IELTS Reading: Yes / No / Not Given

Few states of mind have been as consistently maligned as boredom. Moralists once treated it as the doorway to vice, and educators have long regarded a bored pupil as evidence of a failing lesson. Today the condition is treated less as a sin than as a technical problem, and one for which we appear to have found a solution: the device in our pocket ensures that no queue, commute or pause in conversation need ever be endured unoccupied. It is worth asking, however, whether in abolishing boredom we have discarded something of value. My contention is that boredom is better understood as a signal than as a malfunction, an uncomfortable but informative message about the fit between a mind and its circumstances, and that a culture which reflexively silences that message may be depriving itself of more than it realises.

Part of the difficulty is that boredom has proved surprisingly elusive to define. It is not the same as apathy, in which the desire to act has faded altogether; the bored person, by contrast, is often restless, even agitated, precisely because the desire persists. Nor is it simply the absence of stimulation, since people report being bored in the middle of noisy, eventful situations. The psychologist Hannah Ekwall, who has spent much of her career studying attention, has proposed that boredom is fundamentally a failure of attention: a state in which the mind is primed for engagement but cannot find anything on which to settle. On this account, the fault lies less in the environment than in the relationship between the environment and the attentional resources we bring to it, which is why the same lecture may absorb one listener and leave her neighbour in torment. I find this formulation persuasive, not least because it explains why attempts to banish boredom simply by supplying more stimulation so often fail.

If boredom is a failure of engagement, what, if anything, might it be for? One answer comes from research on creative thinking. In a series of experiments, Oliver Pratt and his colleagues asked volunteers to spend twenty minutes on a deliberately tedious task, matching pairs of identical shapes, before inviting them to suggest as many uses as they could for an ordinary household object. Compared with volunteers who had spent the same period on an absorbing puzzle, the bored group produced more ideas, and independent judges rated a greater proportion of them as original. Pratt interprets the result as evidence that boredom prompts the mind to wander in search of the stimulation its surroundings deny it, and that this wandering can be fertile. The finding has been widely reported, often under headlines implying that boredom makes people more creative in general. That is a larger claim than the evidence will bear. The effect, while consistent, was modest, the task measured only one narrow kind of inventiveness, and it remains unclear whether anything comparable occurs outside the laboratory.

A second line of argument concerns meaning rather than creativity. Ines Carvalho, whose book on motivation draws on twenty years of laboratory work, suggests that boredom functions much as physical pain does: it is aversive precisely so that we will act to end it. What it signals, in her view, is not that we lack stimulation but that our current activity has ceased to seem worthwhile. In her studies, participants who had been made to feel bored were subsequently more inclined than others to choose tasks they regarded as meaningful, such as volunteering, even when those tasks were more demanding than the alternatives. If Carvalho is right, boredom is not the enemy of purposeful activity but one of the mechanisms that steers us towards it.

Not everyone is persuaded by this rehabilitation. Rafael Mendel, a psychiatrist at a large teaching hospital, points out that people who are prone to frequent boredom are over-represented among those who struggle with depression, problem gambling and substance misuse, and he regards the case for boredom's benefits as a comfortable view, available mainly to those who experience it rarely and briefly. This objection seems to me to be largely correct, and it ought to temper any enthusiasm for boredom as a kind of mental tonic. Yet it is directed at something rather different from the claim I am defending. Mendel is concerned with a chronic disposition; my concern is with the passing state that most of us experience several times a day. A signal that sounds continuously is certainly a problem, but that hardly shows that the signal itself serves no purpose.

The more pressing question is what happens when the signal is routinely suppressed. Yuki Sato, whose team spent a year recording how people use their phones during idle moments, found that many participants reached for their devices within a few seconds of a lull, often before they reported feeling bored at all. Sato argues that such devices do not cure boredom so much as postpone it: the relief they provide is brief, and those who checked their phones most often during the study also rated themselves as more bored overall. The correlation does not, of course, establish the direction of cause, since habitually bored people may simply reach for their phones more. But it is at least consistent with the idea that constant distraction prevents boredom from doing whatever work it might otherwise do.

None of this amounts to a case for deliberately inflicting boredom, still less for defending dull teaching or pointless work on the grounds that they are somehow good for us. A signal is useful only to someone who is in a position to respond to it, and a great deal of boredom, in classrooms, offices and factories, arises where the bored person has no power to change anything. For them, the message that their activity lacks meaning is accurate but useless. What I would suggest is more modest: that the brief boredom of an unoccupied moment deserves rather more tolerance than we usually give it. It may yield nothing. But if Ekwall and Carvalho are even partly right, it is one of the few moments in a crowded day when the mind is invited to ask what it would rather be doing, and the answer to that question is not always trivial.