That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Boredom

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Have you ever been bored? Have you ever experienced mind wandering? On this week's episode, we will discuss why boredom occurs, what's going on in the brain when it happens, and even what you can do to help prevent becoming bored!

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. Have you ever been bored? And, you know, as a result of that, did you find yourself daydreaming or your mind wandering? Well, I know I've been bored. You know, sometimes I find myself listening to one of my colleagues give a talk, and, well, some of them tend to shop talk a little bit too much for me, and I just get bored.

Don't get me wrong, I find neuroscience fascinating, but some of my peers do a pretty good job at trying to push me away from my love of the brain. And when I get bored, well, my mind wanders. I start thinking about places I'd like to go and food I'd like to eat. Anything but the topic at hand. On today's podcast, the neuroscience of boredom and mind wandering. Well, boredom really starts with attention. It's the first step in explaining the phenomenon of boredom. We have two attentional systems in the brain. We have a general attentional system that's responsible for keeping track of everything that's going on around us.

And we have a specific attentional system, which is like a spotlight. It focuses in on something that's happening and sort of zooms in and that's what you're paying attention to. So if someone is speaking, the spotlight is focused on them and what that's doing is it's helping you enhance sensory processing. It's basically dialing up the gain of the system so that you're really processing the voice you're hearing or the visual information you're seeing. And when you're bored, well, that spotlight's somewhere else. So if you think back to the example of a professor giving a rather boring lecture, you know, you're trying to keep your spotlight on the professor and process that

information. You're trying to listen to what the person is saying, and you want to get that into your brain so you understand what's going on. Well, when you get bored, quite simply, that spotlight's somewhere else. And it doesn't have to be on an external object. You know, you might be looking out the window at what's going on and saying, oh, wow, that's more interesting than what's happening in here. But the spotlight could also go internally. You know, it could be focusing on something that you are thinking about. So when, like I said in my example at the outset, you know, when I mind wander, I start thinking about what I want to eat next or someplace I might want to go. So what's happening when you're bored? Well, mind wandering is something that comes up. And what is mind wandering? Well, mind wandering

is basically exactly what it says. It's when your brain is wandering around and focusing on different things. Your mind is literally wandering. I did some really cool research with Julia Kam, a professor at the University of Calgary, where we were studying mind wandering. And what we did is we were reading people's brain waves while we had them performing a task. So you can imagine someone sitting in and they're doing a task. We used a motor task where someone was doing a movement pattern. We did a cognitive task where someone was having to process information and make decisions. Basically we probed when people were bored and off task and they were mind wandering.

What we found kind of makes intuitive sense. Basically we found that the neural systems that were supposed to be processing the task information weren't working as effectively. Literally, the brainwave responses we saw, say when someone was about to make a motor movement, were reduced when they were mind-wandering. And conversely, when people were listening to information that they were supposed to process, the brainwave responses to the sensory input were reduced. In other words, when you're mind-wandering, your brain is working less efficiently at the task you're supposed to be doing,

and those resources are focused on what you're thinking about when your mind is wandering. That ties back to the attentional piece, of course. That ties back to the attentional piece, of course. So when the spotlight is off what you're supposed to be paying attention to, your processing of that information is reduced, which is why you still hear the professor in the room talking, but you just can't process the information because literally your brain response to that information is reduced and you don't process it.

Now, something else happens when you're mind-wandering and you're bored, and we've talked about this one before too, but basically the default mode network is engaged. Now, if you remember what we said about the default mode network, this is the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the precuneus, and the angular gyrus. It's basically a network of brain regions, and what's interesting about the default mode network the precuneus, and the angular gyrus. It's basically a network of brain regions.

And what's interesting about the default mode network is when you're not on task, there's more activity in this network. So in other words, the default mode network, when you're focused on the task, so say you're paying attention to the professor giving the boring lecture, the activity in the default mode network is suppressed or it's reduced. in the default mode network is suppressed or reduced. But when you are bored or mind wandering, the activity in the default mode network increases. It's sort of filling in the gap if you will. You can think of it like the default mode network is just sitting there in the background waiting for its chance to do something. As soon as you are off task and you are not focused on something, it engages.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It turns out that the activity of the default mode network is really crucial. But it's bad in the sense that you're not listening to the professor giving the lecture. So you're losing that information, but other things are happening. And just as a quick reminder, what does the default mode network do? Well, it's basically your reflections about self. It's reflections about others, what some people call theory of mind, it's reviewing past memories for consolidation, and it's also associated with future planning. You know, those daydreams about where you want to go on your next vacation, well that's

part of your brain's planning system. And that stuff occurs due to activity in the default mode network when you're bored or off task. What also happens when you get bored? There's other things that drive boredom. If you remember, more than half of your brain is dedicated to sensory processing. Approximately 4-6 billion neurons comprise the human visual system. That's almost half the number of neurons in your entire brain.

So more than half of your brain is tied to sensory processing or a part of sensory processing. And these neurons want input. They don't want to sit there silently. They basically want input. They want stimulation. So this is why sensory deprivation is such a form of torture. You might have heard about this. Some people do limited sensory deprivation because there are some benefits to small amounts of sensory deprivation.

But for extended periods of time, sensory deprivation is a really bad idea. And like I said, it's used as a form of torture. Now, why do these sensory neurons want input? Well, at the simplest level, it's their whole purpose in existence. Visual neurons want to be stimulated. In fact, if you take sensory neurons and you don't provide them input for extended periods of time, they effectively die off and stop functioning. So this half of your brain, or more than half your brain that's associated with sensory input, it's literally craving input. And that drives the boredom thing. If you hear something monotonous, like our proverbial professor giving the lecture,

these neurons, in a sense, are getting bored and they want input. They want stimulation. Now, why do they want to change? Why does your brain want change? The whole part of boredom is you're just going like, I'm sick of this and I just don't want to do this anymore. This is tied to your reward systems. You can't forget the role of the reward system. If you remember, we've talked about the reward system in the brain. Our reward system is largely driven by expectancy.

We like things that are unexpected and unique. Things that are regular are kind of boring. When something unexpected happens, say an unexpected reward, then you get an increase in dopaminergic firing. There's a spike in the dopamine response. Because the reward system is looking for these unexpected things, it's effectively driving us for change. All right? So if that professor is droning on and on and on, then your reward system is also bored. It's looking for something new.

It wants that unexpected reward. So there's another angle to this as well, that when you choose to do, you know, what you choose to do when you're bored also might be more rewarding. So, you know, I think back to my undergraduate days and I really struggled with chemistry. Like chemistry is fascinating, but chemistry textbooks, wow, what a challenge. And, you know, I would sit there and I would be reading my chemistry textbook and I'd just look over and there's the TV and there's the video game console and there's my roommates playing video games, that's clearly more rewarding than reading a chemistry textbook. So part of boredom is your reward system is going, well hey that option over there is better than what

I'm currently doing. And you have to struggle with that. And in fact there's some really cool research about reframing things so that you can sort of validate that listening to the lecture is more rewarding than playing video games. And that's one way to solve the boredom problem. Now, something you might be thinking about is that, you know, are some people more prone to becoming bored? You know, maybe that's just me. I'm more likely to get bored than someone else. Well, the answer seems to be a hard no on that one. You know, there's some researchers that examined this,

and the early hypothesis was that some people were hardwired, and due to individual differences, they were more prone to being bored. In fact, they would react more negatively to boredom than people who basically can handle boredom fairly well. Now again, these tests were done using EEG or brainwaves, and basically they were measuring brainwaves to assess whether some people were more prone to being bored or not. And the hypothesis was that people that reacted negatively to boredom would have a different brainwave pattern than people that didn't react negatively to being bored. Well, it turned out the researchers couldn't find that. They could tell when someone was bored versus when they weren it turned out the researchers couldn't find that. They could tell when someone

was bored versus when they weren't bored, but they couldn't find any evidence whatsoever that some people were more prone to being bored than others. However, are some people better at dealing with boredom than others? Then the answer is yes. Now, in this case, the same research team was using EEG and they were looking at differences activity in the right frontal cortex versus the left frontal cortex. And basically what they found is that people that were better at dealing with boredom had more activity in the left side of their brain and people that were more prone to being bored or dealt with boredom more poorly had more activity on the right side of the brain now this isn't a hardwired difference this is more to do with your ability to deal

with boredom this is a learnable thing so people that have better strategies for dealing with boredom have more left brain activity and people whose strategies aren't as efficient tend to have more right brain activity. So people are not hardwired in the sense that they're more prone to being bored, but people can learn to do better at dealing with boredom. So yes, you can do something about boredom. One thing you can do is turn a negative into a positive. And there's one classic study I love where they were looking at someone

that was doing a very boring task and there was a rhythm to it. So they started singing songs to the rhythm of the boring task and that allowed them to be less bored. So when you surveyed the people that were using these sort of active strategies to deal with boredom,

they were less bored than people that were just focused on the task and essentially were getting bored. So in were just focused on the task and were getting bored. So, in other words, proactive thinking could be a good way of coping with boredom. The trick, however, is getting individuals to learn how to do more of this and succumb to boredom less. Okay, there's a lot on boredom for you. Hopefully you didn't get bored. Man, I gotta work on my sense of humor.

All right. Remember, follow me on Twitter, at ThatNeuroscienceGuy. DM me with episode ideas. We've had about four episodes now that have been driven by you, the audience. So if you've got a cool idea or there's something you want to know more about, just reach out to me. The website is up, of course, ThatNeuroscienceGuy.com. We've got a bunch of new shirts up there. We got the That Neuroscience Girl shirts, and we got a good pun shirt on the amygdala. Please subscribe to the podcast. It really helps us out. And remember, Patreon. Support us on Patreon. If you're not familiar with Patreon, you basically create an account, and it's a way you can search for our podcast and donate some money to help support the graduate students. None of the money goes to me. I'm not rich, but I don't need it. But what we are doing is taking all the profits from t-shirt sales and all

the profits from Patreon and we're funding graduate students who are learning more about neuroscience. My name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you on Wednesday for another neuroscience bite.