Your brain on boredom

There is a network of regions in the human brain that becomes more active when attention is not being captured by anything in particular. Not while you are sleeping. Not while you are meditating. Not even while you are "relaxing" with a podcast. It is most active in the condition that modern life has engineered out of most days: a stretch of time in which attention is not externally directed and the mind is allowed to wander.

It is called the Default Mode Network, and for twenty years it has been reshaping the way neuroscientists think about what the brain does with its downtime.

The network that runs on nothing

In the late 1990s, a neurologist at Washington University named Marcus Raichle noticed something peculiar in positron emission tomography scans. When subjects were given no particular task — when they were simply resting in the scanner, eyes open, not thinking about anything in particular — their brains did not go quiet. A specific and reproducible set of regions became more active, not less. The medial prefrontal cortex. The posterior cingulate cortex. The angular gyrus. Parts of the medial temporal lobe.

These regions formed a coherent pattern. They were consistently more active during rest and consistently deactivated during goal-directed tasks. Raichle's 2001 paper proposed a "default mode of brain function" on the grounds that this pattern appeared to be what the brain settled into when nothing else was being asked of it (Raichle et al., 2001). The phrase Default Mode Network came into general use after Greicius and colleagues' 2003 resting-state functional connectivity work, which showed the regions Raichle had identified were genuinely coupled as a network rather than coincidentally co-active (Greicius, Krasnow, Reiss, & Menon, 2003).

The finding was initially regarded with some suspicion. Network activity during rest sounded suspiciously like noise — an artefact of scanner baselines, perhaps, or a statistical mirage. Over the following two decades it turned out to be neither. The DMN is now one of the most studied large-scale networks in cognitive neuroscience, and it is not idle chatter. It is doing some of the brain's most important work.

What the Default Mode Network actually does

The DMN is active whenever attention is directed inward rather than outward — when the brain is engaged in what researchers call self-referential processing. Stated like that it sounds narcissistic. It is not. It is one important network involved in some of the most essential cognitive functions a human being has.

Autobiographical memory. The DMN is heavily involved in the retrieval and consolidation of personal memories. When an unbidden memory from eight years ago surfaces while you are staring out a train window, that is the DMN doing the retrieving (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, and Schacter, 2008).

Future simulation. The same network that replays the past also rehearses the future. It uses lived experience as raw material for imagining what might happen, a process researchers call prospection. The overlap between memory and imagination is not coincidental; they use much of the same neural machinery (Buckner and Carroll, 2007; Schacter, Addis, and Buckner, 2007).

Social cognition. Understanding what another person is thinking — their intentions, motivations, emotional state — relies on the DMN. It is the neural basis of what psychologists call theory of mind, and its dysfunction has been implicated in conditions from autism to schizophrenia (Mars et al., 2012; Li, Mai, and Liu, 2014).

Creative incubation. In a now-frequently-cited study, Baird and colleagues (2012) found that participants performed significantly better on the Unusual Uses Task — a standard creativity measure — specifically on problems they had previously encountered after a period of mind-wandering, compared with a demanding task or no break at all. The improvement was an incubation effect, not a general creativity boost: unfocused thought appeared to give earlier-seen problems more time to settle, allowing ideas from different cognitive domains to collide in ways that focused attention prevents.

Reflection and identity. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues at USC have argued, in a series of papers beginning in 2012, that the DMN supports the kind of social and emotional reflection through which an adolescent gradually develops a stable sense of self. Their Perspectives on Psychological Science article "Rest Is Not Idleness" makes the case that periods of undirected thought are when much of this consolidation happens (Immordino-Yang, Christodoulou, and Singh, 2012).

Collectively, the picture is that the DMN is doing some of the brain's most expensive and least substitutable work. It is how the brain knits the rest of its activity into a coherent life.

The problem

The problem is that the conditions under which the DMN naturally comes online — moments of undirected, unstimulated attention — have been engineered out of modern daily life.

The phone is the most obvious vector. Every moment that was once empty — the queue, the bus stop, the waiting room, the walk to the shop — is now filled. Andrews and colleagues (2015), in one of the first studies to compare logged phone use against self-report, found that participants checked their phones around 85 times a day on average, roughly twice their own estimates. Later reviews (Wilmer, Sherman, & Chein, 2017) describe a broader range as smartphones became more central to daily life. Whatever the precise figure is on any given year, it is dozens of separate pocket-reaches in a typical waking day.

This is not merely a matter of time. It is a matter of what the time would otherwise have been for. If the DMN is the brain's consolidation and creative-incubation system, and if it only runs when attention is not being held elsewhere, then every instance of pocket-reach-and-scroll is a small interruption of something the brain was trying to do. Over thousands of such interruptions a week, the cost is not obviously zero.

There is some indirect evidence that the cost is not negligible. Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire has shown experimentally that people who are allowed to be bored before a creative task outperform those who are not — a finding she interprets as evidence that boredom is not a bug but a signal: the brain, starved of external input, begins generating its own (Mann and Cadman, 2014). It is worth noting that boredom, mind-wandering, and default-mode activity are related but not identical: boredom is an affective state, mind-wandering is a cognitive one, and DMN activity is a neural signature most reliably observed in fMRI rest paradigms. The Mann finding is about boredom and creative output; the Baird finding cited earlier is about mind-wandering after an undemanding task. They point in the same direction without being the same claim.

What boredom actually is

Let us be accurate about what is being discussed. Boredom is not a pleasant state. It is an aversive one — unpleasant by design. The standard evolutionary account is that it is a motivator: a bored organism seeks novelty, which in ancestral environments usually meant seeking food, status, or opportunities. Boredom evolved as a signal to go find something.

The difficulty is that in an environment saturated with cheap stimulation, the easiest thing to "find" is a scroll. The phone offers instant, near-effortless relief from the aversive feeling. Variable reward schedules — a concept borrowed from operant conditioning and applied, with considerable sophistication, by the designers of modern social feeds — keep the relief available on demand. The boredom evaporates. What the boredom would have unlocked evaporates with it.

This is the loss that is difficult to notice, because it happens in a counterfactual. You do not experience the creative insight you would have had on the train if you had not opened the phone. You experience only the phone.

The first ten minutes

There is an old observation in the meditation and contemplative traditions — predating the neuroscience by several thousand years — that the first ten minutes of deliberate inactivity are the worst. The mind races. The hand reaches. The body fidgets. Anyone who has tried to sit still without a stimulus knows the feeling. It is uncomfortable, and it has the phenomenology of withdrawal from something one has become used to.

It also passes. This is the recurring finding, in the research and in ordinary experience: the acute discomfort of boredom is transient. After a handful of minutes it begins to settle. The racing thought slows. The restlessness gives way to something more spacious. Ideas surface. Memories surface. Sensory detail becomes available again — the sound of traffic, the texture of the bench, the colour of the sky.

That shift is the kind of inward drift that researchers associate with default-mode activity. Whether the network has come online in any particular reader on any particular walk is not something a neuroscientist could say without a scanner, but the phenomenology is the right side of the door.

Practical boredom

Nothing in the research requires dramatic changes to get most of the benefit. It does not require meditation, or a retreat, or an app. It requires only that you permit yourself the occasional unfilled moment.

• Commute in silence once a week. No podcast, no playlist. Just the window and the noise of the vehicle.
• Wait without reaching. Queue, lift, waiting room. Leave the phone in the bag. Stand there. It will feel strange for the first minute.
• Sit somewhere for ten minutes. A bench, a step, a café. Nothing to read. Nothing to watch. Ten minutes.
• Walk without headphones. One walk a week, unaccompanied by voice or music. Listen to the neighbourhood instead.

None of these require willpower in the exhausting sense. They require only a short period of tolerated discomfort. What follows the discomfort is the thing worth the exercise.

The quiet conclusion

The neuroscience is not decisive on every point, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But the broad shape of the findings is robust enough to take seriously. The brain needs downtime. The downtime is not cosmetic. It is the condition under which some forms of autobiographical reflection, future thought, and creative recombination plausibly occur.

The deeper point is smaller than that and also larger. In the silence, what tends to come back is your own thinking, rather than whatever the most recent feed was feeding you. You remember what you cared about before someone told you what to care about. You have ideas that are genuinely, unmistakably yours.

That is worth ten minutes of discomfort a day.

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References

• Andrews, S., Ellis, D. A., Shaw, H., & Piwek, L. (2015). Beyond self-report: tools to compare estimated and real-world smartphone use. PLoS ONE, 10(10), e0139004.
• Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122.
• Buckner, R. L., & Carroll, D. C. (2007). Self-projection and the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 49–57.
• Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain's default network: anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1), 1–38.
• Greicius, M. D., Krasnow, B., Reiss, A. L., & Menon, V. (2003). Functional connectivity in the resting brain: a network analysis of the default mode hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(1), 253–258.
• Immordino-Yang, M. H., Christodoulou, J. A., & Singh, V. (2012). Rest is not idleness: implications of the brain's default mode for human development and education. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), 352–364.
• Li, W., Mai, X., & Liu, C. (2014). The default mode network and social understanding of others: what do brain connectivity studies tell us? Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 74.
• Mann, S., & Cadman, R. (2014). Does being bored make us more creative? Creativity Research Journal, 26(2), 165–173.
• Mars, R. B., Neubert, F. X., Noonan, M. P., Sallet, J., Toni, I., & Rushworth, M. F. S. (2012). On the relationship between the "default mode network" and the "social brain." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 189.
• Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 676–682.
• Schacter, D. L., Addis, D. R., & Buckner, R. L. (2007). Remembering the past to imagine the future: the prospective brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(9), 657–661.
• Wilmer, H. H., Sherman, L. E., & Chein, J. M. (2017). Smartphones and cognition: a review of research exploring the links between mobile technology habits and cognitive functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 605.