The Uses Of An Empty Hour

AFor most of its recorded history, boredom was treated less as a state of mind than as a confession of character. The English noun itself is young: it came into common use only in the 1850s, and the older vocabulary it displaced — sloth, idleness, ennui — carried a charge of blame that the newer word never entirely shed. Psychology inherited the suspicion. Well into the twentieth century the feeling was thought too trivial and too private to be worth measuring, and the first scales built for it, which appeared in the 1980s, asked respondents to rate statements so general that any two of them might have had quite different experiences in mind. That measurement problem has since been narrowed, though it has not been closed. What has changed is the volume of experimental work, which has accumulated rapidly since about 2005 and has produced two accounts of the feeling that sit awkwardly together. One treats boredom as a signal worth heeding. The other treats it as a breakdown in the ordinary business of paying attention.

BMirela Anton, who directs the emotion laboratory at the Halston Institute for Mind and Behaviour, belongs firmly to the first camp. Boredom, on her account, is not an absence of feeling but a specific and uncomfortable message: the activity in front of you is failing to hold you, and something else would serve you better. Between 2017 and 2019 her group ran a diary study in which 640 adults were prompted at random intervals across fourteen days to record what they were doing and how they felt, yielding some 21,000 reports. Where a respondent described themselves as bored, that person had moved on to a different activity within the following hour in 62 per cent of cases, against 24 per cent of the reports that described mild frustration instead. Anton reads the gap as evidence that the feeling does work rather than merely marking the absence of it. It is, she writes, an alarm rather than an emptiness, and an alarm that is switched off instead of answered is wasted.

CAlarms can be tested, and Anton's laboratory has tested this one. In a 2021 experiment, 210 volunteers spent twelve minutes copying entries out of a telephone directory — a task chosen because pilot work had shown that it reliably produced boredom without producing irritation — before turning to one of two problems. On an open-ended task, listing uses for an ordinary household object, the bored group produced 41 per cent more distinct categories of use than a control group that had spent the twelve minutes watching a documentary. On a second task, which had a single correct answer and demanded sustained arithmetic, the same group performed slightly worse than the controls. Anton is careful about what the result licenses. The benefit appears only where the problem invites more than one route to a solution; on work that requires persistence along a single line, she concedes, boredom is a cost rather than a resource.

DDaniel Kestrel, a cognitive scientist at Ferndale University, accepts the experimental findings and rejects the interpretation placed upon them. Boredom, he argues, tells you nothing about the world outside; it tells you that attention has slipped its moorings, after which the mind casts about for an explanation and blames whatever is nearest. In a 2022 study of 1,140 participants he set a standard boredom questionnaire against two other measures. Boredom scores correlated at 0.44 with a laboratory test of sustained attention, and at only 0.19 with a questionnaire asking how meaningful respondents found their daily activities. Were boredom a message about meaning, he reasons, the second figure ought to have been the larger of the two. Kestrel volunteers two weaknesses. His participants were undergraduates recruited on a single campus; and his design recorded all three measures on one occasion, so it cannot establish which of the conditions arrives first.

EThe dispute has consequences outside the laboratory. Since 2022 the Ostwick school district has set aside two unscheduled periods a week in which pupils aged eleven to fourteen are given neither instruction nor equipment, an arrangement defended in public by direct appeal to Anton's published work. Here the expected positions are reversed. Kestrel, who doubts that the feeling carries any message at all, regards the scheme as worth running, because it will leave behind attendance and attainment records that outlast the enthusiasm now surrounding it. Anton is the more cautious of the two. Unscheduled time, she observes, is not the same thing as time a pupil is free to leave, and a child who is bored in a room they may not walk out of occupies precisely the position her own account treats as harmful. Both object to the way commercial 'boredom training' courses quote laboratory figures without stating the conditions under which those figures were obtained.

FWhat the field has arrived at is a division of the question rather than a verdict on it. Where a person can act on the feeling — leave the room, close the file, take up something else — boredom behaves much as Anton describes, prompting the switch to a substitute activity that her diary reports recorded. Where the person is held in place, by a shift pattern, a syllabus or a hospital ward, the same feeling has been found to track poorly with any later benefit and closely with the fatigue and low mood that Kestrel's measures pick up. Whether most modern boredom is of the escapable kind is disputed, and neither researcher will put a figure on it. What both refuse is the framing that governs popular writing on the subject: that boredom must be either a gift to be cultivated or a defect to be trained away, when what the evidence turns on is the circumstances in which it is felt.