The Trendy Wolf
February 12th, 2014, 06:01 PM
Boredom and its purpose and human importance have been the center of multiple debates involving existential beliefs, psychology, etc. Now, after some research, I have crafted an essay that was originally meant to be a feature article in our school's newspaper. Keep in mind that its intended audience had been students in high school, so don't be surprised if you come across something slightly unrelated to the question at hand :
We have all experienced the agonizingly mind-numbing torture that is everyday boredom. Trudging our way through the final hours of the school day, we watch the wall clock as it slowly tick-tocks away its meaningless minutes, all while the teacher’s lecture can only be heard as the monotone blubbering of an adult from a Charlie Brown cartoon.
Have you ever wondered why we all become such droopy-eyed zombies when we sit at a desk for hours on end? What force within us draws our attention away from the current situation in search of more interesting forms of entertainment? The answer dwells deep inside each and every one of us.
The most likely place for us to become bored or disinterested is, not surprisingly, the classroom, to which we are usually bound for an hour and a half at a time. Boredom gradually infects our minds as we are exposed to a constant environment for extended periods of time: sounds, smells, sights and all other brain stimuli that would otherwise provoke our interests remain unchanged for too long, and eventually we become accustomed to that level of stimulation and desire something new.
If you were to view a stimulation map of your brain from when you are calm and when you are bored, there wouldn’t be any apparent difference in your brain’s overall activity. In fact, the total amount of brain activity in your mind only drops approximately 5% when bored, and greater activity will begin to occur in regions of the brain responsible for recalling memories, imaginative thinking and conceiving how others are feeling.
As New York Times writer Jennifer Schuessler stated in her story “Our Boredom, Ourselves,” psychologists and neuroscientists now are beginning to see boredom as “an important source of creativity, well-being and our very sense of self.”
With great benefits, there will be problems, and there are a multitude of experiments that prove boredom to be one of the leading causes of depression, anxiety, as well as addiction. Too much of that thoughtful numbness and we become stimulus junkies, constantly searching for the next happy feeling that will give us the motivation to continue our lives through all the bad, and when we do find it, we will cling to it and won’t let go.
Boredom, while commonly associated as being caused by a temporary lack of stimulating activities, may also be a chronic and pervasive stressor that could lead to psychological consequences if left unchecked. Consisting boredom has the potential to become an irritating complication with psychiatric rehabilitation of serious mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, ADD/ADHD and many other mental disorders.
Our brain requires constant activity to retain focus on a specific topic. However, if there is an extreme lack of stimulation in an environment, and this state is unchanged for long periods, then the brain will begin to form its own kinds of stimuli; in this case, the brain will generate hallucinations to act as entertainment. A common example of this occurs during what is known as the Ganzfeld Effect, where people are exposed to a colorless field accompanied by a random noise, and the brain becomes frantic, so it will start conjuring false images.
Perhaps one of the most interesting cases of child psychology occurred in Arcadia, California with a girl named Genie Wiley. She was born in 1957 to a family that lived in a typical suburban household. Her father was abusive, and he despised the outside world, so he sought to isolate himself and his family from it. He confined Genie to a room, two blacked-out windows shadowed his daughter from the rest of the world, and for the first 13 years of her life she often remained tied to a wooden toilet chair and was never fed solid food.
Authorities finally discovered her in 1970, but to their surprise Genie had not acquired a language, and she had the mental age of an 18-month-old child. A girl, trapped inside a typical home in an open neighborhood, not having learned how to walk, talk, or even live on her own, and it put her through one of the most excruciating circumstances of boredom ever recorded. Genie is alive to this day, but is still undergoing treatments similar to those for the mentally disabled.
Despite having seen the psychological effects of long term isolation, there still exists a place where someone must continuously stay alone and unwillingly in an empty room while the general public knows it very well. That place is solitary confinement. Approximately 25,000 prisoners that acted out of order within American prison walls are currently sitting in a tiny room with just a cheap bed and toilet. They only receive one hour a day to exercise in yet another small, concrete room, and the only contact that they have with the outside world is that of letters rightfully addressed to them.
No sight of another person, not even their family members, for sentences lasting over 30 years, while the majority have spent at least five years in each of their identical cells. Deemed too dangerous to have any form of human contact, many of them die or go insane within their own cells before they are released. But how could one learn to live among the rest of society without any sense of what free people are exposed to on a regular basis? It’s no wonder that prison is synonymous with feeling trapped and unsure of how to escape constant torture.
_________________________________________________________________
I appreciate those of you who took the time to read all of that. Please, if you like, post your own opinion on the purpose of boredom. :D
We have all experienced the agonizingly mind-numbing torture that is everyday boredom. Trudging our way through the final hours of the school day, we watch the wall clock as it slowly tick-tocks away its meaningless minutes, all while the teacher’s lecture can only be heard as the monotone blubbering of an adult from a Charlie Brown cartoon.
Have you ever wondered why we all become such droopy-eyed zombies when we sit at a desk for hours on end? What force within us draws our attention away from the current situation in search of more interesting forms of entertainment? The answer dwells deep inside each and every one of us.
The most likely place for us to become bored or disinterested is, not surprisingly, the classroom, to which we are usually bound for an hour and a half at a time. Boredom gradually infects our minds as we are exposed to a constant environment for extended periods of time: sounds, smells, sights and all other brain stimuli that would otherwise provoke our interests remain unchanged for too long, and eventually we become accustomed to that level of stimulation and desire something new.
If you were to view a stimulation map of your brain from when you are calm and when you are bored, there wouldn’t be any apparent difference in your brain’s overall activity. In fact, the total amount of brain activity in your mind only drops approximately 5% when bored, and greater activity will begin to occur in regions of the brain responsible for recalling memories, imaginative thinking and conceiving how others are feeling.
As New York Times writer Jennifer Schuessler stated in her story “Our Boredom, Ourselves,” psychologists and neuroscientists now are beginning to see boredom as “an important source of creativity, well-being and our very sense of self.”
With great benefits, there will be problems, and there are a multitude of experiments that prove boredom to be one of the leading causes of depression, anxiety, as well as addiction. Too much of that thoughtful numbness and we become stimulus junkies, constantly searching for the next happy feeling that will give us the motivation to continue our lives through all the bad, and when we do find it, we will cling to it and won’t let go.
Boredom, while commonly associated as being caused by a temporary lack of stimulating activities, may also be a chronic and pervasive stressor that could lead to psychological consequences if left unchecked. Consisting boredom has the potential to become an irritating complication with psychiatric rehabilitation of serious mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, ADD/ADHD and many other mental disorders.
Our brain requires constant activity to retain focus on a specific topic. However, if there is an extreme lack of stimulation in an environment, and this state is unchanged for long periods, then the brain will begin to form its own kinds of stimuli; in this case, the brain will generate hallucinations to act as entertainment. A common example of this occurs during what is known as the Ganzfeld Effect, where people are exposed to a colorless field accompanied by a random noise, and the brain becomes frantic, so it will start conjuring false images.
Perhaps one of the most interesting cases of child psychology occurred in Arcadia, California with a girl named Genie Wiley. She was born in 1957 to a family that lived in a typical suburban household. Her father was abusive, and he despised the outside world, so he sought to isolate himself and his family from it. He confined Genie to a room, two blacked-out windows shadowed his daughter from the rest of the world, and for the first 13 years of her life she often remained tied to a wooden toilet chair and was never fed solid food.
Authorities finally discovered her in 1970, but to their surprise Genie had not acquired a language, and she had the mental age of an 18-month-old child. A girl, trapped inside a typical home in an open neighborhood, not having learned how to walk, talk, or even live on her own, and it put her through one of the most excruciating circumstances of boredom ever recorded. Genie is alive to this day, but is still undergoing treatments similar to those for the mentally disabled.
Despite having seen the psychological effects of long term isolation, there still exists a place where someone must continuously stay alone and unwillingly in an empty room while the general public knows it very well. That place is solitary confinement. Approximately 25,000 prisoners that acted out of order within American prison walls are currently sitting in a tiny room with just a cheap bed and toilet. They only receive one hour a day to exercise in yet another small, concrete room, and the only contact that they have with the outside world is that of letters rightfully addressed to them.
No sight of another person, not even their family members, for sentences lasting over 30 years, while the majority have spent at least five years in each of their identical cells. Deemed too dangerous to have any form of human contact, many of them die or go insane within their own cells before they are released. But how could one learn to live among the rest of society without any sense of what free people are exposed to on a regular basis? It’s no wonder that prison is synonymous with feeling trapped and unsure of how to escape constant torture.
_________________________________________________________________
I appreciate those of you who took the time to read all of that. Please, if you like, post your own opinion on the purpose of boredom. :D