Ep. 121: Dr. James Danckert - Nothing Humdrum About Boredom

Sucheta Kamath: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. I am your host Sucheta Kamath and you will continue to notice some changes in terms of our presence and the way we have kind of spruced up our image. So I hope you enjoy and please give us some feedback. If you haven't done so, please subscribe to our podcast. Share a spirit of spread the word. And please tell us what you think about it. And that brings me to our conversation today with our very special guest and welcome Dr. James Danckert who is a trained clinical neuropsychologist from Australia before he moved to Canada to pursue his postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Melvin Goodell at London, Ontario. He was awarded a Canada Research Chair at the University of Waterloo where he his research explores the neural cognitive correlates of boredom, and how the brain builds and updates mental models and the consequences of stroke for attention and vision. So, it's so interesting in so many ways, we are interested in overlaps. And what got me interested in your work was you have co-authored a book with your colleague, Dr. Joan, john D. Eastwood, and that's called out of my skull, fantastic title by the way. A great read. So, if you haven't, please do that you will not be bored that much I can promise. So, thank you, Dr. Danckert. Being here, I'll call you, James. If that's all right.

Dr. James Danckert: Absolutely. And it's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Sucheta Kamath: Thank you. So, I asked this question of all my guests, and particularly I love cognitive or neuro psychologist, because you have this understanding of brain behavior relationship. And you will, if you don't mind if you take a minute to reflect upon your own journey as a learner and a thinker. So since we talked about executive function and goal management, flexibility of thought, insight and strategic thinking, I would love to know how you were as a student, and when did you become self-aware regarding what your strengths were, what your weaknesses were, and what propelled you to become a strategic thinker.

Dr. James Danckert: Oh, that's a that's quite a lot to ask in the first questions Sucheta but I reflect back my time in my undergraduate years, I am glad the doors closed here, and my two teenage sons can't hear this because I was horrible at studying. I really, I was not very good at all I used to. I can remember being on my couch with a textbook open with the television on with the sound down with music playing at the same time. And so, you know, I was a person who I hated silence and I never liked quiet. And so, I always had to have other things going on to sort of occupy my mind, occupy my senses while I was studying and it's, of course, a horrible way to study it's a terrible way to study is not good executive function control at all. But yeah, I did a bit of that. When did I want to address that question of when did I become a strategic thinker? I've never thought of myself that way. But maybe if I just rephrase the question, say When did I fall in love with research and in that ties in for me a lot to some mentors and people who not only guided my own learning and my own training, but showed me that research is just exciting and fun. So, there's a few. My first is (inaudible) my PhD supervisor. And he wants said to me that, you know, one of the things he was worried about was that his job, research, was becoming like his hobby. And I don't know why he was worried about that, because I think that's kind of a really precarious position to be in where for my job, I get to satisfy my curiosity, which is an amazing position to be in. And then as you mentioned, Mel Goodell and Mel, who is you know, he's quite a famous cognitive neuroscientist, as far as fame goes in cognitive neuroscience. But he's just a guy that is always concerned about your development and your promotion in the field. But he also just makes it fun. You know, it was always just fun to be in the lab. Trying to discover new things So those few guys primarily and a few other people along the way I work with a guy called (inaudible) in France. They've all just instilled in me a couple of things that I think are important for strategic thinking. There's curiosity. Yes. But they enthusiastic about it. You can't just be curious without direction, your knowledge, your curiosity and be strategic about it. But also sort of see the joy in the see the joy of the things that you are trying to understand and see the joy and the things that you don't know. And I think that's really important.

Sucheta Kamath: I love that it's so interesting to me. I've been talking to now more than hundred people who are experts in their fields and one thing is emerging is most of them begin to answer this question by saying I became fully aware but if I call it and it's so interesting, we are expecting a lot of agency in our students. We're between K to 12 when they're thinking about their thinking may not have yet evolved, evolved. So, thank you for like taking the minute to answer that. I am tempted to ask one more question If you love me, which is so the I love the way nobody has ever framed it this way that curiosity will allow you to be strategic because you intentionally pursuing something with great care. How about the flip side of it? When you have weaknesses, in spite of having all the talent that you need? Did you have any tools that you develop for your weaknesses or challenges?

Dr. James Danckert: Again, in answering that question, I'll go to other people. Right. So, the other thing that I really love about science is that it's inherently collaborative. And so, I work with people who feel my gaps, right. So I, in writing the book with John, and I don't think he'd be offended at all over this characterization, but John is more ponderous in his thought, than I am I so I'm a little bit more of a bull in a china shop, and he's much more cautious. And that's a great way to combine those two styles of thinking and say, okay, we need to be, he would rein me in. And so, you know, you need to be more careful with your terms and your definitions. And I think that's really important. I have another colleague, who was a trained neurologist, but he's now doing common neuroscience work at GW. And his name's Brad Anderson. He said that he put it this way he, and he and I collaborate. And he said that if we dropped You and I, me and Brad, in a forest in the middle of nowhere, and we were allowed to choose a couple of tools to find our way home. I'd choose the machete and he'd choose the GPS. And so that's, I know I have weaknesses. I know that I don't, you know, and research is such a complex enterprise. I don't know that there's anybody out there that has the full suite of skills that is needed. So, what you need instead is to collaborate with people. And it's best I found over the last 20 years of scientists to collaborate with people who compliment the things I have. And the things I don't.

Sucheta Kamath: I love that. And I think that's a from a miniature version of that is to develop the social skills to form allies and to advocate. But advocacy is through relationships. So, I love that. So that brings us to the topic that you're really here for. So, none of us are fans of being bored. In fact, boredom is marked by this restlessness and mild form of agitation. And that's why we all try to avoid it with a 10-foot pole, I guess. But you have dedicated your career to understand this human experience. And in fact, you write that through boredom, is precisely the state in which you want to do something interesting, such as play some amazing guitar licks, but somehow you just can't so tell us maybe define it for us. Even though people might think, "Do we need a definition of boredom?"

Dr. James Danckert: Boredom it's one of those things that everybody feels like they know. But as soon as you try and sort of put it under the microscope and define it more precisely, it becomes a little bit more slippery. The quote I like to start with most comes from Leo Tolstoy. And that is, he described boredom as the desire for desires. So, when you're in that moment of being bored, it's a wanting state, you want something. And the conundrum of boredom, the problem that opposes is that you recognize that you want something to do, you want to be engaged, but at the same time, you recognize that you don't want anything that's in front of you. And the other sort of story I like to tell to highlight that conundrum is if any of you, your listeners, are parents, most parents will know that experience of a three or four-year-old child coming to them and say, I'm bored, right? What they're saying is, I'm bored and I want you to fix it for me. And as a parent, we trot out all the possible options for them. Why don't you go and ride your bike? Why don't you go play basketball with your brother? Why don't you play with your Lego? Why don't you read a book? We tell them all kinds of things and the options we give them, are options we have watched them enjoy in the past. But what does the child do when we give all those options? No, I don't want to. No can't be bothered, not doing it. So, they dismiss every single option that we provide for them. And what that highlights me is that they are just representing the key conundrum of boredom. They want but they don't want what's available, and why that is why we don't want the current option is a complex thing. At my end, it might be different than idiosyncratic to different people. But for whatever reason, we passed our eyes around, and we just don't see anything that we think was just fine. And that's why it's uncomfortable because you mentioned the word agency a little while ago, right? We're expecting agency or the young people coming into college. Boredom is a threat to your agency. It's sort of saying right now you want something, but you don't want what's available, you're not being an effective agent, you're not deploying the skills and talents in anything like an effective way.

Sucheta Kamath: So, it didn't occur to me earlier. But is, is this a problem of having too many haves? Or doesn't matter? 

Dr. James Danckert: Is there a problem with having too many,

Sucheta Kamath: Too many, like, you know, haves and have nots? Is it like we're surrounded by too many choices? Or, I mean, that's pretty arrogant to say, and I don't want that I don't want.

Dr. James Danckert: Right. And so, it could be a certain sense of choice paralysis. There's too many things. It's funny as an Australian, one of the things that happens when you first come to the United States, you, you go to a restaurant and you order something off the menu and the waitress says to you, well, do you want it with wholewheat or white bread and you have to make a decision and then they say what do you want soup or salad with that and then you have to make a decision. You want the dressing on the salad on the side and you want to have a second you have to make a decision. Australians are not used to that. Because in Australia, you go to a restaurant, you point to the item on the menu and it comes to you. You don't have a choice to ask things for right. So, I mean, that's an aside. But yeah, choice paralysis could be a problem. The flip side of what you're asking me is, do people who don't have as many options, are they less likely to be bored? And we don't have any evidence to say anything much about that. It doesn't seem like there's a strong relationship between SES and boredom, that I know of. So. It might seem like it's arrogant, but I think it's not. It's not that we're sort of spoiled for choice. It's that when we're looking at the things that we could do, they just don't seem like they're going to work in that moment. And you mentioned guitar licks as well. Guitar is my go-to boredom fixer, right. So, I played guitar since I was 12 years old. I love it. I write my own songs. I like them. I don't respond anywhere, but you know, who cares? 80% of the time, when I'm bored, I can go to the guitar and it can fix my boredom. But that means the 20% of the time it fails, right? 20% of the time, I pick it up, I tinker a bit, I do some. I did some small things, but nothing really beats a word. And I put it down, I'm more bored than I was before I picked it up. So that's one of the things that I think is an open research question as to why that why things work sometimes and not others. And I don't have a good answer at the moment.

Sucheta Kamath: Well, that's interesting because I grew up in India and if I went to my parents saying that I'm bored, First of all, I'll get a slap. So, there is some cultural restriction in uttering those words as boredom, which is that's why I framed it as arrogance. It's, it's, it's somewhere you are, we are, you are claiming that you have the right to be entertained. And so, I see that when I came to this country, that there's an assumption sense of wanting your emotional suffering that comes to boredom to be fixed by the world. And as if you have no role to play, so that's why I was framing it that way. So, I wondered if you saw some research in other parts of the world, but maybe it doesn't matter. It's a human condition.

Dr. James Danckert: Why? I think it does matter what you're pointing out in terms of cultural differences, and the big difference that we would sort of make a distinction between sort of individualistic cultures of the west of America, Canada, Australia, versus collectivist cultures like India, China, these other kinds of places that have all communal attitudes to towards responsibility towards individual responsibility, right. Um, and so yeah, we don't have a lot of data on that yet. We sort of accidentally years ago we accidentally anonymous on sample had mostly American, but it had a small group of Indian and Pakistani respondents. Now, the thing I would say, but it wasn't we didn't. We haven't published it because we didn't intentionally select it that way. But what we found was that the boredom levels in general were equivalent, right? But associations with other factors. So, associations with things like self-control and self-regulation were somewhat different. I can't say much about it because we would need to go and try and do that study properly to look into it. I do also know that boredom kindness has been looked at in China and in other countries around the world. And yeah, that the writer for them boredom, so how many people report a (inaudible)  and it's pretty similar? What causes it, and how it manifests are likely to be culturally dependent in some ways. We just don't know yet. Wow.

Sucheta Kamath: So how does boredom look at the brain level? What do you see? Do you see less activity more activity? I you talked about the disconnect between two networks. Can you tell us a little bit about how it exhibits itself?

Dr. James Danckert: Yeah, so there's not a lot of research but we did do something a while back where we asked people to watch a movie for eight minutes. And you guys didn't tell people that's what you did. The first reaction is to laugh. But I don't know if it's because it's two men hanging laundry or if it's just seems like it's an absurd video. It really is absurd.

Sucheta Kamath: Can you tell us a little bit of the setup? I'm sorry, if I interrupted you, but how did you do this experiment?

Dr. James Danckert: Yeah, so what we're trying to do is we're trying to induce mood of boredom. We're trying to make people bored. And then we have them in a functional MRI scanner. So, we can look at the network of brain activity. What we did is we contrasted that with what's called a resting state scan. So, people sitting the for eight minutes doing nothing, essentially. And they have a point to look at on the screen, but they have no nothing, no tasks. And when you do the resting state sort of scan you will get activation in what's known as the default mode network. Prominently for us this was bilateral inferior parietal activity is medial parietal and precuneus activity and medial prefrontal activity. So, we thought, well, we'll contrast that picture of the brain that people have shown for a number of decades and that they think that the default network is about self-referential thought. That's about you see the default network when people's mind wanders from thought to thought, you see the default network when people get nostalgic for things from the past, you see the default network where people imagine future events or think about past events, and when, when they're doing what we call self-referential thought. And it also, in particular, you see the default network for what often referred to as offtask thinking. You're supposed to be doing a task, but your mind is drifting off the task. Anyway, so we collected that and then we looked at, we compared that with activity when people watch this boring movie. And when they watch the boring movie, we got an almost identical set of active activation in the default mode network. And that's important for one reason. Because in the resting state, there's nothing for them to do. And so, we expect to see the default mode. In the boring state, there is something for them to do. There's a movie to watch. Now, the movie was so boring and so hard to engage with that their minds just disengage from it. And we say the default mode activated. The other thing that we found is that when they were bored and they had that default mode activated, they had downregulation, of another part of the brain known as the anterior insula cortex. And this is a part of the brain that were really only starting to put a lot of energy and effort into trying to understand the insular cortex, as you would know, it's important for interception those feelings of gut sensations or racing heartbeat and that kind of thing. Also important for senses sensations of sort of pain and disgust. The anterior insula is a much more complex part of the brain that is part of what we call the salience network. So, the insular cortex is upregulated when there's something salient in the environment for you to attend to and to respond to 

Sucheta Kamath: Something meaningful, something important, 

Dr. James Danckert: But highly relevant to you. And what we found is downregulated when you were bored, and there was no activity in that brain area, when we were just at rest, right, so at rest, you can happily evoke the default network at rest, and just have your mind wander. But when you were bored, you were sort of It was as though you were searching and trying to engage, but you just couldn't. And there was another really interesting study from a group, (inaudible), were the authors, and that they did a really cool thing where they also got people bored. They did it by having them do a really boring task and can't remember the task right now. But then they did a really cool thing. They asked people, how much money would you pay for a music download after they've made them bored or after they'd make them interested or challenged or whatever. And so, the idea was that when you're bored, you're going to be much more likely to pay more money for the music download, just so you can just get out of that thought state. Right. And indeed, that's what I found is that people were prepared to pay more money for the music download when they're bored. They also found that the amount of money that you were prepared to pay to get out of being bored was associated with the increased activity means your cortex., If you put these things together. And as I say, there's not a lot of research at the moment. But if you put these things together, you find that, you know, in our study, when you bought the insular cortex is down regulated. In this study, we were looking at brain activity as you're trying to get away from being bored, the insula is up regulated. So, I think there's an important story to be told there, but there's much more work to be done. We also have some EEG data, and the EEG data seems to confirm something we've known about boredom for a long while, and is that when you're bored, and for people who are prone to boredom, it represents sort of a disengaged state of attention so your attention is not well focused. And we find that the Attention tasks in EEG, we get reduced amplitude of EEG protocols that are associated with attention. So, it would reduce p300 and a reduced error, error related negativity. And those are both event related potentials that are associated with focused attention. So, the picture is emerging, and there's a lot more work to be done in terms of looking at what happens in the brain when we're bored. But it looks like our attention is disengaged, and the systems that are important for representing things that are relevant to us are struggling to bring us to a state of engagement.

Sucheta Kamath: So, I have so many questions. First of all, I think that your research is so cool, and I is this I think I've seen this video on YouTube correct. The two men folding long laundry is the same one, right? It's fascinating. First of all, there are so many questions to be asked about how you chose these men versus their traditionally you know who follows the laundry, but that's another question. But they are really boring. So, one thing that comes to my mind first is, think about the default mode, network and seat of creativity that suspended free flowing off a nostalgic time travel backwards, forwards and making connections. Sounds like in the state of boredom, creativity, because in creativity, you have not down-regulation of the insular cortex correct. So, boredom is really killer of creativity. Would you say that?

Dr. James Danckert: It's interesting that you put it that way, because I think a lot of people certainly in the media, a lot of people want to claim that boredom will make you creative and that claim drives me nuts. Boredom will not make you creative. If you have developed creative outlets, so if you have honed, pardon me, honed the skills necessary for some creative outlet, whether it's music or art, or sculpture or writing or needle work, I don't know doesn't matter what it is, if you've spent the years and the effort and the hours cultivating those creative skills, when you're bored, those skills you've cultivated will be really useful in getting you out of being bored. But I think so it's not that boredom won't make you creative. And I don't think boredom prevents you from being creative. The key is boredom just signals that you need to do something else need to get out of whatever state you're in and do something more engaging. So, if you have not cultivated creative outlets, or others sorts of outlets to engage yourself, in you know, boredom will linger, and it will become a problem for you. My son just the other day is just about to turn 16. He's always claimed to me, he never gets bored. So, then he went for a bike ride the other day, when we asked him when he came home library, why'd you Why did you decide to go on the bike? I said, because he goes, I'm bored. But I said to him, hang on, You told me you never get bored. He says, No dad I never get bored for long enough, I get bored, and then do something about it. And 

Sucheta Kamath: Wow, that's such a great observation.

Dr. James Danckert: What he did was he got he went and did something physical. So, he didn't have to get creative, because he didn't want to at that point. He just wanted to go and do something physical. So, it doesn't. Boredom doesn't prevent anything, and it doesn't promote anything. It pushes you to choose an action, it pushes you to choose a way out of boredom. And you can choose maladaptive ways, or you can choose adaptive ways.

Sucheta Kamath: And I love that you scientists who are talking about boredom, talks about a parallel between feeling bored is so similar to feeling pain. It is literally signal body's signal to do something. It's bringing attention. It's like hollering and saying, hello. Yeah. What is this and do something and it's so interesting. I don't know if you're familiar with Jennifer Roberts. She is actually professor of history in Oregon. Texture from Harvard. And she did a TED talk, I think. And in that she talked about giving students an assignment of going to the Boston Museum and observing a painting for three hours and studying it. Because people are like, I'm done, like two minutes you watch, like, look at a painting, and you're done. And she actually kind of, and she talks about this idea of looking at something with intent, and then connecting it emotionally and finding some meaning. And she gives this example of a boy with a flying squirrel painting in that and she talks about this. It's a cute painting, and I'm calling it cute, but it's an American painter where the boy is leaning and he has a squirrel on a chain, or he's like, captured the squirrel. But if you pay attention, she said, and she's like a professional artist, keen eye, and she said it took me few minutes to notice that the curvature of the ear and the curvature that that was on the curtain behind the boy The curvature on the squirrels ruffles were identical. Once I looked found that similarity, it immediately brought the painting in a different light. So, I think that shaping your interest by listening to the signal of boredom can be a very important art of engaging, right? 

Dr. James Danckert: Absolutely. I think what we need to be able to do in that moment is avoid the negative components of boredom, try not to be overrun by the agitation and the restlessness. And then I would agree you can if you if you can be more reflective and more contemplating then you can extract so much more out of what you're doing. But in the in the height of that sensation of boredom that becomes part of the challenge to try and relax, take a breath and focus on what matters to you and what's meaningful to you.

Sucheta Kamath: So that brings me to this question about what's the relationship between boredom And metacognition, because to me, it's like a tool to pull yourself out of the rut by recognize you’re in a rut.

Dr. James Danckert: Right. And so, John, my co-author on the book, he's done some work looking at boredom and alexithymia. And so, alexithymia is the challenge of being able to accurately label your emotions. And unsurprisingly, perhaps people who are highly prone to boredom are more likely to be alexithymia. They don't. They struggle to label and, you know, recognize what it is that they're feeling.

Sucheta Kamath: So sorry, can you give our listeners an example of how that failure to label your emotion look like? What would they? What are they failing to do?

Dr. James Danckert: Well, I think what they'll be feeling is the physical components that are associated with whatever their emotional status, whether sadness or anger, or boredom, or whatever it is. It always comes packaged with physiological changes and physiological sensations. So, they might be feeling those physiological sensations, but then casting about not knowing what to do about it, because they don't know what it really means to them. Because they're failing in that metacognitive sense to say, Oh, I'm sad now or I'm bored on whatever it is that I am. So that's about as good as I can get in terms of describing I don't think I'm an alexithymia myself. I struggled to describe what it might feel like I don't think it ever happened to me. But yeah, I felt like there's a relationship there, potentially quite a complex one. That because in one sense, I don't want to give the impression that if I'm a boredom prone person, maybe I'm not really bored, and I'm just failing to label a different emotion. I don't think that's entirely the case. I think that when people are boredom prone people are just the rest of us. I think when we're bored Most of us can accurately identify that feeling, That state, right. So, what it might be in terms of relationship to metacognition? And it's a great question and one that I don't think we have a lot of data on. It might just be a barrier, another barrier, yet another one, to responding calmly to the signal of boredom, right? If you have better metacognitive skills, you can you can start to ask questions of the state that you're in and say, Well, what is it about this current circumstance that makes me bored? And you can start to say, you know, can I refine the way I'm thinking or feeling? Can I change how I'm approaching it? Certainly, that the education literature on boredom, a guy called Reinhart (inaudible) does some of this work suggests that people who can cognitively reframe the circumstance they're in have less boredom in academic settings. So that that capacity to cognitively wait for and you know, they had in some of their papers, they looked at not just cognitive reframing, but then looked at sort of behavioral avoidance methods with use. So, the, if you contrast the two behavioral avoidance and cognitive reframing the cognitive reframe is when every day in terms of, you know, learning better, learning more effectively, and experiencing boredom less. So, I think that's a really interesting sort of practical finding. And it's true a range of different things, you know, when we, when we engage avoidance mechanisms of boredom, there might be some short-term fixes that we get, but in the long term, it doesn't really help.

Sucheta Kamath: So two thoughts come to my mind as you're speaking about this one is always fascinates me I'm a big fan of the theater now not in a pandemic, but I and I, if I'm getting get a ticket, I don't mind spending the money for that one show or two shows a year but I'm going to be closer to the stage. I mean, the midpoint or whatever they say, five to five rows, and I'm always fascinated to see people dozing off as soon as the play starts, you know, I was like, haven't you spent a lot of money for this? Isn't this important to you? So, I've always looked at it as more as like failure and self-regulation or connecting to the meaning. But you, these people are failing to anticipate that they'll be bored.

Dr. James Danckert: Right? They could we couldn't ... It could absolutely be a predictive thing. I mean, it's hard. When you go to the theater, you don't really know the motivations of everyone around you, perhaps that person sleeping was dragged today by a partner, maybe

Sucheta Kamath: I didn't think about that. That's true.

Dr. James Danckert: You can't assume that everybody's got the same love of the theater and the same motivations. But yeah, I'm actually fascinated by that idea that perhaps the boredom prone people are not anticipating what things are going to feel like in the future. And when I say in the future, I mean, you know, a minute from now 10 minutes from now. And so maybe the, and this is totally speculative, but I would love to find a way to investigate. Maybe they expect that everything they're going to do is going to be this super level of excitement and then they do it. And it's like ehh, you know, I think that's true. Like one of the things that I think would be relevant to you and to your listeners given me the focus on executive functions. I got into this in part because of working with people who had traumatic brain injuries.

Sucheta Kamath: Yes, I love that work. I'm glad you brought it up. Yes. Tell us. 

Dr. James Danckert: Well, one of the things I think is going on there. So, the individuals that we're talking to the kinds of brain injuries, we're talking about acceleration, deceleration injuries, concussions, car accidents, fights, these kinds of things. And they will typically affect the orbital frontal cortex, which is critical for representing reward and value, right? What I suspect is happening to these guys who to a number when I when I was still working as a clinical neuropsychologist many, many years ago, I would ask each of my patients and they tended to be young men, which is a common experience, most of us have done this kind of work. When I asked them in the history taking part of the assessment, are you more bored now than you were before your injury to a number they leapt out of their seats and said yes, and they didn't just say yes, they leapt out of their seats, they were excited that somebody had bothered to ask them about this, they would say, to me, this is a critical part of your post injury experience. But what I suspect is going on is because of damage over your frontal cortex, preinjury, this is the threshold for engagement, or the threshold for pleasure. This is the engagement. But now they enter into the activity that used to work at this level. And now it's not working at that level anymore. So, they've got to up the ante. And you see all that kind of risk-taking behavior, inappropriate social sort of behavior that I think is probably just an attempt to bump up the stimulation levels in your brain. Now, I don't have great data on its very, very hard, as you would know, to collect that data when I've made is some kind of measure of dopaminergic response levels, preinjury and some kind of level of misuse. And he just how'd he get that he can't get it. Um, but I certainly think that is an interesting idea to be had there but a sort of Other dopaminergic reactivity or responsivity, is diminished, somehow post injury.

Sucheta Kamath: You know, and just speaking about a couple of, you know, ideas popped in my head that one of the research with the children with ADHD shows that their ability to disengage from default mode network to task positive network, they tend to have the it lingers longer, so they're not able to switch and activate. And, and to me, that is also another maybe sign of that. Not boredom, but inability to activate the right system to engage with or elevate engagement by agency. And second thing I was thinking about that with, you know, I had a Tim Pychyl, who is one of the Canadian researcher talks about procrastination. And so he talks about this idea that, you know, don't think about it dealing with something your procrastination as a time management but rather emotion management, because we are trying to do what we're trying to do is manage the emotions in the moment and you just connected that, that. And to be honest with you, the work I do is a metacognitive work, it is not really making somebody as good as they were before their injury or, or make them efficient or effective, but recognize that you're not effective and efficient as you like. So, two questions to ask ourselves, do you want to? And then do you have the motivation to do what it takes to become somebody else you're not, which I don't mean to become a person but the effort and I find that the question people pop out of their seats about boredom, ADHD folks, they are so often find themselves getting bored, and they need a lot more intense stimulation to find something exciting. And so, they want excitement. They don't want mediocre or fine. And school can be that like Daniel Willingham talks about it. We cannot make school entertaining enough.

Dr. James Danckert: No, I absolutely agree. There is data out there showing that kids with ADHD and even adults with symptoms of ADHD without the diagnosis have higher levels of boredom proneness. There was a great study that came out just a couple of months ago, that did a sort of an on/off medication look at children with ADHD, on fairly standard Ritalin-type medication. And so, when they came off medication their ADHD symptoms rose, and their boredom rose, and when they came back on medication, both things dropped in lockstep. So, yeah, I think boredom is a serious experiential challenge for people with ADHD. We don't know what comes first. And is it a, is it a response to some of the challenges of attention that they have or is it a key component of the disorder, there's a lot more to be done there. I would agree. And the procrastination stuff is there's not a lot of work. There's people who are highly boredom prone and do tend to procrastinate more. I love your insight that, you know, we shouldn't be thinking about this as a failure of time management or even a failure of sort of cognitive skill, we should think about it as a challenge of regulation. And it can be, you know, affect regulation.

Sucheta Kamath: And, and what I like to tie with our my clients is one of the best ways to self-regulate when the motivation to regulate is absent is to use the world, like we tend to do better when we are with people because they for decency or to show that we are decent partners or companions, or whatever it is. So, if you can't self-regulate, get into core regulation, because that core regulation can be that external motivation to not look bad or not be a less of a competent partner. If you just don't care about anything else, you know, and that's how we pretty much kind of some like the guy that in the theater who went there because he's he loves his wife, you know, doesn't love the theater. So, tell us a little bit about this other end of the spectrum, the concept of flow. Is it a fair thing to think that opposite of boredom is a state of flow?

Dr. James Danckert: Well, it is, and it isn't. I think. So, it clearly is going to be the opposite of boredom in a range of different ways. And I'll talk about that in a second. The way in which I'd say it's not the opposite of, of boredom. It's not the only opposite. But there are many ways in which we can be engaged as many, many states that we can be in, that we would count as effective engagement. And those states don't have to be flat. And I say that because in my mind, flow represents extreme engagement. It's not it's not just engaged. It's extremely engaged. And so, for anybody who doesn't know that what we mean when we talk about flow, is that idea that you're doing something that you so intensely focused on that time doesn't matter. That the rest of the world doesn't matter. You can't be distracted when It's as though the rest of the world has just fallen away and doesn't exist anymore. And it feels like despite the fact that you're intensely engaged, it feels effortless, and it feels very positive and enjoyable to be in that state. And we're using a book that throughout that sort of last chapter where we talk about the opposite. We use the example of Alex Honnold and I don't know if you've seen any of the videos of Alex, but Alex is a fairly famous, pretty solid climber. So, he climbs sheer cliffs. And most of us would be terrified by such a thing. I've done rock climbing outdoor rock climbing a little bit. No, I'm not an expert. I know. Most people who know, you know, gee, I climb at a 510 just so they know that's not a very strong climber. But, you know, watching him do that, I mean, most of you must be stark raving mad. No, it's just the sheer terror that most of us will feel. That Honnold will say, I don't do a climb if I'm scared of it. And he gets himself So over practiced, and so over rehearsed on it, that he's probably he doesn't talk about this, but he's probably in a state of flow. And that's an extreme engagement that you'd want to have if you're climbing without any ropes. But I think we can't expect to be in that state a lot, or you know, certainly not all the time. It's a, it's an A,

Sucheta Kamath: Particularly we can't have that level of expertise in every domain of our life.

Dr. James Danckert: Right. And so, so, you know, it can function as an opposite of boredom at times for some people, but I don't think it's something that should we expect to be in. So, John and I talk about other states like curiosity and interest, which clearly are opposites of boredom as well. You can't imagine a state of being interested and bored in something at the same time. A little bit of relaxation. For me, I think this is the most interesting one. John came up with the phrase, you know, idle but not bored.

Sucheta Kamath: I love that.

Dr. James Danckert: Yeah, so you're not If you're not actively pursuing a goal at that point, but your mind is occupied still with reading a trashy crime novel, which is what I do in the summer, or just daydreaming or fantasizing, whatever it is, your mind is occupied, but it's not. It's not directed towards any brain goal or event to my, to my mind, that's an important state to cultivate as well, because we need downtime. We can't be on all the time; we're always pursuing goals. That starts to look a little bit like mania. And so, I think that and the reason one of the reasons why I'm really interested in that, because I suspect the people who are highly boredom prone don't deal well with downtime. I think that they, And it might get back to metacognition. I don't think that they recognize that they need the downtime, and certainly won't be in it. And I think that they feel like this still feels like an affront to their sense of themselves as an effective agent. So, I haven't pursued it yet in a research sense, but we will be soon.

Sucheta Kamath: I think they don't enjoy it. There's no like emotional satisfaction that comes from being in that state, which to me is, I will tell you that the work I'm doing on myself through mindfulness has really gotten me closest to that. And one of the ideas there is this. I don't know if you have heard the term called choiceless. Awareness. And it's, it's a, it's, it's being okay to let your mind go let your thoughts be and simply say, oh, there's my mind. Oh, it's now back. So that practice of mindfulness has really helped me, too. But fundamentally, I'm not a person who ever gets bored, because I'm deeply curious about the world. And I have so many ways like your son, like, I don't get bored long enough and I let it go unattended. I will say in a pandemic I'm experiencing a little bit more of fatigue of my curiosity is getting a little exhausted of like running. And that brings me to this last question. Of course, I can go on and on talking, but I'm being mindful of your time. One of the things I love that you said that boredom can tell you what you ought to do. Not can be so well, you're saying, um, pay attention to those physiological signs, signs where if you're more your mind might be doing during boredom, and then channel it. And the channeling, can you just leave our listeners with some specific things like you just explained the leisure and curiosity but how would that look like actionable? Like, how do I put to practice? 

Dr. James Danckert: Yeah, it's difficult, as you would know, talking about your own sort of mindfulness practicing, that takes effort and dedication and time to cultivate mindfulness meditation and mindfulness practices in your everyday life, right. 

Sucheta Kamath: And it's boring to learn to take the time to learn it, because it's literally teaching yourself not to do anything, which is so boring.

Dr. James Danckert: So that's one of the reasons why I don't suggest with highly boredom prone people try mindfulness right off the bat, because I think you're asking them to do something that they already struggle with doing right, which is to focus attention. And that just makes me think that the first thing to say is don't set appropriate expectations, let's not ask people to be too hard on themselves. This is not an easy thing to deal with. Right? I think boredom is not trivial. It is consequential. It is uncomfortable and is difficult to deal with. And so if we just recognize that, the first instance, where I think that most of us for most of our lives have been dismissive of it, and then turn it inwards instead of saying, well, there must be a failure about me that I'm not dealing with boredom very well, maybe, but maybe not. So, as you mentioned, no, I can't tell people what to do, and I like to say that boredom is a little bit like happiness in that way. What makes me happy, is not going to necessarily make you happy. What makes me bored won't necessarily bore you and what fixes my boredom won't necessarily fix yours. But I can't just tell people, you know, the guitar works 80% of the time for me, so you should do that, right? It's just not going to work. The thing to do is to first and this gets back to your notions of metacognition. First of all, recognize that the state has started, recognize that you're right, and then second, take a deep breath. You won't be able to deal well with boredom, if you're still in the midst of the agitation and the restlessness. So, when I get bored, and I'm casting about, pacing about in my lounge room, my wife recognizes it before I do, she is in part my metacognition. She recognizes it 

Sucheta Kamath: She's your external hard drive.

Dr. James Danckert: She sees that I'm getting bored and you can almost hear her say, Oh, yes. Do you know I'm passing about and I'm pacing? In that state of pacing, I'm not very effective at trying to find a way out of boredom. So, calming down, taking a deep breath and relaxing. And then after that, is to reflect and say, Okay, well reflect on two things. One, what is it about the current situation that I find boring? And for me most of the time, it's that I've got a 15-minute block. And most of what I want to do will take at least half an hour.

Sucheta Kamath: Exactly.

Dr. James Danckert: And so, I don't want to start making it to the procrastination again, I don't want to start anything because I know I've only got 15 minutes and I hate not being able to finish something. So, what am I going to do for my 15 minutes I want to be doing but I don't want to be doing that’s going to take longer the 15 minutes. So, if I recognize that what's making me bored. Well, just relax and say when I get my next half hour, period, I'll do it then. Right. And the second entity aside from sort of reflecting on what makes you bored right now, reflect on what matters to you. What what's the next lesson Important thing that you need to feel like you need to get through in life. It doesn't have to be a grand thing. You know if your answer to that question is, well, what's important to me is that I cure cancer, you're always setting yourself up for failure. But, you know, it doesn't have to be some world beating idea. It can be something small and says, Well, what matters to me is that I spend a bit more time with my children or my wife tonight or something it doesn't, you know, anything that you can action on, you can, you can do something about that you will feel good about the meaning to you, and the fact that you are able to tell yourself to being an effective agent. That's the best I can do for advice.

Sucheta Kamath: That's fantastic. This reminds me of James Hollis, who's a psychologist his concept of mature spirituality. Well, that brings us to the end of this fantastic conversation. I cannot thank you enough for being such a fabulous guest and simplifying concepts that are really hard but so important and particularly as there are discussions going on how to help children return to school and how to manage this ongoing ness, of pandemics. So, I really appreciate your time. And that's the time. That's all the time we have. Here are a few things for you to think about. If you love what you're hearing, please share it with your friends. And if you have a moment, leave us a review. And finally, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. So that's all we have. Thank you again for being with Full PreFrontal exposing the mysteries of executive function. This is Sucheta and I thank you, James, for being with us. 

Dr. James Danckert: My pleasure.