Listener Mail: Scale of Dragon, Tooth of Wolf

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to Blow your Mind dot com. Let's see, I'm going to kick things off with this message from j going ways back to our series on the beaver, a surprisingly fascinating animal, Jeff says, Greeting science Humans in regards to your episodes on beavers, I wanted to call your attention to a fantastic short film from the nineteen fifties featuring real life parachuting beavers, previously thought to be nothing but

urban legends. It's called Fur for the Future, and it is well worth your time, and so the video Jeff links here is a short educational film strip from about the year nineteen fifty in color, produced by the Idaho Fish and Game Commission, And it's about the process of live trapping and relocating fur bearing animals like muskrats, beavers, and Martin's And yes, just as Jeff says, when it gets into the part about beavers, we see footage of

a re your actual historical program for catching beavers that were considered a nuisance in one area and transporting them to new habitats by dropping them out of airplanes with parachutes. I loved this short film. This is the kind of educational film that was parodied to great effect on The Simpsons with like think where You'd be without sand or the one about how you would soon regret wishing to

live in a world without zinc. In this one, the narrator paints a lyrical, almost heroic narrative of national identity based on the concept of fur. In fact, can we insert a bit of audio from the beginning here.

The rationale for air dropping beavers into the countryside was that it was necessary to restore areas where beavers had been hunted out of existence, yet were two difficult for rangers hauling large crates to get to on foot. Operation Beaver Drop is clearly the highlight, but there is more to love than just plummeting rodents. I hope you get a kick out of it. Keep rubbing the fur, Jeff, Well, thank you, Jeff. This was a divine recommendation. If you listening now would like to go look it up. It

is again called fur for the Future in it. I think you can find it on what looks like the Idaho Fish and Game YouTube channel for a bit of context. I wanted to find out the background on this, so I looked up some articles on the history of the Beaver Air Drop Project and I found a great article that was a piece for Boise State Public Radio by Samantha Wright published in January twenty fifteen. And I think most of the other articles I could find basically referred

back to this one. So I think this is the main reported piece on it. And so I'll try to streamline and summarize the story how I can. It looks like the story goes back to right after World War Two, when a bunch of people started building homes around a place in Idaho called Payette Lake and a nearby town called McCall. But this was a place occupied by beavers, and of course beavers and humans can get in each

other's way. They are both land and waterway engineers and developers, and they can cause problems for each other when they get too close. So the job of dealing with the beaver problem fell to an Idaho Fish and Game employee

named Elmo Header. Header thought he could find a win win resolution to the situation because while the beavers were causing problems around the area of McCall, there was a place far out in the wilderness called the Chamberlain Basin that would greatly benefit, they thought, from the reintroduction of beavers. So he wanted to get these beavers over there, but the target area was wild and undeveloped. There were basically

no roads. Header considered taking the beavers on pack horses or mules, but, to quote from a report Header made to the Journal of Wildlife Management exerpted in this public radio piece, quote, horses and mules become spooky and quarrelsome when loaded with a struggling, odorous pair of live beavers. These problems involve further handling and too frequently result in a loss of beavers. So transporting beavers in boxes by horse or mule caused problems for the horses and mules,

and much worse problems for the beavers themselves. But Header had another solution. He said, what if the beavers could be moved by airplane, making use of the vast reserves of surplus parachutes left over after World War II. So he tried to come up with a design for a box that could be dropped from an airplane with a parachute and automatically release the beaver upon landing. And the first idea here was sort of ingenious in my opinion.

It would be a box woven out of willow material, which the beaver could then chew through to escape after landing. So you take advantage of the natural beaveriness of beavers and let them just chew their way out of a willow box. But the problem was that the beavers would start chewing their way out as soon as they were placed inside, so this led to concerns that they might escape the box while still inside the airplane, which you can imagine the problems there, or also while falling through

the sky, so that idea was no good. After that, they ended up designing a box with a mechanism that would automatically pop open upon impact with the ground. And then they tested the box repeatedly with an older male beaver who ended up being the first part of the first group actually transported to the Chamberlain Basin by this method, and along with three female beavers, that beaver did establish

a successful colony in the new location. And in the end, a total of seventy six beavers were dropped from the airplane. All but one of them survived the process, and they said, got right to work with beaver business. Maybe let's hear how they describe the beaver air drop in for for the future.

And they say in the article that the descendants of those beavers are probably still thriving in the basin where they parachuted in back in nineteen forty eight. So thank you for the email, Jeff Okay. The second message I'm going to look at today is in response to our series about the Ignobel Prizes, specifically these studies on boredom in students. This message is from Ranata. Renata says, Hi, Joe and Rob, I'm so glad you chose to talk

about papers on boredom from the Ignobel Prizes. I have often thought about writing to you to suggest a topic on boredom, and I agree with all the points you made. Here's my brief history with boredom and what I think it means. When I was in elementary school, I remember a commercial came on TV with a line like, are you stuck in a boring job? And I said to

my mom, having a boring job would be great. This memory sticks in my brain because what she said next was a piece of wisdom that I didn't understand at the time and would take decades to unravel. She said, you don't want a boring job. It's miserable. Fast forward to a job I had as a consultant where the work I was supposed to do wasn't ready yet, so I started to do other work, only to be scolded.

My boss said that until the work came through, my job was to sit at my desk and look busy but not do any work, which was apparently my dream job since childhood. But it was miserable. My mom was right. At one point my boss said, I can tell that you get bored easily, which she meant as a criticism, and finally relented and gave me the task of fixing

formulas in a spreadsheet. Fast forward again to the pandemic, and at this time a lot of people were talking about how much free time they had and how boring it was. For me, it was a time in my life that I was at my busiest, working sixty to seventy hours a week, and I was miserable then too, and jealous of people who had so much free time that they were bored. My boss, who thought that I got bored easily, probably meant that I abhor boredom, which

I do and don't agree with. I think her assessment stems from conflating a few types of boredom that you touched on in the episode. In my own experience, there are at least three types of boredom. Type number one experiential boredom, when the experience you are having is boring. I spent all of elementary school in this state, and it was a time that I was most creative and introspective.

This boredom feels uncomfortable at times, but, like you mentioned, for kids in church and school, figuring out how to engage your mind and get inspiration from things around you is a great skill. She says, I love your theory, Joe about entertainment being the opposite of this state. A stupor of having thoughts put into your brain for you a good podcast, show, book, etc. Should bore you a little bit. In my opinion, to let your mind wander

and react to what you're experiencing. I'd love to hear your thoughts and research on how this relates to childhood development, especially ADHD. Second type of boredom, Renata says is interstitial boredom. Those bits of time you find yourself with nothing to do, like at an airport or waiting at the doctor's office. As an adult, these are some of my favorite times.

It feels like I found a loophole that lets me not have to be an adult for a few minutes, and I have the freedom to either try to fill the time with a book, doodling, et cetera, or to be present in the space as it is. However, this boredom doesn't often happen at home, and if it does, it doesn't feel good, which leads to type three, existential boredom, the feeling that your life is boring and that you are a boring person. This is a bad kind of boredom.

This is how I felt to the job where I wasn't allowed to do work because it leads to feelings of inadequacy and gives you way too much time to think about everything you did wrong in your life that led you to having a do nothing job. The quote bored teacher might be in this camp, but my guess is that their apparent apathy usually has more to do

with burnout than boredom. I don't believe the other two types of boredom typically lead to existential boredom, but maybe if they go unchecked over a long portion of your life, they could. Curious to hear your perspective. Thanks for taking the time to read my letter. I'm glad you're still making an amazing podcast. PS. My current job is neither too boring nor too busy. Thankfully the very best, Renata. Well,

thank you so much, Ranata. Yeah, I think we could come back into a series of episodes on boredom because there's a lot of interesting research. Ironically enough to address your questions. First of all, I agree with your three categories there. The interstitial boredom is very common. I think even when you have a lot of absorbing activites on your to do list, sometimes you're just stuck. You're stuck in a situation where you can't really get to any of them. And I'm very glad to hear that you

are able to make good use of these moments. I know other people in my family who have talked about this as well. I think My mom has talked about enjoying being at the dentist as she can just kind of, you know, relax. I admire the ability to find the good in those moments. I do tend to find these periods really frustrating because I feel like the things that I want and need to do with my attention usually

require some kind of sustained focus. And if I know that I could be interrupted, you know, called back to the doctor's office at any minute, and I'm listening for my name, it's like hard to force myself to get into that state of focus. With your category of existential boredom, I think this sort of highlights the link between the feeling of boredom and the feeling of meaninglessness. If you perceive what you are doing as without value or meaning,

you are more likely to feel bored. But if that activity is not like waiting in line for fifteen minutes, but say the job you have to do every day, it's easy to see how this can have a pernicious effect on our well being and could make a person question their self worth. In large part, we are what we spend our time doing, and if you spend your time doing something that you do not feel is meaningful.

Even if it's something you have to do, it will probably make you feel like you are not yourself meaningful. And I think this is one reason that it's important

to incorporate multiple meaning structures in our lives. You know, you can't invest all of your sense of meaning in just one thing, especially not if it's like your job, because if you are at some point stuck in a job that feels valueless and brings on feelings of existential boredom, you can have other structures like family and friendships and art and religion and hobbies and projects that are there

to give you alternative routes to meaning. Let's see, regarding your question about childhood development and ADHD, I don't feel like I have enough knowledge to comment on that. I do think it's interesting that you mention the idea that a really good book, for example, should be just a little bit boring enough to let you occasionally drift out of the process of reading and let you reflect on what you've already read. And I think I really agree

with that. While you know, there are some books that are just totally effortlessly absorbing, you know, the things we would usually call page turners at least for me. While I can absolutely enjoy a good pop thriller novel that just pulls me relentlessly from one paragraph to another, these types of books are rarely the ones that I look back on after I'm finished and think, Wow, that was so interesting and valuable, I'm so glad I read that.

Usually the books that I value the most in retrospect are the ones that take a little more effort to get through and sometimes would cause me to lose focus on the text itself and start reflecting on ideas that it raises. And this kind of connects to another idea about boredom, which is that it seems to me, based on what I've read, there's a kind of horseshoe spectrum of experiences that cause boredom, and the dimension along which

that horseshoe bends is that of challenge. So some things are boring because they're too easy, and other things are boring because they're too difficult. So you can imagine an adult would probably become bored trying to read a bunch of books meant for toddlers because there's nothing there's no challenge, there's nothing to really stimulate the mind. But similarly, I think most adults would probably get bored trying to read a book on a technical subject that they don't understand

very well. Think of the way that you would probably get bored trying to do college coursework in a class where you are hopelessly in over your head. You would think, in a highly challenging situation where you know you're you're dealing with coursework that's way over your your head, that would be a motivating state that would, you know, cause you to get really into it and really, you know, really want to focus your attention on the material and

understand it better. And I guess for some people sometimes it does do that, but I think a lot of the time it just causes a feeling of frustration and hopelessness that makes one want to disengage with with this this course material. You know, it's just like you feel like you're never going to understand it, and thus any attempt to understand it becomes intolerably boring. And so thinking about this horseshoe sort of connects in my mind to the idea of the psychology concept of the flow state.

You know, a flow state is a pleasurable state of intense foes and absorption in an activity or task that is usually evoked when we are operating consistently near the peak of our abilities, so the task demands exactly what you are able to give. If it demands too little, then you get bored because you're not challenged. If it demands too much, you get frustrated and want to quit, which I think either is a form of boredom or

feel similar to boredom. I think a lot of really good, highly valuable activities, like a really good valuable book or a really good valuable project, are things that are right beyond the scale of challenge where it's easy for us to get into a flow state. They are a little,

but not a lot, more challenging than is comfortable. We're able to make progress through these activities or in reading this book or working on this project, but occasionally we do get frustrated and confused and pulled out of the zone and forced to reflect on our progress in some way. I think those are a lot of the most valuable things you can do or sort of write in that sweet spot. It's just a little more difficult than is comfortable,

and thus it is just a little bit boring. Also, I just wanted to mention a couple of papers related to boredom that I was reading that I thought, we're interesting. This is not directly related to anything you raised or not. But while we're on the subject, I can't recall if this has ever come up on the show before, but there was a paper published in the journal Science in the year twenty fourteen called Just Think the Challenges of

the Disengaged Mind by Wilson at All. This is the kind of charismatic result where I'd be cautious about putting too much weight on it until I see it replicated several times. But it does look like at least a handful of studies have found similar things, so I think this is probably basically sound. The authors here took a

bunch of research subjects college undergrads. For what that is worth, that may color your understanding of this result, but less took these research subjects and put them in empty rooms

without access to their personal belongings. So you couldn't, you know, read a book or look at your cell phone or whatever, and these would they would be put in these situations for periods of between six and fifteen minutes, and the subjects were forced to sit and think for a few minutes with nothing to occupy, nothing external to occupy their attention other than their thoughts. In some tests, they were

told to think about whatever they wanted. In others, they were given a specific like a list of prompts maybe to think about a specific subject, and then allowed to plan in advance what they were going to think about. And after this experience participants rated. They reported high rates of boredom, and about half said that they found the experience more unpleasant than pleasant. So it was a divided feelings about this experience, but about half were like, I

didn't like that. A lot of participants preferred having something to occupy their attention, like reading or music, would much prefer that than just being forced to sit with their thoughts. So that seems pretty understandable that most people would rather have a positive experience than an experience that might induce boredom.

But the really surprising result that was in one of the subsequent studies published in this paper was that in the fifteen minute condition, the researchers found that when they gave participants the ability to push a button to administer a mild electric shock to themselves, a lot of board subjects push the button. There was a large gender divide

in these specific results. Among this cohort, twenty five percent of women and sixty seven percent of men decided they would rather voluntarily choose to receive an electric shock than just sit there and be bored. And I think this has interesting implications for our understanding of boredom as a motivating state. I mean, it makes me wonder about the adaptive utility of boredom as a motivation to escape the

state of being bored. You know, it seems like it must serve some kind of important purpose, forcing us to sometimes even do things that we expect to be painful, or do things that we don't want to do, just to get out of the situation of being bored. Now, there's an important caveat to this, which is that this finding has been applied to the concept of boredom, But technically it was about forcing people to be alone with their thoughts, which might or might not have been perceived

by the subjects as boring. Some subjects might have found it quite entertaining. But I think it's a fairly safe assumption that probably a lot of the people who shocked themselves did so because they were bored and this race is a question like would the same number of people shock themselves as a result of any kind of negative experience or is it something specific about bored or at least what we assumed to be boredom. I looked at

another study that was following up on this. This was by chantal nadercorn at All published in the journal Psychiatry Research in twenty sixteen called self inflicted Pain out of Boredom. In this study followed up by asking participants to watch a film and they had the ability to choose to administer mild electric shocks to themselves while watching. And this

was so there was like a neutral control film. There was a film designed to elicit the negative emotion of sadness, and then there was a monotonous film designed to elicit boredom. And they did indeed find quote participants in the boredom condition self administered more shocks and with higher intensity compared

to both the neutral and sadness condition. So it does look likely that a lot of people would rather experience mild physical pain than boredom, and that even the negative experience of pain was judged at LEAs east in advance sufficient to alleviate boredom. That raises another question for me, which is I wonder how effective it was, Like did the people who gave themselves a shock feel less bored afterwards? Or is the shock only an illusory promise of avoiding boredom?

I don't know, but anyway, to wrap this up, thanks again Renata for the email and for raising this issue again. Ironically, I do find the psychology of boredom to be quite fascinating. So that's going to be it for today's Listener Mail episode, but we will read more listener Mail next Monday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays of each week we do our core Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, which are usually about science and culture in some way. Wednesdays we do a

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