themselves a painful electric shock. Sit there bored or get a shock. A big majority of the participants gave themselves shocks instead of thinking about nothing. Why is boredom so bad? Well, because the default mode network makes us think about things that might be kind of uncomfortable. When you think about nothing, well, your mind wanders and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning in your life. What does my life mean? You go to kind of uncomfortable existential questions when you're bored.

2:10That turns out to be incredibly important.

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