A note on the most underrated cognitive state we have — and why, in our rush to be entertained, we may be quietly disabling the way the mind learns.

In 2014, a team of psychologists led by Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia ran an experiment so simple it sounds like a joke. They put people in a bare room, took away their phones and their books, and asked them to sit alone with their own thoughts for up to fifteen minutes. That was the entire task. Think.

Most of them hated it. So the researchers added one option: a button that delivered a mild electric shock — the same shock every participant had earlier said they would pay money to avoid. Left alone with nothing but their minds, sixty-seven percent of the men and twenty-five percent of the women shocked themselves at least once. One man pressed the button a hundred and ninety times. The study was published in Science, and its title was almost gentle: “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind.”

I keep returning to that experiment, because it describes something we now arrange for ourselves a hundred times a day. We do not have the button. We have something far more efficient. We have the phone in our pocket, and it has made sitting alone with our thoughts — the state we used to simply call boredom — almost entirely optional. We have, in less than two decades, very nearly solved boredom.

This essay is an argument that we should not have.

What we actually killed

Boredom has a bad reputation, and some of it is deserved. The boredom of a child trapped in a badly designed classroom, listening to a lesson that connects to nothing they care about, is a real failure — I have written before that this kind of boredom is a design problem, not a discipline one. That boredom is a signal that something is wrong, and it deserves to be fixed.

But there is a second kind of boredom, and we have confused the two. It is the boredom of the queue, the bus ride, the ten minutes before sleep, the long afternoon with nothing scheduled. It is the unfilled gap. And it turns out that gap was never empty. It was working.

When you stop feeding the brain external input, it does not switch off. It switches over. Neuroscientists have a name for what comes online: the default mode network — a set of brain regions that becomes most active precisely when you are doing nothing in particular. Daydreaming. Staring out of a window. Letting the mind wander. For years this was dismissed as idle noise. We now understand it as some of the most important work the brain does.

The default mode network is where the brain consolidates memory — replaying and filing away what you have recently learned so that it moves from fragile short-term storage into durable knowledge. It is where you do self-referential thinking, stitch together your sense of who you are, and rehearse the future. It is, in large part, where you make sense of your own life. And it runs best when nothing else is demanding your attention. In other words: the brain uses boredom to organise itself. Every time we reach for the phone in an idle moment, we interrupt that filing system mid-task.

There is a striking piece of evidence for what idleness does. In 2014, researchers Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman ran a study with a deliberately tedious premise. They had one group of people copy numbers out of a telephone directory — about as boring a task as can be designed — and then gave everyone a creativity test: think of as many uses as you can for a pair of plastic cups. The people who had been bored first came up with more ideas, and more inventive ones, than the group who went straight to the creative task.

Then they refined it. A second study compared an active boring task (writing out the numbers) against a passive one (merely reading them). The passive, more boring condition produced the bigger creative leap. Their explanation: the duller and more passive the task, the more the mind is freed to wander — and it is the wandering, the daydreaming, that does the creative work. Boredom, they argued, is not the opposite of creativity. It is often the runway.

This is the part of the research that should make every parent and every teacher pause. We treat a bored child as a problem to be solved — quickly, usually with a screen. But the developmental research points the other way. Unstructured, slightly boring time is when children invent games, build things, narrate stories to themselves, and discover what they are drawn to when no one is directing them. That self-directed play is not a gap in their education. It is the part that builds executive function — the working memory, self-control, and mental flexibility that everything else is built on. A child who is never bored is a child who is never given the chance to find out what they would do with an empty hour.

Boredom is a signal, not a verdict

The psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood, in their book Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, make the case cleanly: boredom evolved to help us. It is a signal and a call to action. When you are bored, your mind is telling you that what you are doing right now is not engaging your capacities — that you are capable of more than this moment is asking of you. It is a nudge to reorient, to find something worth your attention.

That signal is useful only if it is allowed to resolve. In a world without phones, boredom resolved into action: you started a project, picked up an instrument, struck up a conversation, let your mind drift until it landed somewhere interesting. The discomfort had a function. It pushed you to do something.

What the smartphone offers is a way to silence the signal without ever acting on it. The discomfort vanishes; the underlying need to be meaningfully engaged does not. We get the relief of the notification without the redirection the boredom was meant to produce. We are, in effect, treating the smoke alarm by removing the battery. And we are doing it constantly. The Indian adolescent now spends, by recent estimates, four to five hours a day on screens. Globally, teenagers average more than four hours, and a large share spend over eight. There is, almost literally, no gap left for the default mode network to do its quiet work.

And attention is paying the price

You can measure what this has done to focus. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has spent two decades timing how long people stay on a single screen before switching away. In 2004, the average was about two and a half minutes. By 2012 it had fallen to seventy-five seconds. In recent years it is around forty-seven seconds — and the median is forty. Half of all the focus stretches she measured lasted forty seconds or less.

This is the engine of the problem, and it runs in both directions. A mind that is never bored never practises sustained attention — and a mind that cannot sustain attention finds ordinary life unbearably boring, which sends it back to the screen for relief. Tolerance for stillness drops. The threshold for stimulation climbs. The unstructured hour, once a doorway, starts to feel like a void to be escaped. We are training ourselves, and our children, out of the exact capacity that deep learning requires: the ability to stay with one thing long enough for it to take root.

Because here is the uncomfortable link to everything I work on. Learning — real, durable learning — depends on consolidation, and consolidation depends on the brain having downtime to do it. The forgetting curve is steep enough as it is. When every idle moment is filled with a fresh feed of input, the brain never gets the offline time it needs to move what it learned into long-term memory. We are not just losing the ability to focus while we learn. We are losing the rest periods in which learning is actually completed.

The paradox for someone who builds engagement

I am aware of the apparent contradiction here. I run a company, Karkei, whose entire purpose is to make learning more engaging — to build experiences immersive enough that children lean in instead of switching off. Am I not part of the same stimulation economy I am criticising?

I have thought about this a great deal, and I think the distinction matters. There is a difference between engagement and stimulation, and it is the difference between nourishment and sugar. Stimulation is what the feed sells: a constant drip of novelty that asks nothing of you, builds nothing, and leaves you needing more of it. Engagement is when attention is captured by something worth attending to — and then put to work. The goal of good learning design is not to eliminate the mind’s effort. It is to make the effort feel worth it, and then to get out of the way so the mind can do what it does.

The best learning experiences I have ever seen leave a child not numbed but lit up — and then quiet. Absorbed, then reflective. They provoke the kind of thinking that continues after the session ends, in the boredom of the bus ride home. The screen that demands you keep scrolling so it can keep selling has the opposite aim: it cannot afford to let you go. That is the line. Anything that respects your attention will eventually return it to you.

What I am actually arguing for

I am not romanticising deprivation. I am not going to tell you to throw away your phone, and I am not going to pretend I always manage my own. But I have started to treat boredom as something to protect rather than something to fix — in my own day, and especially in the lives of my three daughters.

In practice it is small and unglamorous. It means letting a child say “I’m bored” and not rushing to solve it — letting the complaint sit until it turns, as it almost always does, into invention. It means leaving the phone in another room during the gaps: the queue, the walk, the ten minutes before sleep, and letting the mind drift instead. It means defending unstructured time on the calendar the way we defend appointments, because that empty time is not wasted time. It is where the filing gets done.

We have spent two decades engineering boredom out of human life, and we called it progress. I think we removed something we did not understand. The bored mind was never empty. It was consolidating what it had learned, rehearsing who it was becoming, and, every so often, wandering its way to an idea it could not have reached any other way.

That is worth defending. Even when — especially when — it is uncomfortable. The next time you feel the small, familiar pull to fill an empty moment, try, just once, not to. See where your mind goes when you finally let it.

— Elango Raghupathy
Founder, Karkei · Producer, Karuvachy Films · elangoraghupathy.com

Sources: Wilson et al., “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind,” Science (2014); Sandi Mann & Rebekah Cadman, “Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?” Creativity Research Journal (2014); James Danckert & John Eastwood, Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom (Harvard University Press, 2020); Gloria Mark, Attention Span (2023), University of California, Irvine; and published research on the brain’s default mode network and memory consolidation.