Pixland
University of Calgary professor Peter Toohey talks to Globe Life about his new book Boredom: A Lively History
Why do you think boredom can be a good thing?
Boredom is designed to drive you away from social situations that are toxic, and I suspect we're probably hard-wired for this. Societies don't do well if people are opting out because of boredom. But it can also be stimulating: It makes you step back, and I think this detachment allows you to get a better sense of yourself. Daydreaming is good for creativity.
You make boredom sound like a much more active emotion than the kind of dull tedium I'm used to.
To me, boredom is a visceral sort of experience, it's a bit aggressive. Look at children, what do they say when they're bored? I'm fed up. So boredom is linked to satiety. I define it as a form of disgust linked to predictability and constraint.
It's been said that only humans can experience boredom, but you disagree.
You have to be blind not to notice boredom in dogs. If you incarcerate them for too long and remove their normal acts related to food and scratching about, they go through the same phases humans do: descent into anger, self-harm and depression.
What's interesting about animals in captivity is that their lives can become more meaningful if they're allowed to perform rituals, the rooting and sniffing and so on that they would do if they were looking for food in their normal state. And we can apply this to humans: By giving a greater respect to our rituals, and not treating them as chores, they can become more meaningful.
Does everyone experience boredom? It's often depicted as a decadent luxury in the overall human condition.
Because it's an emotion, it's universal. But some societies are more prone to it than others. I doubt that we're any more bored than people in the medieval world, but they probably had a lot more support from religion. In societies that are ritual-based, and are driven by religious patterns that take over large portions of their life, people's brains are full of this extraordinary lore that shifts boredom aside. Societies that remove the rituals associated with myth and large-scale religion, I believe, are going to become more prone to boredom.
Which is why boredom gets connected with secularism and modernity. But you don't have a lot of time for the concept of existential boredom, the intellectual's sense of ennui.
It's a literary state, and it includes a fair amount of humbug. As a philosophical position, it can be very interesting - Sartre's Nausea is a wonderful book. But this is not a type of boredom you'd share with people at a football game. At some level, it's designed to make you stand apart as an important person.
What can we do to deal with boredom, if being a world-weary intellectual doesn't cut it?
The psychiatrist Norman Doidge says that brain plasticity is harmed by monotony, that too much boredom is bad for the brain. For him, the best long-term cure is aerobic exercise, which encourages regrowth of brain cells. I'd add two more things: music and community. The link with music comes from studies of elephants at the Belfast Zoo. The abnormal behaviour that you'd associate with manic incarceration - pacing, swaying, self-harm - was actually assuaged by playing them Mozart. The other act to focus on is simple sociability: As my Auntie Madge said, we need to keep talking to other people.
Even if they're boring?
But that's really a different use of the term. When we say someone's a bore, it's social judgment, just our way of saying that we feel superior to them.
You've given me new respect for boredom. But why do we dismiss it so readily?
Because it's an emotion we associate with children, so it's seen as childish. People wonder, how can children say they're bored when they've got Xboxes, PlayStation and so on. But they still go to school, and an awful lot of school is intolerably boring.
I'm a teacher, and I know I've probably bored generations of students, but I have to say that when the classroom acts bored, it's the teacher who should be making adjustments. When you're too locked into PowerPoint or the text in front of you, boredom is the right reaction.
This interview has been condensed and edited.