Carl Smith
speaker
508 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2018
last heard Sep 2020
Carl Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And yet, despite its prevalence, the field of boredom research is relatively new.
Thomas Goetz says one reason why we're only just beginning to untangle the subtleties of boredom and how we experience it is that up until now, scientists have largely focused on examining other, more obvious and stronger emotions.
Sometimes it does feel like modern life has been designed specifically to banish boredom.
So why are we so anti-boredom?
Doctor Sandy Mann.
Now it makes sense that boredom would generally feel slightly unpleasant, and that we try to erase it from our lives.
The reason it exists in humans is likely to help propel us forward to explore and find new things.
From an
But as we heard earlier, not all boredom appears to be bad.
Professor Thomas Goodz and his colleagues have published several studies classifying five different types of boredom that we might experience in any given dull moment.
In a paper published in 2006, they asked students to describe their feelings of boredom, and they noticed that some described more positive or more negative experiences of boredom.
Some forms of boredom also appeared to be more arousing, prompting action, while others didn't stimulate the students.
So, next, in a study published in 2013, they gave about 60 university students and 80 high school students devices that prompted them to rate how bored they were at any given point through a day.
They were also asked to rate how positive and how stimulating this emotion was.
Kind of depressed mood.
So it seems boredom can range from slightly positive to quite negative, and from low arousal, not very stimulating, to a very highly motivating emotion.
Combining these scales in different ways gives you indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant, or apathetic boredom.
Of course, it's extremely hard to accurately quantify any type of internal feeling.
So this work relies heavily on self-reporting.
But Sandy Mann says that's not the only research showing boredom can be good.
Showing 201–220 of 508 · page 11 of 26
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