Tricycle suggests that boredom is a lack of attention. While this makes sense, I would submit that the root of a lack of attention is a mind that is avoiding what is present. Looking at boredom this way adds texture and greater accuracy to the “lack of attention” definition of boredom, since at any given moment, our lack of attention may not necessarily mean boredom has set in.
Just this morning, for example, my avoidance of what was present resulted in a wild display of Cheerio throwing when for a split-second, I lacked the requisite attention needed for toddler feeding. Boredom wasn’t involved here.
I was, however, absolutely bored recently when someone described to me, pitch by pitch, how a particularly long inning went awry for the San Francisco Giants. In other words, I began to lack attention as soon as my mind began the process of avoidance. I wanted out of the exchange, lost attention, and got bored.
The University of Michigan study reports that researchers put volunteers:
… inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) room, and asked them to perform a boring task, namely identify letters that appeared on the walls, for about an hour. He and his team noticed that, from time to time, the attention levels of the participants spiked, so they analyzed those moments to see exactly what happened when their concentration gave way.
They noticed that areas of the brain closely related to self-control, vision and language processing seemed to seize most activity – this gap triggered inattention and boredom. “Attention failed to grease the connections in the brain,” the scientist says, arguing that attention usually acts as an “amplifier” between certain areas of the brain at a time.
This suggests that attention falls or that “this gap” arises once the mind begins to avoid something like doing an hour’s worth of repetitious tasks.
