Can You Die Of Boredom?

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Hello, I'm Michael Stevens. And I'm Hannah Fry. Welcome to The Rest is Science. You know that phrase, Michael, bored to death. I do. I mean Phrases like that, there's there tends to be something behind them. So uh what I thought we could do today is investigate that. Do you think do you think you actually can be bored to death? Ooh, I hope so, and I hope that we do it today. Get ready for the most boring episode of the

That's quite a big bold promise. If you're driving, if you are operating heavy machinery or doing anything other, frankly, than uh than about to go to sleep, then maybe we should come with a warning. You've been warned. But that's what we're doing today. We are asking: can your brain be bored to death? We're asking, what is it scientifically? And why does your brain hate it so much?

I have a a a feeling the answer is no, at least not directly, but I think that this journey is gonna be a fun one because we need to define boredom and I think we should start by talking about how bored we both feel right now. I mean, right now, I'll be honest with you, my my brain is absolutely brimming with all of the excellent boredom related facts that I have been looking up.

all of the astonishing little stories that I want to bring to you. So I I don't I feel quite the opposite of bored right now. Yeah, no, I feel the same way. And I think that that is one of those great like ironies that boredom is actually really fascinating. You sometimes crave boredom? I mean you're a busy man, right? Uh yeah, but I do crave having nothing to do because that's where I'm a Viking.

In my own mind, just alone with myself. Is it that you actually want nothing to do, or do you just want no responsibility? I want nothing to do, but I like the responsibility. Have you heard about this study that looked at what the best age to be is?

Uh by what metric? Okay, so just ask people. You ask people throughout all their life stages of all ages, like what age were you the happiest? You know, yes really old people, yes people who still have a lot of life to live, and I promise this is related to boredom eventually. I wanna hear it. The answer is thirty eight.

Oh hello, this is Michael and Hannah. A few days after recording this episode, I realized afterwards that I said everyone's favorite age to be was 38. That's not correct. The study 36. So this is a correction. From now on in the episode, when we say 38, just think 36. And uh and if you are 38, all You missed it.

That is consistently the average age of highest happiness. And one of the hypotheses for why is that it's when you feel that you have the greatest meaning and purpose, you have the most responsibility. Right. Whether it be with your family, with children or with work. You're very relevant to the world. And it's it's not the most fun. It's not when people said they had the most fun. It's when they felt the happiest and the most needed.

When you're young, you're kind of like, I'm here, everyone's caring for me. And when you're old, you're here, everyone's caring for you. But in the middle, if you don't get up in time and bring your kid to school, it's your fault. Everyone's relying on you. And so later on you look back and go, That's when I really mattered. You know, you know what's what's really interesting about that is that because there's tiff different ways that you can measure happiness.

Right. There's sort of the the experiential measurement of it. It's like how happy are you right now in this moment? Give me a a metric or give me a score out of 10, for instance. But then there's also the sort of reflective version. Of like, how did you feel? How do you feel about your life? So I haven't actually seen that study. I like I think that's really fascinating that you ask people when were you happiest? And on a r in a reflective way, they say 38.

Because when you ask people how happy are you right now, it's exactly the opposite result. Like the least happy that you are is about the age forty, which for exactly the same reasons is that you are like swallowed up by responsibilities. A lot of people have both young children and old parents simultaneously and they're still trying to build their career and they're still trying to pay for their house. You are definitely not bored.

Exactly. Exactly. And so boredom and and stress and anxiety have this weird opposite relationship later on. At the time, contemporaneously you're unhappy, but then later on you go, Man, that's the happiest I ev I ever was. Okay, well I think it only seems right to start off

with uh what on earth boredom actually is. How the hell do you even study it? I mean Do you just put people in the room and not let anything happen? Um yeah. No, you you actually that is what you do. Or you you have them sit down and do something that's really repetitive and meaningful.

Mm. Is meaningless part of it then? Yeah, that's a that's a part of it. Because if s if people feel like they're doing a task in a laboratory, like say sorting shapes or solving problems, and that maybe there's like a competitive nature and they want to impress the research. That's there's too much meaning there. It needs to feel like, man, this is dumb. Like you can tell people that they're just helping calibrate the machine before the actual test begins.

And that is much more boring because they feel like it doesn't matter. It's just for the machine. It's to like warm up the mouse or whatever. Those are great. If you let people just sit With nothing to do, they can often entertain themselves quite a bit, and often subjects will just take a nap. So you need to make sure that they don't relax. You have to you have to make sure that they're they're in that like uncomfortable zone of I'm bored and I can't escape.

That's an interesting thought, the idea that if you're sat alone in a chair with nothing to entertain you, you can Quite easily. I'm thinking here about kids who fidget in their chairs or like wiggle their feet or kind of pull their hair. Um just to sort of have some kind of sensory input that that's kind of continually there. That's right. Yeah. And I think that we're gonna keep stumbling into this as we try to kill people with boredom. We're gonna find that the body heals from boredom.

Just like a cut heels through platelets and and whatnot. When you're bored, your brain goes, No, not gonna do this. We need the stimulation, and you come up with ways to entertain your

If we're gonna bore people, if we're gonna make this the most boring podcast of all time, you have to sit. You're not allowed to fall asleep. You're not allowed to wiggle, you're not allowed to jiggle your feet, no twiddling your thumbs, no playing with your hair. You just gotta sit. What happens when you do that? When you put people in

Those kind of passive waiting conditions. They don't die. So we're not quite there yet. No. But they do become anxious. Or I think they actually become a little bit disgusting. It has been described as a negative experience, agree, where the desire to engage in stimulating and satisfying activity is frustrated.

That's quite key actually, I think, because there's definitely been moments in my uh life when I've been particularly busy where the thought of like sitting in a chair and not doing anything Would actually be quite appealing. This this this definition being like you're you're not allowed to do something, frustration of not of wanting to be stimulated and not able to be.

Researchers believe it contains an emotional element characterized by a lack of pleasure or meaning. Yeah. You know what? I'm seeing kind of two things here. There's relaxing and then there's boring. Yeah. And I hate being told what to do. And so boredom is the topic today. I brought this book. It's literally called This Book Will Put You to Sleep. Amazing. And so fair warning, if you're driving listening to this podcast, watch out.

Um this book is made to be as boring as possible uh and it's good for reading before you go to bed. It's got, for example, a bunch of clocks. What time is it? And it's just a bunch of little clip art pictures of clocks that you can see. Is there any pattern to the to the times across the different clocks? Uh yeah, they're all just like one minute ahead of each other.

So it's it's really here's a staring contest with forty eight cats. You can just stare at them and see who blinks first. This one is a taxonomy of micro moms. And it's just the most boring description of small moths. And they use a lot of scientific Latin phrases. Yeah, I've got an actually surprisingly high threshold. I know, and that's what I've noticed too. I cannot get bored by this. Like even this bit about micro moths.

I'll I'll read you the first couple of sentences. The Microlepidoptera micromoths are a non-minophyletic group of families of moth. As it is a non-monophyletic group, micromoth enthusiasts generally use the property of smallness as a way of identifying. Moths with a wingspan of less than twenty millimeters qualify as micromoths. And it goes on and on like that. And then I keep going, Oh my God. There's a there's a definition of what a micromoth is.

And then it talks about how it's hard to identify them because you can't see the differences on their wings because they're too small. And then I just wind up staying up all night reading the book that's supposed to put me to sleep. Maybe you're immune. Maybe you're immune from boredom. Maybe. But I think that This is getting at two different things. One is I want to relax my brain and be distracted from all the things that I'm thinking about.

can't sleep and then there's I want to do stuff but I can't because I'm in a waiting room at the dentist's office and I'm bored. Boredom is a negative experience. And it is an emotion that motivates us to move away. To find something new and different.

So here's another nice definition. A situation becomes maximally boring when it combines three factors. One, nothing new is happening, everything is fully expected, and the activity feels pointless. Which makes me think, frankly, your book is out. There was uh it failed on all three camps. Yeah, it's not pointless. It really fails that third one for a lot of reasons. One is just that I I I find micro mops interesting, I guess, but also

Because as like a content creator, I just keep reading this going, This is content. Like I've already made a YouTube short about And i I struggled to find something that was legitimately boring. Like uh there's one that's it's called A Few Facts About Minor Belgian Politicians.

And they talk about like who was the deputy prime minister for a couple of months in this interim period in the two thousands. And I'm just like, I want to Wikipedia this person. What an interesting minor position to have. Um but that's'cause I'm always thinking about how do I get views.

And there's always a way. Yeah. All right. But but what would be boring to me is something that's pointless and that gets to that frustration uh definition that you brought up. The feeling of I'm being stopped from Activities that I would rather be doing. I tell you what is interesting about this though is that we all know this this this experience. We've all like i can completely connect with the idea of sitting in the dentist.

Feeling frustrated. But it is interesting that there is something going on in our brains that does react so viscerally to these kind of situations where nothing new is happening, where everything is fully expected, and where the activity feels pointless. And the thing of I think part of the reason for this is that Our brains, and I think this is increasingly the um the sort of view of scientists, is that our brains are basically these prediction machines.

Trying to work out what's gonna happen next with reality, predict it, and then it feels happy when it gets the prediction correct. And sort of gets a little bit of jolt dis disf dissatisfaction if it gets it wrong. You can notice this really clearly if you ever try and step off of a static escalator. You know that experience that I'm talking about here? Oh yeah, I think it's called the elevator. Like it's a whole thing with the name, yeah. Where uh you wait, escalator effect, no?

What did I say? Elevator? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah, see, I'm just keeping it on your toes. Yeah, well. Not boring. Everything wasn't fully expected. Escalator effect. Yeah, that's when you step off an escalator. Or oh when you when you step onto an escalator that is off. Yes. And you feel like you're losing your balance.

Yeah. And it's because your brain is making a prediction that it's then getting wrong. There was this really incredible study with monkeys. It's like one of the most important science papers, uh neuroscience papers. Certainly one of my favourites, let me put it that way. where they were monitoring the neurons in the brains of monkeys that had these really unbelievably fine wires that were basically eavesdropping on what these neurons were doing in the monkeys' brain.

And they were uh the monkeys were part of this experiment where they were kind of doing like Pavlov's dog, right? So the monkeys would get this little drop of juice, which it really loved, and a light would come on in advance of the juice. And what they were looking at in the brain for when the spike of dopamine might happen. So you would expect, if the monkey loves the juice, that the spike of dopamine would happen when the juice arrived, right? And that is what happened initially.

The monkey the monkey drinks the juice, the the dopamine spikes die. After a while, the monkey learns that the light comes on before the juice arrives. Now, what's interesting is that Um, when the monkey actually gets the juice, then it's like, okay, cool, I was sort of expecting that. You know, that's absolutely fine.

If, however, you decide to not give the monkey the juice, it's predicted it's about to get some and then the juice never arrives, the monkey is pissed. The mon the monkey does not like that at all. But the other way around.

If you don't put the light on and then you just give the monkey the juice, so it's not predicting it, and then the juice arrives, it's even more happy than it would be if it was predicting something. If you put that another way, I always think of this as like, okay, if I'm walking down the street, and I unexpectedly stumble across 20 pounds. It makes me way, way, way happier to have found this unexpected twenty pounds that I didn't predict.

than if somebody, a friend of mine who owes me twenty pounds, gives me the twenty pounds. It's like, yeah, cool. Thank you very much. I knew that was coming. I appreciate it. When you are like predicting the world and something better than predicted happens, your brain is like super excited about it. And likewise the reverse, if you predict that something good is gonna happen and it doesn't, your brain is extremely unhappy.

But this is like one of the pieces of evidence that that we have. And there's a there's a whole multitude. I mean you could do many episodes on on just this. about the fact that the way that our brain works essentially is that it is assessing the sensory inputs, it is uh going through all of the information that is coming in, it's making predictions about what is gonna happen next.

And then it is rewarding itself based on whether those predictions turn out to be true. And so in a situation where nothing new is happening, where everything is fully expected. Both of those situations basically mean that the brain is starved of the opportunity to make predictions. Yeah. I love that they used monkeys and did it so methodically in a laboratory because it's something that is very relatable to our data.

And it really shows how deep of an evolutionary process this is, this need for enrichment and for cognitive stimulation that we need to exercise. And we literally do in order to keep brain cells alive and help them s keep strong connections. And I don't think we see this in all living organisms.

Um, but once you get into warm-blooded ones, once you get into mammals, they really need that cognitive stimulation. When you deny it to them, they feel disgusted in a way and they seek out other places and things and and thoughts.

You said that boredom was like disgust, though. Do you see wait one, how? And two, is that universal across animals? Uh well, disgust is is universal. It is one of the first things you see in a life form. Uh because what it is, is that it's um on the spectrum of approach and withdrawal. Right. That's a thing that uh not all life forms, the earliest ones just they just exist.

But one of the first behaviors you see in an organism through th through increasing complexity is suddenly an interest in approaching certain things and withdrawing from other things and discuss Is the emotion associated with withdrawal? And so Pletchik on his famous Wheel of Emotions, which if you wanna just have a great time looking at how emotions might be related, look look up Pletchick.

He put boredom on the same spoke as disgust, making boredom, in his opinion, a uh more diluted, weaker form of disgust, because ultimately boredom motivates us to withdraw. to say, okay, I can't just sit in this chair. I'm going to pick up a magazine and read this while I wait I've got to change the environment and It's different than curiosity, where you wonder about something and you're looking for knowledge and you approach it. It's instead you're actually withdrawing to whatever necessary.

Like if I'm bored and I just start like tapping with the pencil, I'm not curious about the pimp pencil's properties. I'm disgusted by the lack of anything stimulating me. And so I start doing this. But then actually if you consider that in an environment where you have a bit more freedom, right? So so maybe not dentist chairs, because I don't think our evolutionary past was like had dentists particularly in mind.

Um but if you do find yourself in an environment where there is nothing new, where everything is fully expected And the activity feels pointless, I mean those three kind of definitions again, then it's like, well, yeah, you are. You you probably do need to get up and go away and move somewhere else. You probably do need some kind of emotion that motivates you to find a better environment.

That's right. And before we go to Mars, I just want to say one more thing that is related to this feeling of how deep it is. Your monkey study reminds me of some studies that were done on mice. We all are familiar with the little wheels that we put in mouse cages.

or rat cages, gerbils, and they run on them. And a lot of us think that we put those in there because they lack in a cage the enrichment they would normally get, the the exercise they would normally get out in the wild, right? But Some researchers questioned that and they decided to put mouse wheels out in the woods. They just put them up and they put cameras in the woods pointed at these mouse wheels and sure enough, mice.

Wild mice. Wild mice love to run in circles, going nowhere, on a mouse wheel. You put it out, you know, in the middle of the forest and they're like, Yeah, finally I can run and not go anywhere. Because the mammalian brain, the warm blooded brain, craves. stimulation and I think that in a lot of ways the internet is a mouse wheel in the wild. I've got this whole wide world in front of me and yet I would rather run on a mouse wheel, just like a real mouse. It is deep within us.

distaste for boredom. But then also this very easy, distilled, original way to entertain yourself, I guess, both the wheel and and the internet. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, actually uh so that that thing about mice running around in wheels and cages, um and then th those those analogies between humans and animals. There's a there I think there's a really interesting experiment that has happened. Um it's called the Mars 500 project. This is basically people are wondering about whether it will be possible to do a human-led mission to Mars.

But if you do so, it's gonna take a long time to get to Mars. And so we have to run not just experiments about the physics of rockets and spaceships. but also the psychological experiments of of what it means for a small group of people to be confined in

what is, you know, effectively little bigger than a hamster or a mouse cage for a really, really long period of time. So what they've done, they they they ran this this European simulation in Moscow, they called Mars 500. They had six volunteers. Um, three Russians, one Frenchman, one Italian Colombian, and uh one Chinese person, and they spent five hundred and twenty days.

in this environment. It was uh there was strict confinement, limited social contact, they were in the same room, same surroundings, they're like unbelievably routine schedules that didn't sort of change. Um, no light, you know, uh no sort of external sounds, anything like that. And uh initially people were all right about it. Like they were okay initially. They decided to create a a boredom scale just to see how people were handling it. And it went from emotional flatness.

was sort of the first step on this this this boredom ladder as it were. Kind of do you feel a bit indifferent about what happens today? All the way through to sort of loss of curiosity. Oh, just you know, which is I can't really be bothered to do anything at all. to time distortion does today feel like it's lasted much longer than it than it should do or would do.

Through to um social weariness, would you prefer to to avoid everyone else? And then to actual physical lethargy, like do you feel physically slow even after you've rested? They really by the time it got to um uh two thirds of the way through, they were really, really, really struggling.

One crew member said that um every day started to feel so identical that he started deliberately misplacing objects just to have something to look for. They also they had a treadmill, I mean the sort of the human version of the mouse wheel, a treadmill schedule uh that was so rigid that one of them said that they could tell the time by the sound of the other person's footsteps.

I mean they really it was I think not fun. They just did not enjoy it at all. I love that little trick, that little life hacker.

Deliberately misplacing things just to give yourself something to do, because that is what we find. And this goes back to the body's self-healing, boredom avoidance abilities. If you makes people really bored, they would rather hurt themselves than continue to be bored. Go on. In the experiment, you show participants a button that if they push will administer an electric shock. Like the button is metal.

And when they push it, they get this very uncomfortable, but, you know, not dangerous shock. And presumably these are people who don't want to be shocked. Yeah. And people don't want this. They don't like it. You can even it some people will try it and they'll be like, Oh gosh, yeah, I hate And then you tell them, Okay, cool, well anyway the receptionist'll come in when we're ready.

And you leave them all alone in a waiting room with nothing to do but the button to look at. They don't look at it for long. The majority of people, after you make them wait long enough, I'm talking like up to thirty minutes, an hour, they'll eventually push it again. And then one and they'll do it again. And they'll keep doing it because they would rather be in pain than do nothing and wait.

Can I tell you my favourite thing? I I this this particular sorry, my favourite thing about this is that there is a gender split. In how people respond to this button. So you are right. 67% of men will choose to shock themselves at least once. Um one man pressed the shock button nearly 200 times during this experiment. But only 25% of women. Only 25% of women. I have no idea what that means. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what that tells us. I think that means a lot about how our culture

how we're like a cultured to act. Yeah, I don't know what to say, but there's so much more that could be researched. I wanna bring back another season of Mindfield and we should look into Like what kind what do we what do you learn about someone based on how quickly they decide to ease the boredom with some Okay, well so far I think we haven't done very well at um either boring our listeners to death.

or working out whether it is possible to bore people to death. But we're gonna do better. In the second half, um, you can come back where we are gonna talk about the extreme effects that can happen uh when boredom goes Oh. Yeah, things are gonna get a lot more boring. Stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK, who over the past 50 years have helped double.

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All right, so welcome back. We are discussing how to kill a person with And we haven't gotten any closer to an answer. And I'm not feeling optimistic, Hannah. I did some research. I found when bored, brain activity decreases by about five. Oh. And then I was like, well wait, brain activity is even lower in a coma, and yet people can survive those. They're living during them. I'm just wondering if boredom is not directly lethal. Our only hope is that it might be indirect.

Right. I would say don't don't try killing someone with boredom at home. But but I mean if it's unsuccessful, then maybe you can. Maybe it's absolutely fine and ethical. What kind of consequences can happen when people get really Bored. Like beyond just a little bit bored in a in a dentist's office. Yeah. It can be So much worse than the things that we're describing.

'Cause the thing about that Mars experiment, even, is that s there were six of them. They had like tasks to do. They were able to talk to ground control, you know, sort of simulated ground control. There were things to keep them occupied. Plus also the entire way through, just go back to that definition, the activity

didn't feel pointless. It felt like they were taking part in an experiment that that would h you know, assist in the future of humanity and sp and space exploration. Yeah, it was it was monotonous but meaningful and they had hope. Exactly, exactly right. Um but there have been some experiments into really, really low stimulation environments and the effect of that that hasn't.

One of the first ones came from McGill University. This is like in the fifties and the sixties. And uh it starts off and you're like, Oh, this kind of sounds like quite a fun little experiment, you know, the sort of psychology studies that they do that are kind of cute and interesting. So they got 22 students. They um they paid them$20 a day in 1950, which is substantial, like enough to be a genuine motivator.

And they asked them to stay in this cubicle. Uh they gave them these goggles that were like fogged, so there wasn't really any sort of um visual input that to their brain. Uh they had aircon on at this like constant low level noise so they couldn't really hear anything.

And they had to wear cotton gloves, so they couldn't sort of touch anything. And they just had to stay there and that was it. And they could leave it any time that they wanted to, and they just had to stay and every day that they stayed they were paid twenty dollars, right? Sort of a pretty simple experiment set up. How long do you do you want to guess how long people lasted for twenty bucks a day? In today's money, we're talking about three hundred bucks.

Three hundred bucks a day. Which is I mean it's not a fortune, but it's like it's a motivator, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you're a student. Oh man. Well see, okay, it's hard for me to guess what a normal person would do because I have done Oh yeah. In that same Minefield episode where we made people bored and got them to shock themselves.

I put myself in a room where the lights never turned off and there was constant noise and my food was just all pre made shakes and I couldn't leave uh for three days. How was it? And it was The way I put it is that I have like no memories of it happening.

Um but it so it f it feels like it lasted like a split second in my memory and yet while I was there it felt like there was no time. I mean the lights didn't even go off. I didn't know what time it was. And three days is a long time. And that was so Um weird and uncomfortable, especially at first, that even if you were paying me 300 bucks a day.

Um it wasn't worth it. Now I was able to do it because it was my job. Mm-hmm. It was important for the show and there were like a dozen jobs that depended on me doing Yeah, purpose. And I didn't have anything else I could be doing. It wasn't like, oh man, I could be, you know, organizing my garage.

So that made it feel meaningful and so I got through it. But if it was just an an elective voluntary study for three hundred a day, I I don't think people could do it for like a week. I think they'd eventually say, No, I'd rather not have three hundred

You are absolutely right. So it incredibly very similar to your timescale. So most people l lasted about two and a half days. So got out after got out before three. No one made it past six. No one made it to a week. I wanna meet the person who went six days. I don't know Oh, these are probably like a hundred now. Yeah. I want to know what their personality is. That they they stuck it.

What what a warrior. What a warrior. And the thing is is that like, okay, so in the beginning they they they were bored. They would sing songs, they would, you know, do mental arithmetic, they would um, you know, recite poetry, whatever it was. But really soon Their minds actually started to fracture under this monotony. And when you deprive the brain of stimulation, when you deprive it of its opportunity to make predictions,

It starts predicting things that aren't really there. So essentially hallucinations start to creep in. So one of the participants saw this parade of squirrels marching in in uniform past him. Another one saw a flying dog. Lots of them saw sort of faces, geometrical shapes that appeared that felt really vivid. Now, the people who did this experiment, Heb, was the scientist.

Um, they were really concerned by this. They were like, Oh gosh, we thought this was just a cute little study, and like and all of a sudden it's gone really dark. So um he stopped the work, but the military were like, ah, this is There's potential here that deprivation of the could really destabilize a person's sense of self like incredibly quickly.

And so intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, including the CIA's MK Ultra program. I don't know if you've um come across this, but that is a wild story, which you can hear about on the rest is classified.

We'll put a a link in the description of this. And I don't know whether that matches with your experience. I mean, did it feel like that? Did you feel like you were fragmenting your sense of self? Yeah. So let me tell you. Okay, so the room was completely w Mm-hmm. At one point I balled up my socks and I was throwing them against the wall and I said, No, I gotta stop because that this is a game. This is stimulation.

I just want to stare at the wall for three days. And I did. And the pr the the way you've put it. as a kind of prediction engine gone wild is is a great way to describe it because I started to I knew they weren't real at first. I started to remember the way things tended to go when I was a kid in c in class. And so it was it was like a memory. It was like I was remembering a an event or like a scene in a movie.

And it would be a teacher, my fifth grade teacher, talking to us, and then suddenly like that one kid who always had a smart aleck thing to say would say something, and then that girl would say something, and this was happening in my head, like voices in my head. I knew it wasn't real. But it was like my brain was rehearsing some of its prediction engines that it had had for decades. And it was kind of amusing.

It got scary when I couldn't tell what was real and what And that was I think after about two, two and a half days. Especially dreams. Dreams were the first things that I couldn't differentiate from reality. And so I would dream, I dreamt that the experiment. and that the producers had come in and my wife was there, and then I woke up and they it just felt like they'd walked out. And so I thought, why am I here alone? And I opened the door thinking it was over. They were just in here.

But it was dark out there and I just went back into the room and thought I don't think the experiment's over, but I can't tell. The only hope I had that kept me going was knowing that they were not gonna leave me in there for more than 72 hours because we'd rented the space for three days. And the last thing the production company was gonna do is waste money.

And so their financial incentive was all I had to keep me in that room. Otherwise, I would have said, I don't know what's going on. I might be here forever. This is so extraordinary. And so I don't want to get into it, but it's really encouraged me to think about the emergence of consciousness and sentience in humans. And the the ancient stories of hearing voices and having prophetic dreams, I think it really is a deep thing that we can all tap into. And so I would recommend.

That everyone try some form of intense, prolonged isolation because you learn so much about yourself when there's nothing else but your own mind. 'Cause this is the idea behind sensory deprivation tanks, isn't it? I mean there was um I feel like this is about the seventh time that I've mentioned Feynman on this show. We should do an episode on Feynman and what a problematic character he was.

But he um he really loved going in sensory deprivation tanks, which I've never managed to try, for exactly this reason that essentially your brain very, very, very quickly starts to hallucinate and he felt that he could he could explore the boundaries of what the sort of mechanics of his brain was doing.

Um but in a way that didn't involve taking hallucinogens or mind altering, you know uh mind altering drugs that might have a a longer lasting, more permanent effect. That's right. Yeah. The the the therapeutic and the psychonotical powers of isolation can be explored with sensory deprivation tanks. And I did one of those too in preparation for the isolation room and it helped a lot.

A sensory deprivation tank is built to deprive you of any sensory information. You float in water saturated with Epsom. So you are neutrally buoyant and you don't sink, you don't have to swim, you're just there. And the water is at just the right temperature to be in equilibrium with the heat your body releases. So you feel no temperature.

You're also sealed in a chamber that's completely dark and completely soundproof. So there's just nothing coming in any of your holes. You're just there with nothing but your own thoughts to And you can do it for 30 minutes at a time, an hour, many hours, but that allowed me to become more comfortable being alone with just my

entertain me and that really made isolation or at least the first day of it much easier. How many times did you do the deprivation tank? Just once. How quickly did you Yeah. Because you're it it feels like there's images in front of your eyes right away. And I want to make it clear that it's a hallucination.

But it's not like you think it's actually there, right? I didn't think, oh my gosh, like these dancing colors and these lines are actually real. I knew they weren't. And I was fascinated by why my brain was making them. And if I concentrated too much on them, they went away. It was it was not as powerful as I would have liked, right? It wasn't like uh a psychoactive drug.

But here's the thing, it's like it it I mean, this isn't uh you know, the same as having a mental health episode. This isn't this isn't uh like you say, psychoactive drugs, which is where the molecules in your brain are sort of rearranging and you can't tell it's real anymore. Uh this is this is also not that boredom drives people mad. It's it's that your brain needs noise in order to stay sane. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't drive you mad. You're you were already mad.

And it's reality around us that keeps us sane. And when you remove that, the brain goes, I'm on my own. This is what I'm really like. And you learn a lot about And so killing someone with boredom is it almost feels like the opposite is what's gonna really happen. You will make the person become born again as their true

Well, I think that there are limits to this though, right? Because um those experiments about Uh you know, sensory deprivation from the nineteen fifties. There are more extreme versions of this, of course, because there are prisoners um who are held in long term solitary confinement. So In nineteen eighty three there was a psychiatrist, um, Stuart Grassian, who who went and conducted some clinical interviews with fourteen different inmates who had been been held in these really small

bare cells, like sort of, you know, eight by ten feet, you know, n not not you know, not these you can't sort of exercise in them, for example. Almost no human contact. Meals are passed through a slot in the door, there's the lights are on around the clock, very similar to the environment that you found yourself in. No conversation, no books, no radio.

Um, and no sensory inputs basically. I mean, they could occasionally hear the clank of metal doors down the corridor and like occasionally people screaming or whatever, but that was it. And sometimes these people had been in there for years at a time. And and I think that this is it. It's like, you know, your your uh experience of of three days, how incredibly how quickly your grip on reality was like was shifting. But that was a situation where you had purpose

you had an ending, you didn't have hopelessness. Um, you know, uh that was just that nothing new was happening and everything was fully expected. Whereas this is sort of a much more extreme version for a much longer period of time. And um What they found was that, okay, yes, of course, these people had hallucinations, they had um paranoia, they had panic, they had all of these different kinds of things. One person said, I feel like I'm dissolved. It's just like a really horrifying thought.

Um But actually, in particular, when they looked at the brains of people in this experiment and in subsequent studies of people who have been subjected to long-term solitary confinement, we now know that it shrinks the hippocampus, that it, that it reduces the activity in the prefrontal cortex, that once you deprive your brain of noise and stimulation, it actually starts to atrophy. Yeah. And so maybe you cannot kill someone.

directly, but indirectly you can cause a lot of harm. And I don't know, maybe you can indirectly kill someone with boredom because there have been studies on civil servants who reported being very bored. When they were studied for a long time it was found that they did die younger.

Now the direction of of causation isn't really known here. Could it be that they were already gonna die sooner and that led them to have more experiences of boredom for some related reason? Or was the boredom itself just reason for Brains two atrophy give up three.

Yeah. But I mean when you put all of the different pieces together it does definitely sound as though a sort of rich, interesting, like varied environment is the thing that our brains are not just sort of designed for, but also craving and actively seeking out all of the time. Okay, so maybe the answer to my original question, how do you directly kill someone with boredom, is that you can't. Uh except you can extinct a species.

with boredom. Go on. I think humans are here and I think a lot of other warm blooded mammalian animals are here because we get bored And we look at the universe and we say, all right, but what else could there be? This is the way everything is, but what if it wasn't? And that's how humans decided, okay, look, it's too cold here, but like maybe I could play around with some of these fibers. Maybe I could play around with the part of this animal I can't.

And like invent shirts and coats, and now I can live here. It was boredom that drove those innovations that allowed us to live everywhere. Alligators can't do that, and they don't do it, and they won't. Because they're not driven by boredom to find something else. That's right. Hey, maybe boredom isn't the death of us. Maybe it's the birth of us. Maybe it's the whole reason why we're so successful. So th in that case then it shouldn't be um bored to death. It should be

Bored to being alive and successful. It's not yeah, it's not being bored to death. It's being bored to being alive. Yeah, or maybe born to be bored. Born to be bored. I'm getting I'm putting in an order right now for the t shirt that you're inevitably gonna bring out. Good. Yeah, you'll get the first one.

Schopenhauer thought this was really curious. He thought, shouldn't the world be enough? The existence of boredom showed that there was something wrong with being, with existence itself that we can't just be okay with. And this bothered him his whole life. And on the other side, other philosophers said that it was a sign that humans were sublime. The fact that like a grasshopper can just like do nothing and and and not seemingly be worried about it and yet we do.

shows that we must be greater than this world, that we're above and beyond it. And I think the answer is somewhere in between. I think humans and a lot of like any any kind of warm blooded animal, it really needs to solve puzzles. Its cognitive niche requires it to be thinking about things not as they are, but what they could be. I need to build a nest. Okay, that's an instinctive behavior, but I need to go somewhere else because it's getting too cold for me.

So we're gonna we're gonna try some other places. We're gonna we're gonna build a ship and go across Not because we have to, but because we haven't gone there yet. I think that this is why species like ours are here today. I think it's why the dinosaurs didn't survive the asteroid impact, but birds and mammals. Don't you also think that this is a little bit why science is like the most

human thing possible because it's like the extension of exactly what you're describing, right? Like if our brains are constantly trying to make predictions and then think about what might happen next and then going and testing our our theories and and and and like constantly wanting more and more and more and not being comfortable with just existing.

I sort of feel like that is a description of exactly what science is too. Like constantly trying to work out what's just around the next corner, that next bit of discovery, that next prediction. That's right. Yeah. And and philosophy as well. Like just continuing to ask questions for no purpose. Have I told you one of my favorite jokes? I think about this joke the most.

Okay, so in the joke, the dean of a university is speaking to the engineering department and he's like, Guys, you are just you're costing us too much money. Why can't you be like the math? All they need is um paper and pencils and waste paper baskets. Actually no, why can't you be like the philosophy department? All they need is paper and pencils. And so even if there's even if uh bad ideas are allowed

That's a hallmark feature of humanity that you don't you don't have that activity when you're a tree. No, you don't. No, you don't. You just end up in the waste paper basket. That's right. Yeah. That's why we're here. You're in the ways map basket. Okay, well I think that that is a very lovely place to wrap up this episode. Uh we hope that you enjoyed that. There is a lot more to come um from us.

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