{"id":6852,"date":"2012-09-28T12:32:10","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T16:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=6852"},"modified":"2012-10-08T12:07:24","modified_gmt":"2012-10-08T16:07:24","slug":"study-examines-the-workings-of-attention-and-boredom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2012\/09\/study-examines-the-workings-of-attention-and-boredom\/","title":{"rendered":"Study examines the workings of attention and boredom"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Association for Psychological Science press release:<\/p>\n

\"Boredom\"You\u2019re waiting in the reception area of your doctor\u2019s office. The magazines are uninteresting<\/strong>. The pictures on the wall are dull. The second hand on the wall clock moves so excruciatingly slowly that you\u2019re sure it must be broken. You feel depleted and irritated about being stuck in this seemingly endless moment. You want to be engaged by something\u2014anything\u2014when a thought, so familiar from childhood, comes to mind: \u201cI\u2019m bored!\u201d<\/p>\n

Although boredom is often seen as a trivial and temporary discomfort that can be alleviated by a simple change in circumstances, it can also be a chronic and pervasive stressor that can have significant consequences for health and well-being<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Boredom at work may cause serious accidents when safety depends on continuous vigilance, as in medical monitoring or long-haul truck driving<\/strong>. On a behavioral level, boredom has been linked with problems with impulse control, leading to overeating and binge eating, drug and alcohol abuse, and problem gambling. Boredom has even been associated with mortality, lending grim weight to the popular phrase \u201cbored to death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although it\u2019s clear that boredom can be a serious problem, the scientific study of boredom remains an obscure niche of research, and boredom itself is still poorly understood<\/strong>. Even though it\u2019s a common experience, boredom hasn\u2019t been clearly defined within the scientific community.<\/p>\n

Psychological scientist John Eastwood of York University (Ontario, Canada) and colleagues at the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo wanted to understand the mental processes that underlie our feelings of boredom in order to create a precise definition of boredom that can be applied across a variety of theoretical frameworks<\/strong>. Their new article, which brings together existing research on attention and boredom, is published in the September 2012 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n

Drawing from research across many areas of psychological science and neuroscience, Eastwood and colleagues define boredom as \u201can aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,\u201d which arises from failures in one of the brain\u2019s attention networks<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Specifically, we\u2019re bored when:<\/p>\n