Can You REALLY Be Bored To Death?

8:54Hannah Fry:That's an interesting thought, the idea that if you're sat alone in a chair with nothing to entertain you, you can quite easily. I'm thinking here about kids who fidget in their chairs or like wiggle their feet or kind of pull their hair just to sort of have some kind of sensory input that's kind of continually there.

9:14Michael Stevens:That's right. Yeah. And I think that we're going to keep stumbling into this as we try to kill people with boredom. We're going to find that the body heals from boredom, just like a cut heals through platelets and whatnot. When you're bored, your brain goes, no, not going to do this. We need the stimulation. And you come up with ways to entertain yourself.

9:34Hannah Fry:If we're going to bore people. We're going to make this the most boring podcast of all time. You have to sit. You're not allowed to fall asleep. You're not allowed to wiggle. You're not allowed to jiggle your feet. No twiddling your thumbs, no playing with your hair. You've just got to sit. What happens when you do that? When you put people in those kind of passive waiting conditions?

9:51Michael Stevens:They don't die. So we're not quite there yet. But they do become anxious. Or I think they actually become a little bit disgusted.

10:02Hannah Fry:It has been described as a negative experience, agree, where the desire to engage in stimulating and satisfying activity is frustrated. That's quite key, actually, I think, because there's definitely been moments in my life when I've been particularly busy, where the thought of like sitting in a chair and not doing anything would actually be quite appealing. This definition being like, you're not allowed to do something, frustration of wanting to be stimulated and not able to be. Researchers believe it contains an emotional element characterized by a lack of pleasure or meaning.

10:36Michael Stevens:Yeah. You know what? I'm seeing kind of two things here. There's relaxing and then there's boring. Yeah. So the producers, of course, are always telling us to make the show more interesting. And I hate being told what to do. And so boredom is the topic today. I brought this book. It's literally called This Book Will Put You to Sleep. Amazing. And so fair warning, if you're driving, listening to this podcast, watch out. This book is made to be as boring as possible. And it's good for reading before you go to bed. It's got, for example, a bunch of clocks. What time is it? And it's just a bunch of little clip art pictures of clocks that you can look at.

11:13Hannah Fry:Is there any pattern to the times across the different clocks?

11:17Michael Stevens:Yeah, they're all just like one minute ahead of each other. Oh, so it's really here's a staring contest with 48 cats. You can just stare at them and see who plays first. This one is a taxonomy of micromoths. And it's just the most boring description of small moths. And they use a lot of scientific Latin phrases.

11:36Hannah Fry:I've got an actually surprisingly high threshold. I know. And that's what I've noticed too.

11:41Michael Stevens:I cannot get bored by this. Like even this bit about micromoths. I'll read you the first couple of sentences. The microlepidoptera micromoths are a non-minophyletic group of families of moth. As it is a non-minophyletic group, micromoth enthusiasts generally use the property of smallness as a way of identifying micromoths. Moths with a wingspan of less than 20 millimeters qualify as micromoths. And it goes on and on like that. And then I keep going, oh, my gosh. There's a definition of what a micromoth is. And then it talks about how it's hard to identify them because you can't see the differences on their wings because they're too small.

12:16Michael Stevens:And then I just wind up staying up all night reading the book that's supposed to put me to sleep. Maybe you're immune. Maybe you're immune from boredom. Maybe, but I think that this is getting at two different things. One is I want to relax my brain and be distracted from all the things that I'm thinking about so I can sleep. And then there's I want to do stuff, but I can't because I'm in a waiting room at the dentist's office and I'm bored. Boredom is a negative experience. And it is an emotion that motivates us to move away, to find something new and different.

12:54Hannah Fry:So here's another nice definition. A situation becomes maximally boring when it combines three factors. One, nothing new is happening. Everything is fully expected. And the activity feels pointless, which makes me think, frankly your book is out there was uh it failed on all three counts yeah it's not pointless it

13:14Michael Stevens:really fails that third one for a lot of reasons one is just that i i find micro moths interesting i guess but also because um as like a content creator i just keep reading this going this is content like i've already made a youtube short about this book and i struggled to find something that was legitimately boring like there's one that's it's called a few facts about minor Belgian politicians. And they talk about like, who was the deputy prime minister for a couple of months in this interim period in the 2000s. And I'm just like, I want to Wikipedia this person. What an interesting minor position to have.

13:52Michael Stevens:But that's because I'm always thinking about how do I get views on this? And there's always a way. But what would be boring to me is something that's pointless. And that gets to that frustration definition that you brought up, the feeling of I'm being stopped from activities that I would rather be doing.

14:10Hannah Fry:I'll tell you what is interesting about this, though, is that we all know this experience. We've all like can completely connect with the idea of sitting in the dentist, feeling frustrated. But it is interesting that there is something going on in our brains that does react so viscerally to these kind of situations where nothing new is happening, where everything is fully expected and where the activity feels pointless. and the thing of I think part of the reason for this is that our brains and I think this is increasingly the um the the sort of view of scientists is that our brains are basically these prediction machines trying to work out what's going to happen next with reality predict it and then it feels happy when it gets the prediction correct and sort of gets a little bit of jolt just dissatisfaction if it gets it wrong you can notice this really clearly if you ever try and step off of a static escalator you know that experience that i'm talking about oh

15:03Michael Stevens:yeah i think it's called the elevator effect like it's a whole thing with a name yeah where uh you wait escalator effect no what did i say elevator yeah yeah yeah ah see i'm just keeping on your toes yeah not boring everything wasn't fully expected elevator effect yeah that's when you step off an escalator or when you when you step onto an escalator that is off yes and you feel like you're losing your balance. Yeah.

15:29Hannah Fry:And it's because your brain is making a prediction that it's then getting wrong. There was this really incredible study with monkeys. It's like one of the most important science papers, neuroscience papers, certainly one of my favorites, let me put it that way, where they were monitoring the neurons in the brains of monkeys. They had these really unbelievably fine wires that were basically eavesdropping on what these neurons were doing in the monkey's brain. And they were, the monkeys were part of this experiment where they were kind of doing like Pavlov's dog, right? So the monkeys would get this little drop of juice, which it really loved, and a light would come on in advance of the juice.

16:04Hannah Fry:And what they were looking at in the brain for when the spike of dopamine might happen. So you would expect if the monkey loves the juice that the spike of dopamine would happen when the juice arrived, right? And that is what happened initially. The monkey drinks the juice, the dopamine spikes done. after a while the monkey learns that the light comes on before the juice arrives now what's interesting is that um when the monkey actually gets the juice then it's like okay cool i was sort of expecting that you know that's absolutely fine if however you decide to not give the monkey the juice it's predicted it's about to get some and then the juice never arrives the monkey is pissed.

16:46Hannah Fry:The monkey does not like that at all. But the other way around, if you don't put the light on and then you just give the monkey the juice, so it's not predicting it and then the juice arrives, it's even more happy than it would be if it was predicting something. If you put that another way, I always think of this as like, okay, if I'm walking down the street and I unexpectedly stumble across 20 pounds, it makes me way, way, way happier to have found this unexpected 20 pounds that I didn't predict than if somebody, a friend of mine who owes me 20 pounds gives me the 20 pounds. It's like, yeah, cool.

17:19Hannah Fry:Thank you very much. I knew that was coming. I appreciate it. When you are like predicting the world and something better than predicted happens, your brain is like super excited about it. And likewise, the reverse, if you predict that something good is going to happen and it doesn't, your brain is extremely unhappy. But this is like one of the pieces of evidence that we have. And there's a whole multitude of you could do many episodes on just this, about the fact that the way that our brain works essentially is that it is assessing the sensory inputs. It is going through all of the information that is coming in.

17:50Hannah Fry:It's making predictions about what is going to happen next. And then it is rewarding itself based on whether those predictions turn out to be true. And so in a situation where nothing new is happening, where everything is fully expected, both of those situations basically mean that the brain is starved of the opportunity to make predictions.

18:10Michael Stevens:Yeah. I love that they used monkeys and did it so methodically in a laboratory because it's something that is very relatable to our day to day experiences. And it really shows how deep of an evolutionary process this is, this need for enrichment and for cognitive stimulation that we need to exercise that. And we literally do in order to keep brain cells alive and help them keep strong connections. And I don't think we see this in all living organisms. But once you get into warm-blooded ones, once you get into mammals, they really need that cognitive stimulation. When you deny it to them, they feel disgusted in a way and they seek out other places and things and thoughts.

18:55Michael Stevens:You said that boredom was like disgust

18:58Hannah Fry:though, do you see, wait, one, how, and two, is that universal across animals?

19:07Michael Stevens:Disgust is universal. It is one of the first things you see in a life form, because what it is, is that it's on the spectrum of approach and withdrawal, right? That's a thing that, not all life forms, the earliest ones, they just existed. But one of the first behaviors you see in an organism through increasing complexity is suddenly an interest in approaching certain things and withdrawing from other things. And disgust is the emotion associated with withdrawal. And so Pletschek on his famous wheel of emotions, which if you want to just have a great time looking at how emotions might be related, look up Pletschek's emotion wheel.

19:49Michael Stevens:He put boredom on the same spoke as disgust, making boredom, in his opinion, a more diluted, weaker form of disgust because ultimately boredom motivates us to withdraw, to say, okay, I can't just sit in this chair. I'm going to pick up a magazine and read this while I wait for the doctor. I've got to change the environment. And it's different than curiosity where you wonder about something and you're looking for knowledge and you approach it. It's instead you're actually withdrawing to whatever necessary. Like if I'm bored and I just start like tapping with the pencil, I'm not curious about the pencil's properties.

20:27Michael Stevens:I'm disgusted by the lack of anything stimulating me. And so I start doing this.

20:33Hannah Fry:But then actually, if you consider that in an environment where you have a bit more freedom, right? So maybe not dentist, Jess, because I don't think our evolutionary past was like a dentist particularly in mind. But if you do find yourself in an environment where there is nothing new, where everything is fully expected and the activity feels pointless, I mean, those three kind of definitions again, then it's like, well, yeah, you are. You probably do need to get up and go away and move somewhere else. You probably do need some kind of emotion that motivates you to find a better environment.

21:03Michael Stevens:That's right. And before we go to Mars, I just want to say one more thing that is related to this feeling of how deep it is. Your monkey study reminds me of some studies that were done on mice. we all are familiar with the little wheels that we put in mouse cages or rat cages gerbils and they run on them and a lot of us think that we put those in there because they lack in a cage the enrichment they would normally get the the exercise they would normally get out in the wild right but some researchers questioned that and they decided to put mouse wheels out in the woods they just put them out and they put cameras in the woods pointed at these mouse wheels and sure enough, mice love them.

21:45Michael Stevens:Wild mice. Wild mice love to run in circles going nowhere on a mouse wheel. You put it out, you know, in the middle of the forest and they're like, yeah, finally, I can run and not go anywhere. Because the mammalian brain, the warm-blooded brain craves stimulation. And I think that in a lot of ways, the internet is a mouse wheel in the wild. I've got this whole wide world in front of me. And yet I would rather run on a mouse wheel, just like a real mouse. It is deep within us, this distaste for boredom.

22:17Hannah Fry:But then also this very easy, distilled, original way to entertain yourself, I guess, both the wheel and the internet. Yeah. Yeah. You know, actually, so that thing about mice running around in wheels in cages, and then there's analogies between humans and animals. I think there's a really interesting experiment that has happened. It's called the Mars 500 project. This is basically people are wondering about whether it will be possible to do a human led mission to Mars. But if you do so, it's going to take a long time to get to Mars. And so we have to run not just experiments about the physics of rockets and spaceships, but also the psychological experiments of what it means for a small group of people to be confined in what is, you know, effectively a little bigger than a hamster or a mouse cage for a really, really long period of time.

23:09Hannah Fry:So what they've done, they ran this European simulation in Moscow, called Mars 500. They had six volunteers, three Russians, one Frenchman, one Italian Colombian, and one Chinese person. And they spent 520 days in this environment. There was strict confinement, limited social contact. They We were in the same room, same surroundings. They're like unbelievably routine schedules that didn't sort of change. No light, you know, no sort of external sounds, anything like that. And initially people were all right about it. Like they were OK initially. They decided to create a boredom scale just to see how people were handling it.

23:53Hannah Fry:And it went from emotional flatness was sort of the first step on this boredom ladder, as it were. kind of do you feel a bit indifferent about what happens today all the way through to sort of loss of curiosity oh just you know which is i can't really be bothered to do anything at all to time distortion does today feel like it's lasted much longer than it than it should do or would do through to um social weariness would you prefer to to avoid everyone else and then to actual physical lethargy like do you feel physically slow even after you've rested they really by the time it got to two thirds of the way through, they were really, really, really struggling.

24:30Hannah Fry:One crew member said that every day he started to feel so identical that he started deliberately misplacing objects just to have something to look for. They also, they had a treadmill, I mean, sort of the human version of the mouse wheel, a treadmill schedule that was so rigid that one of them said that they could tell the time by the sound of the other person's footsteps. I mean, they really, It was, I think, not fun. They just did not enjoy it at all.

24:55Michael Stevens:I love that little trick, that little life hack of deliberately misplacing things just to give yourself something to do, because that is what we find. And this goes back to the body's self-healing boredom avoidance abilities. If you make people really bored, they would rather hurt themselves than continue to be bored. Go on. In the experiment, you show participants a button that if they push, will administer an electric shock. Like the button is metal. And when they push it, they get this very uncomfortable, but not dangerous shock. And presumably these are people who don't want to be shocked.

25:30Michael Stevens:Yeah. And people don't want this. They don't like it. You can even, some people will try it and they'll be like, oh gosh, yeah, I hate that. And then you tell them, okay, cool. Well, anyway, the receptionist will come in when we're ready for the real study. And you leave them all alone in a waiting room with nothing to do, but the button to look at. They don't look at it for long. the majority of people after you make them wait long enough i'm talking like up to 30 minutes an hour they'll eventually push it again and then one and they'll do it again and they'll keep doing it because they would rather be in pain than do nothing and wait can i tell you my favorite thing

26:07Hannah Fry:i i this this particular story my favorite thing about this is that there is a gender split in how people respond to this button so you are right 67 of men uh will choose to shock them themselves at least once um one man pressed the shock button nearly 200 times during this

26:23Michael Stevens:experiment but only 25 of women only 25 of women i have no idea what that means i'm not sure i'm not sure what that tells us a lot i think that means a lot about how our culture how we're like a cultured to act yeah i don't know what to say but there's so much more that could be researched i want to bring back another season of minefield and we should look into this like what kind what What do you learn about someone based on how quickly they decide to ease the boredom with some pain?

26:53Hannah Fry:Okay, well, so far, I think we haven't done very well at either boring our listeners to death or working out whether it is possible to bore people to death. But we're going to do better. In the second half, you can come back where we are going to talk about the extreme effects that can happen when boredom goes far.

27:11Michael Stevens:Yeah, things are going to get a lot more boring. Stay tuned.

27:28Michael Stevens:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Cancer drugs aren't developed overnight. They start as ideas in the lab, then move into testing to check they're safe and work effectively.

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30:29Michael Stevens:All right, so welcome back. We are discussing how to kill a person with boredom. And we haven't gotten any closer to an answer. And I'm not feeling optimistic, Hannah. I did some research. I found when bored, brain activity decreases by about 5%. That's it. Oh, okay. And then I was like, well, wait, brain activity is even lower in a coma. And yet people can survive those. They're living during them. I'm just wondering if boredom is not directly lethal. Our only hope is that it might be indirectly lethal. Right.

31:01Hannah Fry:I would say don't try killing someone with boredom at home. But I mean, if it's unsuccessful, then maybe you can. Maybe it's absolutely fine.

31:09Michael Stevens:What kind of consequences can happen when people get really bored?

31:15Hannah Fry:Like beyond just a little bit bored in a dentist's office. Yeah. It can be so much worse than the things that we're describing. because the thing about that mars experiment even is that there were six of them they had like tasks to do they were able to talk to ground control you know sort of simulated ground control there were things to keep them occupied plus also the entire way through just go back to that definition the activity didn't feel pointless it felt like they were taking part in an experiment that that would you know assist in the future of humanity and space exploration yeah it was it was monotonous but meaningful and they had hope.

31:51Hannah Fry:Exactly, exactly right. But there have been some experiments into really, really low stimulation environments and the effect of that that has on us. One of the first ones came from McGill University. This is like the 50s and the 60s. And it starts off and you're like, oh, this kind of sounds like quite a fun little experiment. You know, the sort of psychology studies that they do that are kind of cute and interesting. So they got 22 students. they um they paid them 20 a day in 1950 which is substantial like enough to be a genuine motivator and they asked them to stay in this cubicle uh they gave them these goggles that were like fogged so there wasn't really any sort of um visual input that to their brain uh they had aircon on at this like constant low-level noise they couldn't really hear anything and they had to wear cotton gloves so they couldn't sort of touch anything and they just had to stay there and that was it and they could leave it anytime that they wanted to and they just had to stay and every day that they stayed they were paid twenty dollars right that's sort of a pretty simple experiment setup how long do you do you want to guess how long people lasted for twenty bucks a day in today's money we're talking about three hundred bucks three hundred bucks a day which is i mean it's not a fortune but it's like it's a motivator isn't it yeah yeah especially

33:05Michael Stevens:your student oh man well see okay it's hard for me to guess what a normal person would do because i have done isolation oh yeah in that same minefield episode where we made people bored and got them to shock themselves i put myself in a room where the lights never turned off and there was constant noise and my food was just all pre-made shakes and i couldn't leave uh for three days.

33:31Hannah Fry:How was it?

33:32Michael Stevens:And it was, the way I put it is that I have like no memories of it happening really. Um, but it, so it, it feels like it lasted like a split second in my memory. And yet while I was there, it felt like there was no time. I mean, the lights didn't even go off. I didn't know what time it was. And three days is a long time. And that was so, um, weird and uncomfortable, especially at first that even if you were paying me 300 bucks a day, um, it wasn't worth it. Now I was able to do it because it was my job was important for the show. And there were like a dozen jobs that depended on me doing this.

34:10Yeah.

34:11Michael Stevens:And I didn't have anything else I could be doing. It wasn't like, Oh man, I could be, you know, organizing my garage or whatever. So that made it feel meaningful. And so I got through it, but if it was just an elective voluntary study for 300 a day, I don't think people could do it for like a week. I think they'd eventually say, no, I'd rather not have 300 bucks today.

34:31Hannah Fry:You are absolutely right. So incredibly, very similar to your timescale. So most people lasted about two and a half days. So got out before three. No one made it past six. No one made it to a week. I want to meet the person who went six days. I know. These are probably like a hundred now.

34:49Michael Stevens:yeah i want to know what their personality is that they stuck it out like what what a warrior

34:56Hannah Fry:what a warrior and the thing is is that like okay so in the beginning they they they were bored they would sing songs they would you know do mental arithmetic they would um you know recite poetry whatever it was but really soon their minds actually started to fracture under this monotony and when you deprive the brain of stimulation when you deprive it of its opportunity to make predictions it starts predicting things that aren't really there so essentially hallucinations start to creep in so one of the participants saw this parade of squirrels marching in in uniform past him another one saw a flying dog lots of them saw sort of faces geometrical shapes that appeared that felt really vivid now the people who did this experiment heb was the scientist they were really concerned by this they were like oh gosh we thought this was just a cute little study and like and all of a sudden it's kind of really dark so he stopped the work but the military were like ah this is there's potential here that deprivation could really destabilize a person's sense of self like incredibly quickly and so intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, including the CIA's MK Ultra program.

36:10Hannah Fry:I don't know if you've come across this, but that is a wild story, which you can hear about on The Rest is Classified. We'll put a link in the description of this. And I don't know whether that matches with your experience. I mean, did it feel like that? Did you feel like you were fragmenting your sense of self?

36:25Michael Stevens:Yeah. So let me tell you. Okay, so the room was completely white. There were no books, there was nothing to do. At one point, I balled up my socks, and I was throwing them against the wall. And I said, no, I got to stop because this is a game. This is stimulation. I just want to stare at the wall for three days. And I did. And the way you've put it as a kind of prediction engine gone wild is a great way to describe it because I started to, I knew they weren't real at first. I started to remember the way things tended to go when I was a kid in class. And so it was like a memory. It was like I was remembering an event or like a scene in a movie, and it would be a teacher, my fifth grade teacher talking to us.

37:09Michael Stevens:And then suddenly like that one kid who always had a smart aleck thing to say would say something. And then that girl would say something. And this was happening in my head, like voices in my head. I knew it wasn't real, but it was like my brain was rehearsing some of its prediction engines that it had had for decades. and it was kind of amusing. It got scary when I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. And that was, I think, after about two, two and a half days, especially dreams. Dreams were the first things that I couldn't differentiate from reality. And so I would dream. I dreamt that the experiment was over and that the producers had come in and my wife was there.

37:49Michael Stevens:And then I woke up and it just felt like they'd walked out. And so I thought, why am I here alone? and I opened the door thinking it was over. They were just in here, but it was dark out there. And I just went back into the room and thought, I don't think the experiment's over, but I can't tell. The only hope I had that kept me going was knowing that they were not gonna leave me in there for more than 72 hours because we'd rented the space for three days. And the last thing the production company was gonna do is waste money. And so their financial incentive was all I had to keep me in that room.

38:24Michael Stevens:Otherwise, I would have said, I don't know what's going on. I might be here forever. This is so extraordinary. And so I don't want to get into it, but it's really encouraged me to think about the emergence of consciousness and sentience in humans. And the ancient stories of hearing voices and having prophetic dreams, I think it really is a deep thing that we can all tap into. And so I would recommend that everyone try some form of intense, prolonged isolation, because you learn so much about yourself when there's nothing else but your own mind around you.

38:58Hannah Fry:Because this is the idea behind sensory deprivation tanks, isn't it? I mean, there was, I feel like this is about the seventh time that I've mentioned Feynman on this show. We should do an episode on Feynman and what a problematic character he was. But he really loved going in sensory deprivation tanks, which I've never managed to try, for exactly this reason that essentially your brain very, very, very quickly starts to hallucinate. And he felt that he could explore the boundaries of what the sort of mechanics of his brain was doing, but in a way that didn't involve taking hallucinogens or mind-altering drugs that might have a longer lasting, more permanent effect.

39:33Michael Stevens:That's right. Yeah. The therapeutic and the psychonautical powers of isolation can be explored with sensory deprivation tanks. And I did one of those too in preparation for the isolation room, and it helped a lot. A sensory deprivation tank is built to deprive you of any sensory information. You float in water saturated with Epsom salts. So you are neutrally buoyant and you don't sink. You don't have to swim. You're just there. And the water is at just the right temperature to be in equilibrium with the heat your body releases so you feel no temperature. You're also sealed in a chamber that's completely dark and completely soundproof.

40:08Michael Stevens:So there's just nothing coming in any of your holes. You're just there with nothing but your own thoughts to happen. And you can do it for 30 minutes at a time, an hour, many hours. But that allowed me to become more comfortable being alone with just my thoughts to entertain me. And that really made isolation, or at least the first day of it, much easier.

40:31Hannah Fry:How many times did you do the deprivation tank? Just once. How quickly did you start to see things that weren't necessarily there?

40:40Michael Stevens:Really quickly. Because it feels like there's images in front of your eyes right away. And I want to make it clear that it's a hallucination, but it's not like you think it's actually there. Right? I didn't think, oh my gosh, these dancing colors and these lines are actually real. I knew they weren't. I was fascinated by why my brain was making them. And if I concentrated too much on them, they went away. It was not as powerful as I would have liked. It wasn't like a psychoactive drug, but it was much safer.

41:11Hannah Fry:But here's the thing. It's like, I mean, this isn't the same as having a mental health episode. This isn't, like you say, psychoactive drugs, which is where the molecules in your brain and sort of rearranging and you can't tell what's real anymore. This is also not that boredom drives people mad. It's that your brain needs noise in order to stay sane.

41:32Michael Stevens:Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't drive you mad. You were already mad and it's reality around us that keeps us sane. And when you remove that, the brain goes, I'm on my own. This is what I'm really like. And you learn a lot about yourself. And so killing someone with boredom, it almost feels like the opposite is what's going to really happen. You will make the person become born again as their true self.

41:58Hannah Fry:Well, I think that there are limits to this, though, right? Because those experiments about, you know, sensory deprivation from the 1950s, there are more extreme versions of this, of course, because there are prisoners who are held in long term solitary confinement. So in 1983, there was a psychiatrist, Stuart Grassian, who went and conducted some clinical interviews with 14 different inmates who had been held in these really small, bare cells, like sort of, you know, eight by 10 feet, you know, not, you know, not these, you can't sort of exercise in them, for example. Almost no human contact.

42:34Hannah Fry:Meals are passed through a slot in the door. The lights are on around the clock. Very similar to the environment that you found yourself in. No conversation, no books, no radio. and no sensory inputs, basically. I mean, they could occasionally hear the clank of metal doors down the corridor and like occasionally people screaming or whatever, but that was it. And sometimes these people had been in there for years at a time. And I think that this is it. It's like, you know, your experience of three days, how incredibly, how quickly your grip on reality was like, was shifting. But that was a situation where you had purpose, you had an ending, you didn't have hopelessness.

43:12Hannah Fry:You know, that was just that nothing new was happening and everything was fully expected. Whereas this is sort of a much more extreme version for a much longer period of time. And what they found was that, OK, yes, of course, these people had hallucinations. They had paranoia. They had panic. They had all of these different kind of things. One person said, I feel like I'm dissolving, which is like a really horrifying thought. um but actually in particular when they looked at the brains of people in this experiment and in subsequent studies of people who have been subjected to long-term solitary confinement we now know that it shrinks the hippocampus that it that it reduces the activity in the prefrontal cortex that once you deprive your brain of noise and stimulation it actually starts to atrophy Yeah.

44:03Michael Stevens:And so maybe you cannot kill someone with boredom directly, but indirectly you can cause a lot of harm. And I don't know, maybe you can indirectly kill someone with boredom because there have been studies on civil servants who reported being very bored at their jobs. When they were studied for a long time, it was found that they did die younger. Now, the direction of causation isn't really known here. Could it be that they were already going to die sooner and that led them to have more experiences of boredom for some related reason? Or was the boredom itself just reason for their brains to atrophy and give up?

44:45Hannah Fry:yeah but i mean when you put all of the different pieces together it does definitely sound as though a sort of rich interesting like varied environment is the thing that our brains are not just sort of designed for but also craving and actively seeking out all of the time

45:02Michael Stevens:okay so maybe the answer to my original question how do you directly kill someone with boredom is that you can't, except you can extinct a species with boredom. Go on. I think humans are here. And I think a lot of other warm-blooded mammalian animals are here because we get bored and we look at the universe and we say, all right, but what else could there be? This is the way everything is, but what if it wasn't this way? And that's how humans decided, okay, look, it's too cold here. but like maybe I could play around with some of these fibers. Maybe I could play around with the part of this animal I can't digest and like invent shirts and coats and now I can live here.

45:47Michael Stevens:It was boredom that drove those innovations that allowed us to live everywhere. Alligators can't do that and they don't do it and they won't do it.

45:55Hannah Fry:Because they're not driven by boredom to find something else. That's right. Hey, maybe boredom isn't the death of us. Maybe it's the birth of us. Maybe it's the whole reason why we're so successful. So in that case, then, it shouldn't be bored to death. It should be bored to being alive and successful.

46:13Michael Stevens:It's not, yeah, it's not being bored to death. It's being bored to being alive. Yeah, or maybe born to be bored. Born to be bored. Born to be bored.

46:22Hannah Fry:I'm getting, I'm putting in an order right now for the t-shirt that you're inevitably going to bring out.

46:27Michael Stevens:Good. Yeah, you'll get the first one. Schopenhauer thought this was really curious. He thought, shouldn't the world be enough? The existence of boredom showed that there was something wrong with being, with existence itself, that we can't just be okay with it. And this bothered him his whole life. And on the other side, other philosophers said that it was a sign that humans were sublime. The fact that a grasshopper can just do nothing and not seemingly be worried about it, and yet we do, shows that we must be greater than this world, that we're above and beyond it. And I think the answer is somewhere in between.

47:07Michael Stevens:I think humans and a lot of like any kind of warm-blooded animal, it really needs to solve puzzles. Its cognitive niche requires it to be thinking about things, not as they are, but what they could be. I need to build a nest. Okay, that's an instinctive behavior, but I need to go somewhere else because it's getting too cold for me. So we're gonna, we're gonna try some other places, we're gonna, we're gonna build a ship and go across the ocean. Not because we have to, but because we haven't gone there yet. I think that this is why species like ours are here today. I think it's why the dinosaurs didn't survive the asteroid impact, but birds and mammals did.

47:48Hannah Fry:Don't you also think this is a little bit possible because it's like the extension of exactly what you're describing, right? Like if our brains are constantly trying to make predictions and then think about what might happen next and then going and testing our theories and like constantly wanting more and more and more and not being comfortable with just existing, I sort of feel like that is a description of exactly what science is too. Like constantly trying to work out what's just around the next corner, that next bit of discovery, that next prediction.

48:21Michael Stevens:That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And philosophy as well. Like just continuing to ask questions for no purpose. Have I told you one of my favorite jokes? I think about this joke the most often.

48:30Hannah Fry:Go on.

48:30Michael Stevens:Okay. So in the joke, the Dean of a university is speaking to the engineering department and he's like, guys, you're costing us too much money. Why can't you be like the math department? All they need is paper and pencils and waste paper baskets. Actually, no. Why can't you be like the philosophy department. All they need is paper and pencils.

48:54Michael Stevens:And so even if there's, even if bad ideas are allowed, that's a hallmark feature of humanity that you don't, you don't have that activity when you're a tree.

49:06Hannah Fry:No, you don't. No, you don't. You just end up in the waste paper basket. That's right. Yeah. That's why we're here. You're in the waste paper basket. Okay, well, I think that that is a very lovely place to wrap up this episode. We hope that you enjoyed that. There is a lot more to come from us. Make sure that you are following the rest of science wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure that you like and subscribe on YouTube.

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