NEWSFLASH! Boredom is dying out! That's right folks, more and more people are reporting that they are no longer bored! As a species we are on the verge of eradicating boredom forever!

Woohoo!!

MASSIVE RECORD SCRATCH!

Woah, wait, hang on; is this a good thing?

Well yes; I hear you say, that's a great thing @cryptogee; who the hell wants to be bored?

Aha! Therein lies the point of my argument, however we'll get to that in a sec, first let's talk about:

What Now?

In the last three Incredible You! articles, we have looked at the power of single tasking and how best to put your mind into a state whereby you can effortlessly carry off one task at a time.

A huge part of that process was to purge all the pointless apps on your phone.

The problem is that while doing this leaves your mind free of pointless digital distractions . .

leaving it free to .

to . .

To what?

Seriously, what now?

Well for the first couple of hours after decluttering your phone it will feel weird.

You will have urges to reach for your device and check Facebook, Words With Friends, or whatever particular brand of phone fiddling you're into.

Or maybe you are one of the millions of people who play a game or check social media on the train or bus to work.

Without these fun distractions, mundane events such as commuting to work reveal themselves in their true boring light.

Your minds need stimulation to thrive, it can be said that stimulus is our brain fuel, revealing a simplistic and symbiotic relationship; like cars and gasoline.

So what the hell Cryptogee? You've just told me to get rid of all my phone apps. You told me to get the Stay Focused app for my computer, now I can only go onto Facebook and all my fun sites for 10 minutes a day!

Seriously; what gives?

Ah, I see, you're feeling bored; right?

Uh-huh!

Good, this is just another step on your journey to enlightenment.

Before long, you will embrace the boredom, you will long for times of solace devoid of all action.

You will learn to embrace the boredom!

A Brief History Of Boredom

If you were born after about 1998, the chances are you don't remember the internet before broadband.

In that dusty and distant time, we used 56 kps modems to dial up the internet and get it fed down our copper wire phone lines, literally bit by bit.

Video was an impossibility back in those days, and in fact most modern websites wouldn't work on the old version of the internet.

However we still saw that as information at your fingertips.

Waiting 30 seconds for a Google page to load and then a further couple of minutes for the website you searched to appear on screen, was still faster than getting up and going to the library.

Nowadays, any Google search that takes more than 0.52 seconds can trigger a cataclysmic, foam-flecked rage.

This is strange to me and my generation, I grew up in a world without personal computers, without mobile phones and devices and without the internet.

All of these things were still in the realm of science fiction when I was a boy. Tomorrow's World, a program that took a perceived look into the future, was my favourite show.

In those days we understood boredom, I mean I only had three TV channels for crying out loud!

So what did we do with our boredom, at the time it felt like nothing; however looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I realise now it was much much more.

The modern child does not have the luxury of being bored, no wait, scratch that; the modern human regardless of age, doesn't have room to be bored.

Even before they are allowed to go on a computer or have a smart device, they have access to TVs with at least dozens of channels, if not more.

By the time a child is 12 years old, the only time they are truly bored, is when they're hanging out with their parents, usually on holiday.

Even then, they still have access to their friends via social media. Or they can immerse themselves in one or more virtual worlds for hours on end.

OK OK, WE GET THE POINT! SO WHAT?

Well it turns out that boredom is in fact a necessary function in creativity. Meaning that it is a major evolutionary prime mover.

A big player, a big cheese when it comes to the development of the human race.

Sure we talk about the evolutionary importance of opposing thumbs to help us manipulate physical objects. Or the frontal lobe to help us make abstract choices in the future.

However we never really talk about what boredom has done for us.

The Anatomy Of A Bored Mind

There exists a phenomenon called the ganzfeld effect, this is a phenomenon of perception caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field.

The effect is the result of the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual signals.

In plain English, if you cut off visual stimulation to the brain, and replace ambient noise with the sound of static, you start to hallucinate.

This is because the brain is not happy with being at rest. Which is why the instruction to; empty your mind is one that leads to a frustration based in futility.

Human beings such as we are, have commercialised the ganzfield effect in the form of flotation tanks and sensory deprivation rooms.

However you can set up your own ganzfield experiment very cheaply.

You can either cut a couple of ping pong balls in half, and making various holes and using elastic turn these into your very own ganzield goggles.

Or if you're not so artistically inclined, you can make a simpler pair by using a piece of white paper, some glue and cotton wool, using a traditional eye-mask for a template.

When someone wears a ganzfeld (the German word for complete field) mask, they experience a progression of effects that can be described as follows:

All colour drains from the field of vision.
The size of the field of vision oscillates.
Swirling kaleidoscope of colours appear.
Images suddenly pop in the visual field.

In a recent neuroscience article, a researcher described his first experience with Ganzfeld as follows:

For quite a long time, there was nothing except a green-greyish fog. It was really boring, I thought, ah, what a non-sense experiment! Then, for an indefinite period of time, I was off, like completely absent-minded. Then, all of sudden, I saw a hand holding a piece of chalk and writing on a black-board something like a mathematical formula. The vision was very clear, but it stayed only for few seconds and disappeared again. The image did not fill up the entire visual field, it was just like a window into that foggy stuff...

...an urban scenery, like an empty avenue after a rain, large areas covered with water, and the city sky-line reflected in the water surface like in a mirror...

....suddenly, a young woman passed by on a bicycle, very fast, she crossed the visual field from the right to the left, with her blond long hair waving in the air. The image of the entire scene was very clear, with many details, and yes, the colours were very vivid. ...

....A friend of mine and I, we were inside a cave. We made a fire. There was a creek flowing under our feet, and we were on a stone. She had fallen into the creek, and she had to wait to have her things dried. Then she said to me: Hey, move on, we should go now...

What is interesting about this account, is as soon as the researcher professed to feeling boredom, his mind snapped into action, creating images to entertain and stimulate him.

Boredom As A Precursor To Creativity

Boredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense, is greater than the entire universe. Boredom is an expression of a profound despair at not finding anything that can satisfy the soul's boundless needs.

~ Giacomo Leopardi

OK, so we know that the brain doesn't dig boredom, and will create a personal cinema for us on the backs of our eyelids rather than expose us to just a few minutes of boredom.

So why am I telling you to embrace it?

What possible good can come out of being bored?

The devil finds work for idle hands.

David Thoreau

Well it turns out that fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) shows that when people are bored; the region in our brains responsible for conjuring hypothetical events, light up like a Christmas tree.

In other words, we get creative.

Creativity is most often linked to artists and musicians. When we say that "Joe" or "Jane" is creative we are most likely talking about their ability to draw, paint or write songs, poetry or stories.

However these are just byproducts of creativity, if we remember that none of our behaviour makes sense without the lens of evolutionary biology. Then we can easily deduce the need for creativity amongst our early ancestors.

60,000 years ago human creativity was not limited to art, and in fact art came long after the creation of tools and advanced hunting methods.

It is hard to argue against the fact that as a species, what we call creativity, has been a driving force in our development on this planet.

However what we have only just recently begun to realise, is that boredom is the flip side to the coin of creation.

It is in those moments when our minds are not distracted by anything and we are under stimulated, that we can truly be creative.

Of course it is not impossible to gain a truly inspirational insight whilst playing Candy Crush, it's just highly improbable.

Best to just put the game down and stare off into space .

The Power Of Nothing

We are constantly plugged in, turned on and tuned in to a growing sea of information.

This incredible state of being has led us to attempt to fill each and every waking moment we have doing something, regardless of what that thing is.

After the first couple of days living the life of a digital minimalist, you'll notice your concentration and mood improving.

At first you'll just want your electronic comforts back, but then something amazing will start to happen. You'll find yourself just thinking random thoughts.

Notions and ideas will pop into your mind at will, some you will act on, some you won't.

It's working, your mind is resetting, your focus is returning, you are getting closer to flow.

Learn to embrace boredom, to recognise it for what it is; space and time to think . .

About?

Anything you want . .

. . . and in that moment . .

you may just find .

That you achieve . . .

Happiness.

Peace . .

and total

Flow

The Incredible You! Flow State Series So Far:

Incredible You! - Flow Your Way To Success With The Power Of Single Tasking
Incredible You! Single Task Training - 3 Steps To Flow
Incredible You! Single Task Training The Final Test - Becoming A Flow Jedi

Incredible You! - Feeling The Flow With The Power Of Touch
Incredible You! - Connect To The Moment And Enhance Your Power With Sound
Incredible You! - Move Like An Animal With Ido Portal
Incredible You! - Finding Your Flow State Superpower

DO YOU OFTEN GET BORED? DO YOU EVEN RECOGNISE WHAT BOREDOM FEELS LIKE? WHEN DO YOU LIKE TO GET CREATIVE? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Cryptogee