Zoned Out…Or Am I?

It’s Thursday morning –a blog posting day – and I’m bored. Feeling a little guilty for zoning out, I frantically search through the day’s news trying to find something to kick the ol’ brain into gear. Unfortunately, it seems like the biggest news is that Brett Favre has been traded to the New York Jets, and that doesn’t do much to pique my interest.

Becoming desperate, I hit up previous days’ headlines and I find this in the New York Times: “You’re Bored, but Your Brain Is Tuned In.” How is that even possible? Turns out that my brain is still working away even when it seems like I’m not all here. “Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter,” Benedict Carey, the article’s author writes. An internal spam filter seems pretty cool, but it gets better: “In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive,” Carey continues. That’s not a bad nugget of information to have the next time the boss catches me staring off into space. Who’s to say I’m not coming up with a clever solution to a nagging problem? Don’t know if they’ll buy it, but it’s worth a shot!

The article has a lot of other interesting tidbits about a seemingly uninteresting state of being. If you’re a little bored, reading it could remedy the situation. After all, boredom consists of “frustrated, restless moments,” and that makes it “a state that demands relief.”